Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Forgot about the processors

https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/05/16/europe-built-sovereign-clouds-to-escape-us-control-then-forgot-about-the-processors/5237735

by beardyw • 2 months ago

121 134 2 months ago

theregister.com

nasretdinov• 2 months ago

Quite an odd thing for a British journal to pretend ARM doesn't exist...

dijit4• 2 months ago

ARM is:

1) An ISA licensor, with no capability to create its own CPUs

and

2) Owned by Softbank in Japan, not European

shaokind• 2 months ago

Is 1) accurate with ARM creating their own CPUs directly? https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/03/24/arm-launches-its-own-cpu...

Aromasin2• 2 months ago

They are pivoting to become a fabless chip company as of last year (the decision happened a few years back): https://www.wired.com/story/chip-design-firm-arm-is-making-i...

I'd also argue that while Softbank has capital ownership of the company, the leadership structure and how that capital is allocated is still done within the UK with standard board oversight. I know a few of the leadership team personally, and they have a wide remit, almost more so than a public company might do.

dadoum4• 2 months ago

ARM design IP blocks, they can make their own CPU (and now they are making one), eevn though that means competing with your customers.

hannob• 2 months ago

As far as cloud service servers are concerned, I don't think ARM CPUs have any meaningful marketshare, right?

You could start running things on ARM, but, almost certainly, that comes with a lot of extra friction. (Not saying that isn't a bad idea, it'd probably improve the ecosystem as a whole and flush out architecture-specific assumptions in server software. But it's not someting trivial to do.)

therockhead• 2 months ago

AWS Graviton has been steadily gaining share, a quick Google search says it's up to 20% now.

Sytten• 2 months ago

AWS runs a lot of ARM server and they are pushed heavily since they are cheaper and faster. And with Apple running ARM it is just easier to fully transition now.

Hikikomori• 2 months ago

More than 50 % of new CPU capacity on AWS is arm. Most of their own stuff uses it, nitro co processors are also arm. Anyone caring about cost of AWS has or is transitioning.

tlb• 2 months ago

Linux on Arm works great. I barely notice the difference except everything is a bit faster. Most SaaS companies can and should switch.

novos• 2 months ago

Surely having AWS Graviton in service for nearly a decade will mean it's not that much friction.

hanwenn• 2 months ago

AWS graviton, Google Axion? ARM has better performance per watt, which translates to better performance per $.

Kon5ole• 2 months ago

Arm has been growing fast for years, recent stories claim ARM is at 50% for hyperscalers (google, amazon and microsoft are making their own designs) and 25% for general servers according to stories from this year, and the share is growing fast.

x86/64 is looking more and more like the next Alpha or MIPS in many ways.

Aromasin2• 2 months ago

The author is a Dutch journalist with no technology background. I wouldn't jump to get my information from this source. As a person who works in the UK semiconductor industry, I noticed 4 or 5 glaring holes in the article in just the first couple of paragraphs.

embedding-shape16• 2 months ago

I got to the second sentence ("Europe is pouring more than €2 billion into sovereign cloud initiatives") before I realize the author either doesn't know and/or didn't care to research properly.

anonym293• 2 months ago

ARM has the exact same problem via TrustZone. Different technical implementation, slightly different known capabilities, but fundamentally, still an unauditable, unremovable ring -3 subsystem that cannot be controlled by the legitimate, lawful owner of the hardware.

M95D2• 2 months ago

It depends on the CPU. For Rockchip we have open source BL31 blob [1] and it's supported by mainline u-boot.

And I think it's ring -2, because it's not a separate CPU.

[1] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2024/02/21/almo...

sauercrowd• 2 months ago

So what's being proposed here? Why bother and just use US clouds?

anonym293• 2 months ago

Don't let 'perfect' be the enemy of 'progress'.

lstodd• 2 months ago

Exactly. Why bother and own yourself?

