The real 'military bases' are banks.
In this new world you cannot trust that this will not happen. As a European relying on the Americans is honestly probably little better than relying on the Russians and probably on par with relying on the Chinese in terms of risk profile. Note we are actually for all intents and purposes at war with Russia.
The amount of leverage the Americans have over Europe is insane, and every captial should be trying to mitgate that risk asap.
these companies have datacenters in Europe too. It is not wild to think that if push comes to shove and US cut off Europe, then Europeans can just take control over those European data centers and restore access to GCP/AWS/Azure in Europe because these datacenters are on their soil and predominantly employing Europeans.
Microsoft executives under oath said that they will not be able to honor those contracts if there is pressure from the US administration. We should know this, but we keep forgetting: laws, contracts, courts etc always bow before political and military might. In peacetime, we delude ourselves into thinking it aint so.
The situation is now clear as day. What op stated is 100 percent correct.
The US will have successfully invaded an EU country by 2027.
They will, if it comes to this, immediately and successfully weaponize all three hyperscalers.
It is abundantly clear where thinks are going.
If any country, organization or company is not prepared for this by mid 2026, they are blind and deaf
The only thing is that weaponizing the hyperscalers would also be disastrous for the hyperscalers. They would be liable to lose their assets in Europe, access to European markets, etc and so on. Which would as a consequence cause a tangible harm to the US economy itself.
Not that in Europe we should rely on it for anything. Any business is wise to move away from any sort of dependency that is subject to US pressure. Governments in particular should consider it a matter of life and death.
That's not the case for digital infrastructure like Google Workspace, Google cloud, Office 365, AWS, etc.
The EU compelling banks to do business despite US sanctions seems pretty unlikely even if relations continue to degrade.
Microsoft relies on the EUs courts to recognise their property rights.
This made me realize that many people who are extremely critical of the power the EU has, have no idea how much that power is often protecting them.
This is not a dismissal of the fact that it's absolutely critical to stay vigilant about how that power is used. But it's quite clear that without that power, the US would've abused theirs way more within Europe.
Losing access to data is potentially worse than losing access to your bank account. I doubt Microsoft will let you grab a copy of all your emails after they block/ban you.
This is a very major inconvenience.
There's potentially coming a whole lot of European € back to the European market
Monitoring of "hostile" workloads at datacentre scale is not going to work.
Should we throw away 80 years of trade, cooperation, and the resulting prosperity and go back into ridiculous tribalism?
The US is already doing that, pretending otherwise is just hopeless naivete.
All we can do is face the facts and pick up the pieces.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
Operating systems are even easier - pick your flavour of Linux - devices are all made in China anyway.
Its the cloud and software part that sucks. VPSes aside, almost any managed service is US based.
AI has made this even worse.
Managed services weren’t needed because big tech was bending to EU regulations and buying out alternatives. The services aren’t rocket science; plenty of euro devs participated and still participate in building them, they’re just on US big tech payrolls. Expertise is there, money isn’t, yet.