> AWS / Azure et al, who are also available in the EU
Because US-in-EU is fake-EU.
CLOUD act, PATRIOT act etc. etc. US headquarters doesn't escape the arm of US law.
Remember a long time ago there was a famous case where Microsoft fought the US DoJ when they came looking for somebody's data in Azure Ireland ?
That was then. Now is now. Do you honestly think Microsoft would put up the same fight today, especially if the US President decided to lean on them ? I don't !
CLOUD/PATRIOT etc. has gone from a theoretical risk to a real one. And now you have a US President in office who doesn't care much for bypassing all that anyway.
Is it a risk anyone cares about? There is very little actual switching. In many ways dependence is increasing as everything moves to apps (including the EU's own age verification app) that only run on US controlled devices.
Cloud Act: The CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act) is a U.S. federal law passed in 2018 that allows U.S. law enforcement to compel U.S.-based tech and cloud companies to hand over customer data, even if that data is stored on servers located outside the United States
The data sovereignty stuff is mostly just lip-service. Both the EU and Canada are in the process of negotiating reciprocal CLOUD Act arrangements with the US government similar to what UK and Australia already have in place.
> EU-US agreement [1]
> Negotiations with the United States to facilitate cross-border access to e-evidence for judicial cooperation in criminal matters started in September 2019 and are currently ongoing. At present, US-based service providers collaborate with European law enforcement authorities through direct cooperation on a voluntary basis or through mutual legal assistance (MLA) procedures.
The economics of it are the same as for Hetzner. AWS is trying to split the difference by offering services that are supposedly run exclusively by EU citizens, from data centers located in the EU. The reasoning is pretty solid for at least the next two or three years. It might take another five to restore trust in US tech. Not a bad amount of runway.
There are several regulated industries that need to have their computing done in the EU without ties to US companies. Sovereignty is currently a big political topic.
Them putting services in EU (even as subsidiaries) is just a marketing strategy where they are straight up lying to customers so they can get more money.
Sincere congrats to the Verda team :-)
Can someone please help me understand what their competitive advantage is, versus the likes of AWS / Azure et al, who are also available in the EU.
I love a good underdog story, but I'm not understanding the economics of it.
> AWS / Azure et al, who are also available in the EU
Because US-in-EU is fake-EU.
CLOUD act, PATRIOT act etc. etc. US headquarters doesn't escape the arm of US law.
Remember a long time ago there was a famous case where Microsoft fought the US DoJ when they came looking for somebody's data in Azure Ireland ?
That was then. Now is now. Do you honestly think Microsoft would put up the same fight today, especially if the US President decided to lean on them ? I don't !
CLOUD/PATRIOT etc. has gone from a theoretical risk to a real one. And now you have a US President in office who doesn't care much for bypassing all that anyway.
Is it a risk anyone cares about? There is very little actual switching. In many ways dependence is increasing as everything moves to apps (including the EU's own age verification app) that only run on US controlled devices.
Cloud Act: The CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act) is a U.S. federal law passed in 2018 that allows U.S. law enforcement to compel U.S.-based tech and cloud companies to hand over customer data, even if that data is stored on servers located outside the United States
The data sovereignty stuff is mostly just lip-service. Both the EU and Canada are in the process of negotiating reciprocal CLOUD Act arrangements with the US government similar to what UK and Australia already have in place.
> EU-US agreement [1]
> Negotiations with the United States to facilitate cross-border access to e-evidence for judicial cooperation in criminal matters started in September 2019 and are currently ongoing. At present, US-based service providers collaborate with European law enforcement authorities through direct cooperation on a voluntary basis or through mutual legal assistance (MLA) procedures.
[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/e-evidence/
Verda's own website is sitting behind Cloudflare! So is consilium.europa.eu! The dependence is pervasive.
The economics of it are the same as for Hetzner. AWS is trying to split the difference by offering services that are supposedly run exclusively by EU citizens, from data centers located in the EU. The reasoning is pretty solid for at least the next two or three years. It might take another five to restore trust in US tech. Not a bad amount of runway.
There are several regulated industries that need to have their computing done in the EU without ties to US companies. Sovereignty is currently a big political topic.
They ain’t Americans.
Them putting services in EU (even as subsidiaries) is just a marketing strategy where they are straight up lying to customers so they can get more money.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
If only I was in Helsinki. This would be an interesting time to work in this area.
Verda is great! The only thing bad about Verda is that it's sold out fairly often :-) So the $189M will hopefully help with that.
Gongratulations to the team! Their solutions not only allow the data to actually stay in the EU, but are otherwise competetive as well!
Could you clarify what you mean? Cloud-related data stay in the EU, but yeah, marketing/payment stack are more diverse.
Disclaimer: I work at Verda.
Excellent news for European tech stack - congrats!
AI cloud? I guess 189 mil will buy nvidia GPUs to host inference for Chinese models for Europeans? Is that what this is?
That's a real risk.
Hopefully it's for buying VSORA or Euclyd machines, but well...
Can you buy these already? I think not.
The VSORA machines, possibly. They are apparently delivered and being installed at Scaleway.
The Euclyd machines, probably many months away.
This is wonderful, congrats to everyone at Verda!
Very good dev experience! Congrats
yet another ai cloud
Yeah, but this time like... In EU!
$198M for AI Cloud when US has a company that pays one of it's employees about that?
That American AI companies waste money like that is a good argument for them being vulnerable to leaner companies.
Yeah the sold out bit is telling, and it's rarely the cards, it's finding racks with enough power and cooling ready to take them.