I always snarked at clueless CEOs bent on forcing me to sign NDAs while the entire infra _and_ data was living in US from the get go. Like, what's so sensitive I'm going to disclose that wasn't voluntarily disclosed by yourself already?

brookst2• 2 months ago

People are at least as concerned with who data is disclosed to as they are with what data is disclosed.

I am sure the US government has everything from my banking records to my biometrics to my medical history.

That does not mean I would be ok with all of those things being posted on the open web (yes, some / all may already be).

Employers are generally more concerned with disclosure to competitors than they are with possible collection by US intelligence.

wood_spirit• 2 months ago

So what is the solution? Can Europe start building the next gen fab now already? And if it can technically, and if it can politically, even at great expense, should it?

dijit4• 2 months ago

I think people miss the point about sovreignity.

Part of what got Microsoft into this position in the first place is that they built and sold software.

Now, they don't build and sell software, they sell services. Services means you're buying access to data.

The data is the problem.

There's a certain amount of soft power you have when you can disallow access to data and services for foreign officials[0] arbitrarily.

The old world order would of course permit us to sanction new sales of things, but in the new world: this is crucially tied with current access to services.

I think the easiest way to think about it is:

Would you depend on another nation selling you the parts to build a power plant, or would you prefer to depend on them supplying you the power- in fact it's worse than that because not only are you buying power you're also giving up a lot of information on who uses it, how it's used, and enough control to cut it off for an individual person.. totally crazy.

the EU itself was designed around the idea that if you are crucially tied in this way then war becomes unthinkable. But that only works when you're equivalently sized entities. The US uses this position to bully the world.

leonidasrup5• 2 months ago

EU is for example quite comfortable to be dependent on energy imports.

The biggest share of imports to EU by value is "mineral fuels, oils, distillation products". It's 17% of all imports.

https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/imports-by-categ...

dijit4• 2 months ago

1) that gave Russia a lot of leverage over us, so, lessons should be learned.

2) Tech dominance is almost at 100% for large companies and governments across europe. Much higher than 17%

Spooky232• 2 months ago

Those integrations are needed in the long term because only through interdependence can you have peace. You need peace because the consequence of war post WW2 are too high.

The problem with the right wing authoritarian types, regardless of regime is that their thirst for power is harmful to all stakeholders. The tragedy of the Iraq War wasn’t Iraq — it was kicking off decades of inevitably escalating conflict. And doing so for nothing.

We, as in citizens of the world, need strong trade ties with China, Europe, the United States and the developing world. I don’t want my sons getting killed by some PRC drone, nor do I want them killing people in service of the dreams of fat old men.

Europe butchered two generations a century ago. Their model makes sense, and can integrate with the world.

clearstack• 2 months ago

The GPU situation is even more concentrated. NVDA data center was $39B last fiscal year — roughly 90% of their total revenue. No European alternative exists for AI compute workloads.

leonidasrup5• 2 months ago

Even if Europe could replace the dependence of Intel and AMD processor, for example with home grown RISC-V processor, where in Europe could such processor be manufacture in a secure and somehow cost effective way? Then there are other chips and components like memory chips, network components. How about secure European network routers which for networks and datacenters in Europe?

https://www.techspot.com/news/107073-researchers-uncover-hid...

Silicon level backdoors.

https://www.wired.com/2016/06/demonically-clever-backdoor-hi...

dhdueii18• 2 months ago

If they can make the EUV machines I doubt it’s beyond Europe to do the manufacturing at higher levels.

And as commented elsewhere, ARM

cenamus• 2 months ago

Also Siemens/Infineon. Although that's a vastly different node size, but still, there's some expertise present

jeffrallen• 2 months ago

As a European, enjoying the environmental quality of life our regulations provide, I'm ashamed to admit it might be impossible to make chips here, as it's probably a dirty industry that Europe prefers to keep offshore.

kyboren• 2 months ago

If they can make the EUV machines [...]

