First is "data sovereignty", which is what the current (data) migrations are all about. As long as the data remains in place where it cannot be suddenly locked away by the US government, people don't care if the CPU was purchased from the US, as the government cannot suddenly disable those (as far as we know at least).

Second is "hardware sovereignty", which is what this article talks about, about the geographical locations where the hardware is designed and built. This is obviously much harder, but also less important at this very moment. That's why you're not seeing people suddenly rushing to fund EU fabs for silicon, there are more important things to focus on right now, with real implications.

The article kind of does everyone a disservice by mixing the two and not clearly separating which ones it's actually talking about. But to be fair, if they did that, then they've wouldn't have been able to publish this whole "Look how they aren't actually sovereign after all" article if they did so, here we are...

China already produces government and business computers with their homemade LoongArch architecture. The run on homemade Linux as well. Their point was not only to not be worried as much about backdoors and sanctions, but also to get a platform that their own universities and engineers can maintain and develop

This brand used to coproduce with the French, open source and Java apps work, it's under US sanctions for supplying the chinese government and military, export was restricted so that none land in Russia.

It took decades to make, commercial value is uncertain, but they did master the entire computing stack now

https://www.techspot.com/news/107073-researchers-uncover-hid...

Silicon level backdoors.

https://www.wired.com/2016/06/demonically-clever-backdoor-hi...

  > Europe is pouring more than €2 billion into sovereign cloud initiatives designed to reduce exposure to US legal reach.

this is just sad. the US clouds did not happen because US poured billions into them. they happened because the financial/whatever situation was such that these businesses could happen.

now the EU, instead of making it easy for companies to innovate, spends billion on trying to catch up to the US. not even catching up. getting to where the US clouds are today.

the "skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it's been" quote comes to mind.

https://catalonia.com/w/barcelona-supercomputing-center-laun...

https://www.bsc.es/join-us/excellence-career-opportunities/d...

I think there is a partition in our supercomputing facility for these new types of technologies, but since my work is running climate models, I only hear news from other teams like our AI factory, the quantum computer, or people involved with these new chips and some emulators (that I think work together).

That's surprising. I would've expected most people at a cybersecurity conference to have heard of it, for over a decade.

Is this conference not for people who understand the technology at all, but rather for purely management-track people who oversee the people who understand the technology?

Part of what got Microsoft into this position in the first place is that they built and sold software.

Now, they don't build and sell software, they sell services. Services means you're buying access to data.

The data is the problem.

There's a certain amount of soft power you have when you can disallow access to data and services for foreign officials[0] arbitrarily.

The old world order would of course permit us to sanction new sales of things, but in the new world: this is crucially tied with current access to services.

I think the easiest way to think about it is:

Would you depend on another nation selling you the parts to build a power plant, or would you prefer to depend on them supplying you the power- in fact it's worse than that because not only are you buying power you're also giving up a lot of information on who uses it, how it's used, and enough control to cut it off for an individual person.. totally crazy.

the EU itself was designed around the idea that if you are crucially tied in this way then war becomes unthinkable. But that only works when you're equivalently sized entities. The US uses this position to bully the world.

Even if open source, currently there is no European plan on how to take care of supply chain on those.

Huawei came up with a full stack, after the ties were closed, as an example. OS and languages.

Sovereign clouds are an incredibly meaningful first step. Full independence takes decades. China still uses plenty of AMD and Intel chips, does it mean the amount of independence they've achieved is meaningless? That their stacks are just as dependent on the US as those of the EU?

Of course not and even a child could know that. You start with the very end of the chain and hopefully very gradually work your way upwards. Sovereignty is a float, not a bool. If it's a bool its valye is False for all of China, the US and Italy, where in reality each has very different degrees of tech sovereignty. So you do things in order of efficiency, i.e. compare effort needed and how much it moves the sovereignty needle and pick what has the best ratio at this time. Designing and producing your own processors is far down this list.

Please read about the previous initiatives like Cloudwatt involving the same actors (Thales, etc.) [0]

I have been forced to consider them about 10 years ago and realized at the time that the French telco Orange (who acquired it in 2015) just transferred all control to Huawei (datacenters in France but controlled by Huawei). So all the organisations who put their precious data in a sovereign EU cloud was now in the hand of the Chinese. It took me a while to understand because they would hide it first and strangely the wikipedia article does not mention it.

So it was fun while the initial public money was flowing but right after that they just throw their "client" under the train.

If you want an European cloud, companies like Hetzner are good. But please do not get to excited by all the other announcements.

- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudwatt

This is laughable, since US cloud platforms invested trillions. Also, US companies benefit from greater efficiency, know how, cheaper energy and less regulations.

If EU wants to compete with the US, they have to do what US does.

I am very smart.

/s