Microsoft bets on Germany in €3.2B AI push

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-invest-32-bln-eur-germany-ai-push-2024-02-15/

by thunderbong • 2 years ago

157 115 2 years ago

reuters.com

lifestyleguru4• 2 years ago

I would invest a round 4B EUR, 3.2B is an awkward number.

lnxg33k15• 2 years ago

Probably they forgot the other wallet with 800 million euros in the other pants

hef19898• 2 years ago

Happens all to me all the time, really annoying when you don't want to be cheap on tips...

hulitu4• 2 years ago

Um, no. That's what they spent on bri^Wlobying. /s

ben_w• 2 years ago

If you've got enough money that €800 million is something you'd spend purely for the aesthetics of your invoice, please feel free to send the extra my way.

dubcanada2• 2 years ago

Joking, but surely Microsoft does.

Adverblessly• 2 years ago

It doesn't go well when reporting on it, but clearly they must have actually went for 3,220,176,896 EUR, signalling to Germany that they are 0xBFF00000's

ipsum2• 2 years ago

Isn't power really expensive in Germany? Wonder why they would build data centers there.

_19qg• 2 years ago

Germany is in the middle of Europe? 3rd largest economy (by GDP) in the world? Lots of customers nearby? It has one of the world-wide largest Internet exchange nodes in Frankfurt (-> DE-CIX)? It helps to adhere to EU (-> GDPR) and German regulations having data local, when wanting to serve EU customers?

openplatypus• 2 years ago

It helps to adhere to EU (-> GDPR) and German regulations having data local

Not this again. The moment you transmit data to European based servers under control of US corporation you could just as well send it straight to the US. Same difference.

Nobody cares if AWS, Azure or GCP have EU datacenters. They are for most part understood as under US control.

V__7• 2 years ago

It's on a downwards trend again after the spike created by the war [1]. However, I don't think this is a big factor, since Microsoft is the second-biggest buyer of renewable energy, so other prices apply.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1346782/electricity-pric...

[2] https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/news/bloombergnef-corpo...

huppeldepup• 2 years ago

That second link … it’s depressing how a site about renewable _energy_ writes an article about cumulative _energy_ consumption but consistently fails to tell the difference between energy and power.

wanderlust2021• 2 years ago

EU's best AI/ML universities are nearby (ETH, Tübingen, Munich,...)

FirmwareBurner• 2 years ago

I think British, Swiss and French universities top those in Germany for AI/ML.

locallost2• 2 years ago

Electricity for the industry is cheaper, they are freed from some taxes (not sure which one) and obviously VAT is deductible which is not the case for end consumers.

Regardless of that it's a myth anyway. Germany has a very competitive electricity market, and it basically works by having all the costs on the actual electricity bill (will not be 100% true in the coming years, but it was until now). Some other countries have cheaper electricity on paper, but cover the real costs with government money / taxes. France is the most obvious example as a neighbouring country.

lyu07282• 2 years ago

Why do you think it's a myth? It is true. Germany has one of the highest electricity prices in the world. It's well known because it's true.

dubcanada2• 2 years ago

There are also already tons of DCs in Germany. So obviously it's not prohibiting anything.

leobg• 2 years ago

I pay ~50 Euro cents per kWh. Even if you gifted me a GPU server it would be cheaper for me to use the cloud.

Scharkenberg• 2 years ago

Change your provider, you're overpaying by about 20 ct.

sveme• 2 years ago

Why do you pay so much? Latest contracts are 23 Cents/kWh, I pay about the same using tibber's dynamic tariff. Sounds like a massive rip off.

pgeorgi3• 2 years ago

Check your provider's current rate, it's probably closer to 30 cents. Then call them and ask if they want you to switch at the next opportunity or if they're willing to hoist you over into the new rate.

They even backdated my contract change by a few months when I did that.

throw_a_grenade• 2 years ago

If anyone cares to fix title, here's the character to copy-paste: € (3,2B€)

culturestate• 2 years ago

Using the name rather than the symbol is just the Reuters house style for non-USD currencies in headlines.

V__7• 2 years ago

I haven't seen it mentioned yet on Hacker News, but Germany is about to pass the "Gesundheitsdatennutzungsgesetz". This bill allows anonymized access for researchers to all German health care data. Data from over 83 million people.

The example given by the health minister for how this might play out: Researchers find an interesting pattern in the data. They request the ministry to ask the matched people for permission to become participants in a study or direct access. If permission is given, the anonymization is lifted in part and a study could move forward. This alone would make Germany a pretty fascinating place for future AI research.

zelphirkalt• 2 years ago

Sounds perhaps a bit naive, as one might expect from German government, when it comes to data. How much of such data does one need to de-anonymize someone? How easy will it be to accidentally slip identifying data in using whatever kind of system, that is supposed to be used? How easy will it be for any company like MS to correlate that data with all that other data they extracted without user consent?

lb4r• 2 years ago

How easy will it be for any company like MS to correlate that data with all that other data they extracted without user consent?

