EU-US data transfers gone for good?

concept

@emgh said:

Yes. Time to secure power is years. Fastest in China, then the US, Europe last

But in Europe, nordics is amongst the ”least bad”

US is pretty much nothing without Canada. They rely on Canada so much.

totally_not_banned

@concept said:

@emgh said:

Yes. Time to secure power is years. Fastest in China, then the US, Europe last

But in Europe, nordics is amongst the ”least bad”

US is pretty much nothing without Canada. They rely on Canada so much.

I remember that coming up somewhere around the whole tariffs debate. Supposedly the US is importing a good amount of materials (mostly crude oil?) from Canada. Kinda hard to quantify from the other side of the pond without really digging into it though.

concept

@totally_not_banned said:

I remember that coming up somewhere around the whole tariffs debate. Supposedly the US is importing a good amount of materials (mostly crude oil?) from Canada. Kinda hard to quantify from the other side of the pond without really digging into it though.

yup https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/facilities-we-regulate/canadas-pipeline-system/2021/crude-oil-pipeline-transportation-system.html

OpaqueRegistrant

@OpaqueRegistrant said:

@rm_ said:
Still can ping some US servers, so I believe the data transfer is working.

@William said:

@OpaqueRegistrant said: What is the EU still missing that everyone flocks to American companies?

Innovation in IT and general hardware design for example. Its not like we cannot design an EU mobile phone manufactured at least partially local (like India does, and we had Nokia) its just simply not cost effective and we lack creative minds. We are in a weird middle phase now, not really industrial anymore but also not finance oriented. EU is becoming more of a tourism + transit hub and safe haven from overreaching governments to incorporate or store your wealth.

Other point is plain energy cost holding us back, sure you have countries with basically free power (Iceland) but you pay for that in extra transport/transit, shipping etc, most of EU is around 30-50c/kwh while Florida and Texas are just 14cents... (and with gas turbines and fracking you can drop this even lower, see the xAI datacenters).

I meant in the context of servers, cloud storage, etc. They're not lacking in that, they actually have quite good competition. Some of the long-time favourites like Hetzner are European. AWS isn't, but AWS is overpriced garbage anyway.

Nobody is arguing to stop buying computers from Dell - well many people are arguing that but not for this reason. This is about server hosting itself. What's the EU missing that we keep turning to American companies when it isn't necessary?

OpaqueRegistrant

@totally_not_banned said:

@OpaqueRegistrant said:

@rm_ said:
Still can ping some US servers, so I believe the data transfer is working.

@William said:

@OpaqueRegistrant said: What is the EU still missing that everyone flocks to American companies?

Innovation in IT and general hardware design for example. Its not like we cannot design an EU mobile phone manufactured at least partially local (like India does, and we had Nokia) its just simply not cost effective and we lack creative minds. We are in a weird middle phase now, not really industrial anymore but also not finance oriented. EU is becoming more of a tourism + transit hub and safe haven from overreaching governments to incorporate or store your wealth.

Other point is plain energy cost holding us back, sure you have countries with basically free power (Iceland) but you pay for that in extra transport/transit, shipping etc, most of EU is around 30-50c/kwh while Florida and Texas are just 14cents... (and with gas turbines and fracking you can drop this even lower, see the xAI datacenters).

I meant in the context of servers, cloud storage, etc. They're not lacking in that, they actually have quite good competition. Some of the long-time favourites like Hetzner are European. AWS isn't, but AWS is overpriced garbage anyway.

I kinda doubt you could just replace the big cloud services and infrastructure providers with Hetzner and maybe OVH. Even if you could chances are the screwed up energy supply will make it even more non-competitive than it already is rather sooner than later. I mean, datacenters are already regularly bottlenecked on energy. More and more AI is pushing in competing for energy/datacenter space. It doesn't take some scientist to predict what will happen to prices. There's also no real fix available since you can't just hex energy into being.

But why couldn't you? Outside of AI (which is a bubble) and Netflix (actually I worked for a smaller European competitor to Netflix) most businesses don't need AWS scale. And that European Netflix did use a bunch of colo racks for the CDN and for central services, Kubernetes on more colo but they were thinking of renting servers for that.

totally_not_banned

@OpaqueRegistrant said:

@totally_not_banned said:

@OpaqueRegistrant said:

@rm_ said:
Still can ping some US servers, so I believe the data transfer is working.

@William said:

@OpaqueRegistrant said: What is the EU still missing that everyone flocks to American companies?

Innovation in IT and general hardware design for example. Its not like we cannot design an EU mobile phone manufactured at least partially local (like India does, and we had Nokia) its just simply not cost effective and we lack creative minds. We are in a weird middle phase now, not really industrial anymore but also not finance oriented. EU is becoming more of a tourism + transit hub and safe haven from overreaching governments to incorporate or store your wealth.

Other point is plain energy cost holding us back, sure you have countries with basically free power (Iceland) but you pay for that in extra transport/transit, shipping etc, most of EU is around 30-50c/kwh while Florida and Texas are just 14cents... (and with gas turbines and fracking you can drop this even lower, see the xAI datacenters).

I meant in the context of servers, cloud storage, etc. They're not lacking in that, they actually have quite good competition. Some of the long-time favourites like Hetzner are European. AWS isn't, but AWS is overpriced garbage anyway.

I kinda doubt you could just replace the big cloud services and infrastructure providers with Hetzner and maybe OVH. Even if you could chances are the screwed up energy supply will make it even more non-competitive than it already is rather sooner than later. I mean, datacenters are already regularly bottlenecked on energy. More and more AI is pushing in competing for energy/datacenter space. It doesn't take some scientist to predict what will happen to prices. There's also no real fix available since you can't just hex energy into being.

But why couldn't you? Outside of AI (which is a bubble) and Netflix (actually I worked for a smaller European competitor to Netflix) most businesses don't need AWS scale. And that European Netflix did use a bunch of colo racks for the CDN and for central services, Kubernetes on more colo but they were thinking of renting servers for that.

As long as it's just about renting a bunch of servers/cloud instances and you don't really care that much about locations you sure can but there's so much more than having a box sitting somewhere. I'm not exactly the best person to get into this but having had the opportunity to shake my head at peoples Azure training materials i can say there's a lot to it beyond simple servers and that's just one aspect. Being able to stick servers into DCs just isn't that much in 2026.

Also like i said, what's there is working under very unfavorable conditions and with massive question marks. I don't really want to write an essay but expecting a lot of growth (especially from the ground up) is simply unreasonable. The conditions are just bad. Costs are high and regulatory overhead is insane. Sure, big companies will find ways to deal with that (even if that way might be to move elsewhere) but internationally that won't win them any prices and Joe Schmoe probably rather goes on unemployment than figuring out how to even sell a roll of toilet paper on Ebay (maybe even to the EU country next to him - how dare he?) or really do much of anything and that doesn't take local specialties into account yet (there's some massive braindamage there, trust me...).