They can't. The EUV light source is produced by Cymer, an American subsidiary of ASML.

dadoum4• 2 months ago

In general, in Europe there is research infrastructure that I think could be used at a medium scale for important applications (but I am not a professional).

There is the NanoIC research line at imec (2nm), CEA-Leti incomming 7nm FD-SOI pilot lines, and in terms of full production lines, Global Foundries Dresden (12 nm), ESMC (12 nm, in construction), and the various FeRAM/FMC projects I can't keep track of (Neumonda for example).

I would be more worried about designs, because outside of ARM (and Imagination Tech, both in the UK), I don't know any competitive European designs. (about routers NXP already makes router chips with accelerators on top of ARM cores, used for example in the Mono Gateway, but they are fabbed on old TSMC nodes)

anonym293• 2 months ago

Francillon seems very dismissive of the risk, citing his "castle walls", but there's a flaw in his thinking, partially described in the article. Francillon seems to anticipate adversarial traffic only flowing in, not out. Sure, he can block packets before they ever reach CSME or PSP. But there are several embedded assumptions in there which are unsupported: that the behavior of these systems is known, auditable, or understood well enough to assume that they're not sending outbound communications as a covert C2 channel, and that attackers reaching in need to send packets directly to these systems, rather than surreptitious delivery mechanisms to the main OS that CSME and PSP can observe, like a certain WLAN name broadcast from a wireless radio, or certain device firmware being present, or even a specific targeted ad being served to a browser running in the main OS. The claim that these criticisms make the entire framework he designed worthless is obviously untrue, but it's also a strawman. The true claim isn't that it makes the framework worthless, but rather, it makes the framework incomplete. This is inconvenient for Francillon because it tasks him with addressing a class of problem that may be partially possible to detect, but impossible to solve, in practice. And you can't have a conclusion that there is an unsolvable problem, even if it's true.

embedding-shape16• 2 months ago

I guess there are two types of "sovereignty" people talk about here.

First is "data sovereignty", which is what the current (data) migrations are all about. As long as the data remains in place where it cannot be suddenly locked away by the US government, people don't care if the CPU was purchased from the US, as the government cannot suddenly disable those (as far as we know at least).

Second is "hardware sovereignty", which is what this article talks about, about the geographical locations where the hardware is designed and built. This is obviously much harder, but also less important at this very moment. That's why you're not seeing people suddenly rushing to fund EU fabs for silicon, there are more important things to focus on right now, with real implications.

The article kind of does everyone a disservice by mixing the two and not clearly separating which ones it's actually talking about. But to be fair, if they did that, then they've wouldn't have been able to publish this whole "Look how they aren't actually sovereign after all" article if they did so, here we are...

masfuerte• 2 months ago

The actual risk is that US spooks can use these hardware features to infiltrate European clouds. It's not just a theoretical concern about hardware sovereignty.

embedding-shape16• 2 months ago

Is this an actual risk? If I buy a Intel/AMD CPU today and chuck it into this "European cloud" I'm running, how exactly will that be used to infiltrate this cloud?

AFAIK, there is absolutely zero evidence either Intel or AMD CPUs are compromised, even less so that they're somehow remotely accessible by the US government...

Spooky232• 2 months ago

That’s a risk, but for most cases likely not the most material up front risk - there’s a million ways for the spooks to enter the building.

TBH, all of these entities are likely actively penetrated by US, Israeli and Russian human assets. You don’t need esoteric knowledge of CPU flaws or whatever if the dude holding the keys works for you.

moses-palmer• 2 months ago

Well, to be fair, then it's precisely a theoretical concern about hardware sovereignty.

traceroute664• 2 months ago

The actual risk is that US spooks can use these hardware features to infiltrate European clouds.

If your threat model is clandestine government actors then I think it would be a rather odd decision to host on ANY cloud !

The main risk for most people is being subject to US CLOUD Act, US PATRIOT Act etc. etc. Which, despite what the sales-droids will tell you, still applies in the fake-EU clouds operated by the US providers.