Doable to some extent, but would they really learn much that we haven't already told them, given our propensity to Google for symptoms and diseases?

Personally, my worry here, if I had some embarrassing medical history that I wouldn't want people to know about, would be some malicious party gaining access to de-anonymized data and using it to blackmail, or just simply making it public.

Edit: Come to think of it, insurance companies could probably have a field day with a data set like this.

V__7• 2 years ago

The companies and researchers get access to the data with oversight but the data isn't shared. They basically get access to a server to run their analysis but can't retrieve the data.

belter• 2 years ago

Incredibly naive. Easy to de-anonymize. First they come for the books, now AI practitioners come for the health data.

"Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10933-3

"...We here propose a generative copula-based method that can accurately estimate the likelihood of a specific person to be correctly re-identified, even in a heavily incomplete dataset. On 210 populations, our method obtains AUC scores for predicting individual uniqueness ranging from 0.84 to 0.97, with low false-discovery rate. Using our model, we find that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes. Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization ..."

awesomeMilou2• 2 years ago

It is important to note the the original draft for the law does not talk about anonymizing data, but rather pseudonymizing of data. So no attemt is made at keeping identities of patients truly anonymous (which has been repeadeatly proven to be impossible in sparse datasets).

lnxg33k15• 2 years ago

I would hope that there is a way for the subjects themselves to be involved in the decision before their data is de-anonymised

luplex• 2 years ago

I think the plan is an opt-out solution. But they really don't want many people to actually opt out.

And it's a legal challenge to make sure that everyone understands how and why they should opt out, even my grandma.

hulitu4• 2 years ago

I would hope that there is a way for the subjects themselves to be involved in the decision before their data is de-anonymised

No. Unless you don't want medical treatment.

dizzydes• 2 years ago

This should absolutely be done everywhere.

It will exponentially reduce time to cures for various diseases. The amount of red tape in academia and pharma to do simple data studies is wild...

chopin3• 2 years ago

My medical data is affected and I can't disagree more. As well pharma is not interested in finding cures, for obvious reasons. I am getting all the downsides with no of the upsides.

cjblomqvist• 2 years ago

Sweden is usually ranking vet high on health care, both in results and research/innovation. One big reason for this is that we very early on gathered a lot of medical statistics on the population through the "health ministry", which have later been used in research. All this have fostered and cultivated innovation. The biggest victory however is the benefit of the results it had brought the population (and the world).

If done with care this can have a big impact! Very exciting Germany is doing this!

rcbdev2• 2 years ago

When it comes to digitalization and privacy in Germany, no good intention goes unpunished.

peteradio• 2 years ago

Doesn't sound anonymous if it can be trivial unmasked. Sounds like the setup for one of the most egregious medical leaks of all time. Germany pwned.

V__7• 2 years ago

It can't be trivially unmasked. If approved researchers get controlled access to the data with oversight, but the data itself isn't shared with the companies.

lifestyleguru4• 2 years ago

Next thing you see is letter from Rundfunkbeitrag suggesting to pay for the whole year in advance because your cancer doesn't have good prognosis. Nothing personal or fraudulent you know... it will be convenient.

shankr2• 2 years ago

I don't think people understood the joke since they might not know what Rundfunkbeitrag is!

Everyone outside of German has to face death and taxes. In Germany you face death, taxes and Rundfunkbeitrag.

zx8080• 2 years ago

This bill allows anonymized access for researchers to all German health care data. Data from over 83 million people.

Sounds like MS has just bought a relatively easy access to ~83m people's health data. For €3.2B.

That's €39 per person (tax included).

jug• 2 years ago

This might be good strategically from the perspective of EU companies where the physical location of operations can matter a lot depending on your field of business, e.g. NIS 2 Directive for energy companies and other sensitive infrastructure.

But they'll face competition too of course! I can't wait to see more development from European actors and projects like Mistral, TrustLLM, and also GPT-SW3 for the Nordics! There's much in motion on the European stage right now.

schleck8• 2 years ago

They don't face much competition for datacenter locations in Europe. Germany has a really good location being relatively centered to the continent depending on the city, and DE CIX as a gigantic internet exchange. Most datacenters are located around that exchange. The only two locations that come close to Frankfurt am Main in datacenter count to my knowledge are Paris and Amsterdam, but neither has that geographical advantage for latency.

lima• 2 years ago

It goes both ways, of sorts - DE-CIX is also a consequence of all the large DCs being there :-)

Interestingly, Tier 1 transit pricing is increasingly competitive and DE-CIX access is more expensive (relatively speaking) in recent years.

dalex00• 2 years ago

Conspiracy view... Maybe just an indirect bribe so German government votes in favour for the tech giant on EU level laws...

