Comment by TrackerFF
10 days ago
Lack of capital. Fear of consequences.
Google rolls into town and wants to spend half a billion euro on a datacenter? Sure thing. They'll say that it'll boost the local economy while being built - by creating a couple of thousand jobs for the contractors that are going to build and maintain it, and then some onsite jobs for the next decade or two, creating a couple of hundred jobs for techs / engineers.
And as long as they keep playing ball with google, projects like that will pop up once in a while. If you're difficult, there's also a risk of the rich tech companies taking their business some other place.
With that said, I've recently noticed more voices for building our own stuff - as there's a real risk that US tech companies will simply comply if pushed enough, say, by a POTUS that's out for blood and wants to hurt certain foreign users. Ban/lock out certain users from gaining access to software, turn off their infrastructure, etc. who knows.
But, alas, there just isn't the same willingness to pour in capital on the important things. For private investors it doesn't make much sense, unless they have a bulletproof contract with domestic users willing buy their service - and using state funds isn't too popular, either.
Truth be told, any of the big tech businesses can undercut any competition, and probably build better and faster. If anything, it could be the case for tariffs - outsourcing critical infrastructure will leave you very exposed. If European countries all over the board started to abandon US tech companies, they'd cry to Trump, who in turn would probably start a trade-war.
Now replace Google with an EU company doing it in the EU for EU jobs and everything you described. It’s not like money only comes from the US.
You are right to be worried. US companies under this administration can’t be trusted to follow the law. Why should they, when our commander in chief isn’t and has a panel of judges who let him do whatever. Just the other day he suggested Obama be investigated for treason. So yeah, we’re toxic, and you all should seriously quarantine yourselves.
EU businesses are pretty conservative. They don't have the insane amounts of capital that arose in Silicon Valley as a result of the Bretton Woods system. There are companies that size, but they're all in, like, manufacturing, or coal mining. There's no EU company that both has a billion dollars and knows how to be AWS. There are companies with billions of dollars (euros) and there are different startup companies that probably could be AWS if they tried really hard, but never the twain shall meet.
> They don't have the insane amounts of capital that arose in Silicon Valley as a result of the Bretton Woods system.
Why would you say all personal finance advisors from Europ advise their clients to invest at least 50% in the US? The aggressive ones suggest 70-90%. 53% of The Norwegian sovereign fund is invested in the US, 24% in Europe and 23% the rest of the world. Their biggest investments are in Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Broadcom, etc, as one would expect.
Why don't European investors move their investments from US index and into European companies and businesses? Norway alone has ~1 trillion Euros invested in the US. Surely they can move it to invest in European tech, no? that can make a couple of European AWSs.
2 replies →