EU Tech Independence, Another OpenAI Lawsuit & Digital Privacy Crisis | SS #37

So first up for the news for this week, a continuation of the conversation that we've been having with the EU and their issues with some of the policies coming out of the US.

The European Union just unveiled their latest tech sovereignty plan.

This plan is another step towards them reshoring their supply chain, but not just the digital infrastructure, but including the chips, data centers energy they're also looking to make sure that all of their software providers from the cloud service providers to their ai companies all of that is homegrown and growing inside of their own ecosystem.

So again, they have decided that it is too dangerous to continue to rely on technology coming out of the US and China.

And this is one of our partners, at least one major group of our partners.

But some of the policies that have been coming out of the US administration or the current US administration is making them feel like they need to accelerate their plans to move away from choosing between a rock and a hard place.

So that is something that has been, I'd say, growing in terms of importance for a few years.

They've been looking and been considering ways to become more self-reliant.

They've been looking for ways to move away from just having US companies dominate their economy, their systems, and basically they just use and consume all of these services coming out of the U.S. and China.

But recently, with some of the changes in terms of policy, like recently, Anthropic being unable to export, quote unquote, their AI models or different policies that impact their ability to access chips and strategic materials that they need in order to increase their economic productivity, but also their military capabilities.

Like a lot of that technology, they're relying on the U S for it.

And one of the interesting parts, and I mentioned it from, I believe last week or a few weeks ago with them considering looking at, I think it was GCP or Google cloud Azure and AWS or specifically AWS inside of the EU region and how that was one of their focuses to see if, if the AWS counted as a marketplace that was being unfairly managed and unfairly controlled by Amazon.

that news just came out a few weeks ago and today or a few days ago they decided that they need to create or at least innovate and invest inside of their own cloud service provider so they looked at amazon as competition that they would have to get around if they were to invest inside of their own cloud service provider, because Amazon already has as majority of the market share of businesses and governments, municipalities, everything that is actually using AWS or they're using Azure or they're using GCP.

Those are the big three CSPs in the market right now.

So it was interesting that Just a few weeks after that announcement, they're saying that we need to control our entire software stack.

And one of the reasons which makes sense, I think one of the representatives from the EU forgot her name right now, but she basically said that we should not be relying on external governments, external partners to provide technology that is powering our governments.

our healthcare, our energy, all of these critical infrastructure industries that you really cannot live without, especially in the current age, having all of those services being almost 100% reliant on what's coming out of a partner today, but someone who could potentially turn off that system if they decided that there was some disagreement that, or I say disagreement or even a change in how they thought about that relationship.

Any of those things could happen and result in them basically losing access to something that they need in order to provide the services that their people, that the entire nation relies on.

So it makes sense from the EU perspective why they're trying to go this route.

But one of the questions I thought about was, are they actually capable of getting it done? There are going to be more investments made inside of the EU regions.

I mentioned a few weeks ago, SoftBank investing a few million dollars into developing a data center, a new data center inside of France.

And they'll probably get in there figuring out financing and investments for other builds like that.

They have some really innovative companies.

They have ASML, which is one of the link pins to this current AI revolution and the advancements inside of GPUs and the different semiconductors that are available in the market.

They have ARM, which is one of the major companies that provided chips and design chips and the software for a lot of the operating systems that most computers rely on today.