If you are serious about EU data sovereignty then you absolutely want an EU OpCo that has nothing whatsoever to do with any US company. If OpCo has ties to a US company or IS a US company such as AWS or Microsoft, then you've lost the EU jurisdiction.

PaulHoule• 2 months ago

Or any other country. It is not like you can keep that genie inside the bottle.

adjejmxbdjdn• 2 months ago

It’s not. It’s a real concern.

But they are two different things.

You can’t solve all problems at once.

It’s reasonable to start by solving the problems which provide rrhe best improvement for the lowest effort and risk.

Prioritizing data sovereignty as the OP has done well naming it, seems like a good trade off to me.

brookst2• 2 months ago

A risk, but not remotely the same risk or same severity of risk as hosting data in US clouds.

leonidasrup5• 2 months ago

"data sovereignty" for Europe should use the same technology as data protection from tech. giants for both US citizens and EU citizens.

1. Use open-source and Free as in Freedom software

It's always easier to place and hide backdoor into closed source software than open source software.

2. Use decentralized and federated communications networks

Even small organizations, groups should run own servers. Don't concentrate data at few cloud service providers.

netfortius• 2 months ago

Now this is a perfect time to be just a little patient. After Trump literally threw Taiwan under the incoming Chinese bus, during his recent trip in the area, the chip design and building ought to change. And not in the direction of "build in America (as in MAGA one)" direction.

onemoresoop• 2 months ago

Sovereignty is not necessarily about spying but about having control over their destiny.

DeathArrow• 2 months ago

Europe is pouring more than €2 billion into sovereign cloud initiatives designed to reduce exposure to US legal reach.

This is laughable, since US cloud platforms invested trillions. Also, US companies benefit from greater efficiency, know how, cheaper energy and less regulations.

If EU wants to compete with the US, they have to do what US does.

big85• 2 months ago

Not to mention that the UK thinks its legal reach extends beyond its borders, what with levying fines against 4chan, a US-based site with no legal requirement to obey foreign law.

neilv• 2 months ago

Goodacre told The Register he tested awareness of the Management Engine with various attendees at the CyberUK conference in April 2026. "Almost no one" knew about it, he reports.

That's surprising. I would've expected most people at a cybersecurity conference to have heard of it, for over a decade.

Is this conference not for people who understand the technology at all, but rather for purely management-track people who oversee the people who understand the technology?

hinata082• 2 months ago

I'm surprised that nobody ever tells about Loongson

China already produces government and business computers with their homemade LoongArch architecture. The run on homemade Linux as well. Their point was not only to not be worried as much about backdoors and sanctions, but also to get a platform that their own universities and engineers can maintain and develop

This brand used to coproduce with the French, open source and Java apps work, it's under US sanctions for supplying the chinese government and military, export was restricted so that none land in Russia.

It took decades to make, commercial value is uncertain, but they did master the entire computing stack now

deaux• 2 months ago

These articles may as well be US industry plants. Clickbait title, useless content written to discourage people and hope they throw their hands up and abandon all efforts.

Sovereign clouds are an incredibly meaningful first step. Full independence takes decades. China still uses plenty of AMD and Intel chips, does it mean the amount of independence they've achieved is meaningless? That their stacks are just as dependent on the US as those of the EU?

Of course not and even a child could know that. You start with the very end of the chain and hopefully very gradually work your way upwards. Sovereignty is a float, not a bool. If it's a bool its valye is False for all of China, the US and Italy, where in reality each has very different degrees of tech sovereignty. So you do things in order of efficiency, i.e. compare effort needed and how much it moves the sovereignty needle and pick what has the best ratio at this time. Designing and producing your own processors is far down this list.

dingaling• 2 months ago

You start with the very end of the chain

No, that's just taking a quick win and kicking the can down the road.

Data migration and hosting is comparatively quick and easy. It can be done any time.

