European Systems Collective

The Dutch Broadcasting Foundation reports (in Dutch) that European tech companies are seeing a spike in new customers. They attribute the increase to a growing desire to transition away from US-based tech companies.

It looks like new customers are mostly consumers and small businesses, but hopefully this will build momentum for larger european enterprises to consider switching. Often, a change in consumer sentiment and preferences foretells a shift at the enterprise level.

Matt Burgess writing at WIRED:

There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.

For years, there's been a bubbling concern about the behavior of the big US tech corporations around data privacy and tech lock-in. Now that's boiling over, into a near crisis about digital sovereignty and the imperative to find or build viable alternatives.

This article is a good overview of recent events fueling the movement to reduce or eliminate the utter dependence on big US-based tech companies.

Viktor Shvets of Macquarie points out that in 2023, the US exported more than $300 billion in information and communications technology and business services, yielding a net surplus of $120 billion. US royalty and license fees (mostly tech) reached a net surplus of $90 billion, while financial services generated a surplus of $63 billion. “Expanding the scope of the trade war will be inflammatory,” he says, “but it seems the EU (and Canada) might have decided that one can only negotiate with the US from a position of strength, and services are the US’ Achilles heel.”