Can The EU Create It’s Own Cloud Platform?
The EU is forming an alternative to US and Chinese cloud platforms called Gaia X. This effort will fail on so many fronts. It reminds me of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) which still struggles for viability after spending an estimated $51 billion.
This CRN article reports: “According to Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, the Gaia-X cloud computing platform is expected to be ready to launch in early 2021.” That would be a remarkable time frame although admittedly you can assemble a couple of racks of bare metal servers and run virtualized services on them in short order. But can you create the equivalent of AWS? Never.
Just look at the relative size of the major cloud providers. The combined market cap of the four largest cloud companies, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba is $4.8 trillion (1.569+1.578+1.001+.685). For comparison the GDP of the largest member of the EU, Germany, is $3.9 trillion. (I know, false equivalence, but I don’t know how to calculate a market cap for a country.)
Admittedly, Airbus, a similar venture partnership between government and industry, has succeeded in creating and supporting an aerospace industry in Europe. It has not been a commercial success of course. One can make the argument that having a viable aerospace industry is critical to national security and therefore creating and operating a money losing business is still worth it. Can the same argument be made on the grounds of data privacy? I would argue no, especially when the real purpose is actually the opposite.
The era of digital mercantilism—or, as the East West Institute calls it, Tech Nationalism—was ushered in after Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the NSA’s digital tentacles as it reached into as many data sources as it could to “collect everything.” The blowback was predictable and is destined to harm the US’ dominance of the technology sector.