What takes huge lead-times is re-establishing a chip-making industry; not just the fabs but also the raw material contracts, materials processing etc

I'd argue that achieving data sovereignity first is counter-productive because we know the politicians will relax once the easy bit is done. The actual hardware hard-work will never get funded, especially after a new US President takes office in 2029. Europe will sigh in relief and go back to its wilfull ignorance of the risks of dependency'

kinow• 2 months ago

My company is involved in research and production of RISC-V-based chips in Barcelona, with partners. There is or was a partnership with Intel at some point, and I think NVIDIA collaborated in some tasks in one of the projects. But the idea that I heard from the presentations is to produce chips in EU with little dependency on US, China, etc.

https://catalonia.com/w/barcelona-supercomputing-center-laun...

https://www.bsc.es/join-us/excellence-career-opportunities/d...

I think there is a partition in our supercomputing facility for these new types of technologies, but since my work is running climate models, I only hear news from other teams like our AI factory, the quantum computer, or people involved with these new chips and some emulators (that I think work together).

krisbolton• 2 months ago

I don't think they "forgot" about processors. It was out of scope. Creating the pipeline to end up with a fully "sovereign" system end-to-end is a decades long process and hundreds of billions of euros. As others have pointed out, in this context "sovereign" meant data processing. This is also a fairly paranoid take. Not to say hardware isn't targeted, but there are other methods. So spending hundreds of billions and several decades to build the fabs to gain assurance... it's a waste of time.

Fnoord• 2 months ago

Exactly, it was out of scope. You cannot in one go have a full-blown scope. It won't work.

This is a sensationalist headline (CBA to RTFA). It isn't a case of all or nothing, it is about becoming less dependent. A country like China follows the same industry, and besides, in a globalist economy like ours we are dependant on each other. So, for example, a lot of hardware components come from China, and assembly happens there as well. That counts for EU (DE, FR, ...), US, CA, RU, UA, CN, IN, etc. But as the talk on 39c3 has shown [1]: we can DIY.

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-in-house-electronics-manufacturi...

hinata082• 2 months ago

France's Scaleway already offers RISC-V bare metal servers. It's a first step that brings most of the value with close to no cost, as RISC-V is cheap nowadays

This cloud provider is a for profit company, not a research institute, so they can see short term commercial value if they do it

pjmlp2• 2 months ago

Programming languages and operating systems as well.

Even if open source, currently there is no European plan on how to take care of supply chain on those.

Huawei came up with a full stack, after the ties were closed, as an example. OS and languages.

graemep7• 2 months ago

If is open source, why is there a problem?

pjmlp2• 2 months ago

Depends if anyone actually bothers to read the code for supply chain attacks.

Also it would be great not to depend on that poor fellow in Nebraska to keep it running, and being further developed.

wolvesechoes• 2 months ago

People finally learned that capital has nationality. They now need to learn that code has it as well.

It doesn't matter that it's open source if most contributions and maintenance effort come from MS, Google, Oracle, Red Hat etc. These companies control these projects.

sunshine-o• 2 months ago

I don't think the HN crowd realize how much the whole political EU Cloud is another edition of a money grab by a group of insiders that happen every few years.

Please read about the previous initiatives like Cloudwatt involving the same actors (Thales, etc.) [0]

I have been forced to consider them about 10 years ago and realized at the time that the French telco Orange (who acquired it in 2015) just transferred all control to Huawei (datacenters in France but controlled by Huawei). So all the organisations who put their precious data in a sovereign EU cloud was now in the hand of the Chinese. It took me a while to understand because they would hide it first and strangely the wikipedia article does not mention it.

So it was fun while the initial public money was flowing but right after that they just throw their "client" under the train.

If you want an European cloud, companies like Hetzner are good. But please do not get to excited by all the other announcements.

- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudwatt

inemesitaffia2• 2 months ago

Is there anything like Elastic Beanstalk/Spanner/App Engine?