lifestyleguru4• 2 years ago

"Legal bribes" with dedicated budgets and departments at corporations are absolutely a thing (lookup Siemens), only in Europe we avoid the word "lobbying". It's not conspiracy at all.

rcbdev2• 2 years ago

"Kickbacks" is the term used internally at Siemens for this modus. They only document it well for their CEE subsidiaries but the fish rots at the head.

supergirl• 2 years ago

hard to understand what exactly they are investing in. just building a data center to suck up the green energy is not such a great deal for germany

lencastre• 2 years ago

Something something Dreiundzwanzig und Ich.

ladyanita22• 2 years ago

care to explain?

andsoitis• 2 years ago

23andme

(dreiundzwanzig und mich)

ruszki3• 2 years ago

Are there countries which have universal healthcare, and health care data is not stored already at a centralized place? This is not new at all. At least definitely not in Europe.

lucianbr• 2 years ago

Romania has universal healthcare, if pathetic, and health care data is likely not stored at all, and in any case not at a centralized place. And we're definitely in Europe, the EU even.

Admittedly, this may be a bit besides the point. Still, I think the universality of your assertion is based mostly on thinking that the world is made only of a handful of "important" countries.

graemep2• 2 years ago

A lot of UK NHS patient data is stored by GPs who are private sector contractors and do not use NHS systems.

I do not know the details - I have worked with medical systems handling NHS data a bit but not the details of what is stored where and how it is transferred between systems. I do recall some news stories about GPs not cooperating with the NHSs push to a centralised system because of privacy concerns - articles on The Register IIRC.

Lichtso2• 2 years ago

Germany had many big external investment + government subvention projects involving factories, data centers etc. announced in the recent years. None of them materialized and they got canceled because of the German balanced budget amendment [0].

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuldenbremse_(Deutschland)

snowpid3• 2 years ago

Schuldenbremse does not directly affect private investment. Why should it?

retromario2• 2 years ago

Some projects are a mix of private and public investments. A freeze on the public portion affects the risk/trade-offs of the private investment portion and therefore on the overall project.

fahrradflucht• 2 years ago

What exactly does it mean to invest 3.2B€ in Germany? Does it mean this is actually spend in Germany - as in for goods and services produced in Germany, or does it mean they order an astonishing amount of GPUs at Nvidia and put them into the Frankfurt region because that's just one of the most popular regions latency wise to serve Europe?

fsflover• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39411061

m3kw9• 2 years ago

MS need its own AGI strategy as they ain’t getting it from OpenAI from that 10b investment

aleph_minus_one• 2 years ago

MS need its own AGI strategy as they ain’t getting it from OpenAI from that 10b investment

Microsoft will neither get AGI from their own nor the OpenAI investment. The whole story of AGI is just a nice science-fiction story marketing pitch to relieve investors of their money. :-)

charles_f• 2 years ago

double the capacity of its AI and data centre infrastructure in the country and expand its training programmes,

So installing GPUs in the existing German Azure datacenters (likely most of the money), and spending some of the time of their existing field teams to train customers to use it.

I think the "bet" is a bit emphatic there, Germany has had protective laws for their data for a long time, which is why they've had local datacenters for a long time.

It's a logical place to start massive deployment of GPUs in Europe if you don't want to exclude its largest economy from the party

alephnerd• 2 years ago

Microsoft also has a Privacy Shield re-certification coming up this year [0].

[0] https://www.privacyshield.gov/ps/participant?id=a2zt0000000K...

aj72• 2 years ago

Is Germany being used for development or as a database?

I have reservations about Germany’s 9-5/work-life balance culture being compatible with high performance in development.

AnonymousPlanet• 2 years ago

From personal experience, American work/life balance seems to revolve around standing at the water cooler while Germans sit at their desks and do actual work.

aj72• 2 years ago

Between 9-5, you are right.

Then, the action starts.

(When I worked in Germany, they practically locked the doors at 5.)

whalesalad• 2 years ago

I thought Germany was famously an OSS leader? Thought all govt machines ran Linux. Maybe it’s just certain municipalities.

undebuggable• 2 years ago

Someone somewhere is using WSL. Was enough to tick the "OSS" checkbox.

Krasnol• 2 years ago

There is an interesting story on this topic: https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/

NekkoDroid• 2 years ago

While I live in Germany I haven't been paying too much attention, but I do know that it feels like it's trying to invest more in OSS than certain other countries. One thing is the sovereign tech fund and another is them working on openDesk.

outside1234• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, at the actual company, we are laying off German employees in droves because the labor laws are so inflexible there (or so the meme internally goes)

ManuelKiessling• 2 years ago

Fun fact: Once these have been built, I‘ll be able to walk there from where I‘m writing this (which is my bed) — it‘s that close.

Anyone here who can tell how these change the surroundings (economically, ecologically, socially… any dimension is interesting)?

Rant423• 2 years ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39384282 (2 days ago, 1 comment)

Microsoft bets on Germany in €3.2B AI push

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