Comment by user43928

5 days ago

If Europe can't even build data centers, which come with low to moderate environmental impact, they won't manage to deploy a Starlink alternative either.

Even though they could use SpaceX launch capacity to deploy such a constellation, Europe has no such plans.

Your comment seems to reinforce the parent's opinion about societal paralyzation.

Europe can claim to be cleaner or more democratic, but it doesn't change that they get nothing done.

We're building data centres, there are several massive ones in my tiny little country (NL). We're also quite capable of putting satellites into orbit. We have swarms of these small satellites just not quite at the scale of StarLink and they're doing science.

Your claim makes as much sense as saying that the US can't even build airliners. Sure they can't build good ones. That was a decision to replace the technically capable management at Boeing with an army of MBAs. Sure Airbus are a decade ahead but the US can still build them.

The thing which many people forget was that, up until the current POTUS decided to reverse course, we were best buddies. We've invested a huge amount of money in US-based companies and generally worked together to increase the size of the pie for everyone.

  • Sure, but are we building them fast enough?

    Our current global share of AI compute is estimated at 5%, US at 78%, China 11%.

    We're projected to briefly rise to 8% around 2028, and back to 5% for 2031.

    That does not look like sovereignty and independence from the US.

    • Are you building them "fast enough"? I follow American politics and infrastructure build-out closer than I do my own local politics as I've been working for American companies in the AI space.

      I'm hearing a whole lot of noise, frustration and anger from the construction side that it's getting really hard to build data centres in the US now that the public are coming out hard. Especially in DEEP "red" states.

    • No, we're not building them fast enough, but there is a lot of money being poured into this space right now, the big bottlenecks are power, RAM and GPUs. We're also spending a lot on Putin's idiocy so there are some other things that aren't helping.

> If Europe can't even build data centers, which come with low to moderate environmental impact, they won't manage to deploy a Starlink alternative either.

You must be trolling. Even US cloud providers have multiple regions in Europe, and the likes of Eutelsat precede SpaceX for a couple of decades and have been around for half a century already.

> Europe can claim to be cleaner or more democratic, but it doesn't change that they get nothing done.

I don't think you're noticing the US is plunging into self-imposed irrelevance. It can't even manage to properly fight a war anymore,as can be attested by the whole Iran fiasco. But keep parroting your alt right pipeline tropes pushed by Russian bots. Don't forget to complain how Europe is freezing and how minority rights are a societal problem.