Most of what I see are Kubernetes offerings and VPS

neya• 2 months ago

The other day, I saw a clone of OpenRouter pitched as a "superior" alternative simply because they were "European" only to find out their entire stack was dependent on Cloudflare. That's why I'm always sceptical of providers who claim superiority just because they want to "escape" US control because that's rarely the case.

whage• 2 months ago

Doesn't encryption protect against these low level network backdoors? I'd think that encryption happens in the upper layers so by the time traffic goes through the ME, it is just gibberish. Someone with expertise enlighten me, please!

M95D2• 2 months ago

ME has unrestricted access to everything in the system via PCI bus. It can read all memory via DMA, access any card, any USB, everything. I expect it can communicate with SMM too and it can stop the main CPU if it wants to.

ztcfegzgf• 2 months ago

  > Europe is pouring more than €2 billion into sovereign cloud initiatives designed to reduce exposure to US legal reach.

(not Europe, the EU)

this is just sad. the US clouds did not happen because US poured billions into them. they happened because the financial/whatever situation was such that these businesses could happen.

now the EU, instead of making it easy for companies to innovate, spends billion on trying to catch up to the US. not even catching up. getting to where the US clouds are today.

the "skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it's been" quote comes to mind.

embedding-shape16• 2 months ago

Isn't this essentially the Apple playbook typically? Don't innovate, let others find what works or not, then once you have something, catch up with the rest, try to out-compete? Apple is almost never "first" with something, but once they release something, it's a good iteration on that thing, I don't think Apple would be the only ones able to pull something like that off.

f33d5173• 2 months ago

The clouds are not really american, but they are subject to american laws. The money and ownership needn't be american, anybody all around the world can buy stock in america companies. And the work to build these clouds was not done exclusively by americans, as all these companies have offices in europe to hire european engineers (to say nothing of the foreigners they pay to come live in america). From the perspective of the market, the clouds being american is an irrelevant detail, since they can reap whatever benefits they like of the world outside the US, as well as whatever benefits they want within the US.

I think this is an important thing to note in all these discussions of "why can't europe innovate": europeans in europe can and do innovate, but the processes to commercialize that innovation have been set up in the US, and have no market incentive to relocate or diversify. They can always take advantage of innovation wherever it lies.

To make the market care about something it is otherwise indifferent to, you have to pay it. Whereas capital markets ordinarily don't care if a company serving europeans is domiciled in the US, if you pay them a couple billion suddenly they will. It may be expensive, but it's the only solution to the problem at hand.

lossolo• 2 months ago

now the EU, instead of making it easy for companies to innovate, spends billion on trying to catch up to the US. not even catching up. getting to where the US clouds are today.

What's your alternative? The US has behemoths with trillions of dollars in market cap, more than GDPs of most countries in EU. What kind of innovation in context of cloud do you think would allow anyone to compete with them? Who would risk their own money and pour billions into challenging them?

surgical_fire• 2 months ago

now the EU, instead of making it easy for companies to innovate, spends billion on trying to catch up to the US.

Depends on what you mean by this.

Quite often this is said in the direction of eroding labor protections and allowing corporations to fuck over consumers freely.

If that's whay you mean, then no, fuck that noise.

Better to take the China route of enforcing a bunch of stuff to be home grown and making it harder or impossible for US corporations to act here.

graceful6800• 2 months ago

I see you are making a critique of society, and yet you participate in that society! Isn't that strange?

I am very smart.

abdelhousni• 2 months ago

"Europe's frameworks certify the clouds. They don't assess the silicon." At least they show good intentions

tsoukase• 2 months ago

Europe has a very long way to real digital sovereignty. It's not only the 3-4 cloud companies that have to be replaced. It's the whole stack, from CDNs down to the two US based mobile OSs, that will haunt European citizens for a long time as no replacement seems to come soon.

Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Forgot about the processors

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