Airbus Takes Flight from AWS

https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/07/20/airbus-takes-flight-from-aws-what-happens-next-is-critical/5274109

by bbg2401 • 3 days ago

216 169 3 days ago

theregister.com

aratob• 3 days ago

Is it the first for similarly high—profile companies?

mathgeek• 3 days ago

More related to the EU's movement away from foreign-hosted infrastructure.

radiator2• 2 days ago

Public administration in Europe has already started moving away from the american hyperscalers. This is of course happening at the usual speed which is characteristic of all public administration.

ttoinou• 3 days ago

Do we have proven (or probable) case of USA industrial espionage ?

amelius• 3 days ago

We have a proven case of USA pulling the plug. Not sure which is worse.

mrngld2• 3 days ago

Do we? From a EU-hosted location? Becoming a sanctioned entity wouldn't count -- if Airbus somehow made the business decision to start selling drones directly to Uyghur slave labor camps in western China and got itself on a list of sanctioned companies even Scaleways couldn't help them.

I think that's a thinly veiled excuse for a much more mundane reason this is happening; their government stakeholders asked them to find a way to retaliate as part of the arguments around trade going on, and Airbus figured this out as a lever they could pull without angering any airline customers.

lysace2• 3 days ago

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB95326824311657269 (https://archive.is/N46di)

Why We Spy on Our Allies

March 17, 2000 11:56 am ET

By R. James Woolsey, a Washington lawyer and a former director of central intelligence.

We'll begin with some candor from the American side. Yes, my continental European friends, we have spied on you. And it's true that we use computers to sort through data by using keywords. Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we're looking for?

tl;dr: "You bribe, so we spy"

TMWNN• 3 days ago

I haven't read the op-ed, but I wonder if it talks about the French Leclerc case?

TIL that when Greece tested four tanks in 2000 before a big arms purchase, the US M1A1 Abrams and British Challenger 2E tanks had trouble with their satellite navigation systems. A French intelligence agency used GPS jammers to help the French Leclerc tank in the competition. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6bhr14/til_th...>

mcv• 2 days ago

Yes, but the US bribes too. In fact, I'd say that corruption is more common in the US than in much of Europe. The article's claim that the US worships Adam Smith is only nominally true; in practice, they love nothing more than monopolisation and market domination.

Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we're looking for?

Any advantage that they can exploit. It's no great secret that the US government often acts on behalf of its major corporations and vice versa.

wongarsu• 3 days ago

From the NY Times, 1995:

Spying on allies for economic advantage is a crucial new assignment for the C.I.A. now that American foreign policy is focused on commercial interests abroad. President Clinton made economic intelligence a high priority of his Administration, specifically information to protect and defend American competitiveness, technology and financial security in a world where an economic crisis can spread across global markets in minutes

At the time "only" to have the upper hand in trade negotiations, and presumably when "having the President press foreign countries to award business to American firms", as they call it. But that was 30 years ago, and trust that these these things aren't directly forwarded to US private industry is in short supply these days

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/15/world/emerging-role-for-t...

https://archive.is/LmEA1 (same site without paywall)

mrngld2• 3 days ago

If any company, especially one with a global presence, ever even strongly suspected that had happened and a competitor was using something they developed you'd of seen it play out in the courtroom. Hopefully we can all agree that if America is good at anything, it's letting its lawyers be litigious.

The fact that, AFAIK, that's never happened nor been alleged says a lot.

lancebeet• 3 days ago

Well, yes, since long before the current administration. It's mentioned multiple times (with examples) in the European Parliament's "The Echelon Affair" report.[0] But it seems to me that this is not really what you're asking, but rather you're implying that there's no justification for this move other than European protectionism. If this is the case, I would argue that a sitting administration actively threatening with the invasion of your territories is a compelling argument for politicians and business leaders to evaluate alternatives.

[0] https://historicalarchives.europarl.europa.eu/files/live/sit...

ruuda• 3 days ago

It doesn’t have to be espionage, it can be just operational risk. There is the case of Trump ordering sanctions against the International Criminal Court, and Microsoft blocking their accounts to comply (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14203). Or more recently, Trump deciding who gets access to Anthropic’s latest models. You can’t build a business on a vendor who may be forced to block you at any moment.

Havoc2• 3 days ago

You don’t need an espionage case to decide a provider is too much risk.

The political unreliability alone is enough. Just takes one orange guy waking up in a foul mood one day and doing something erratic. That increases risk for using anything American across the board even if the individual companies have done nothing wrong

rob74• 2 days ago

Case in point: the Claude Fable debacle. It's not a big stretch to imagine that one day, they might decide any AI platform developed by an American company is too dangerous to let those shady foreigners access it. Not to mention the potential implications of your internal code being sent to AI datacenters in the US...

robertkoss3• 3 days ago

Does this include their Skywise Platform?

tecleandor• 3 days ago

Following the article that generated this column [0] says:

Skywise, a platform that aggregates and analyzes aviation data, and Case Management Assistant for customers' technical queries will continue to be hosted by AWS.

  0: https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/07/16/airbus-migrating-70-critical-apps-from-aws-to-frances-scaleway-amid-digital-sovereignty-push/5272373

robertkoss3• 3 days ago

Interesting, thank you!

Doches• 2 days ago

Skywise is basically a re-branded Palantir Foundry, and Palantir’s not exactly a big believer in avoiding US tech…

robertkoss3• 2 days ago

I know, but afaik you can deploy Foundry also on Prem using Apollo, so that should not be a show stopper.

edit: who am I telling this ;)

areoform2• 3 days ago

A study in contrasts,

I signed up my business with Hetzner. And the first thing I saw during onboarding was a demand to upload my ID to spend $5 to test their service (I was testing before we bought). I wrote to customer service and got,

    Dear Client,
    
    We received your email. Thanks for writing to us.
    
    You have probably realized that this is an automated message.
    
    We need some time to process each email that we receive, but we will write back to you personally as soon as we can.
    
    Kind regards

    Hetzner Online GmbH
    [...]
    www.hetzner.com

Digital Ocean? They just let me do it.

Guess where I'm going to recommend spending our money?

chpatrick• 3 days ago

Hetzner if you have sense.

KingOfCoders• 3 days ago

What works best for you I guess.

sam_lowry_• 3 days ago

Welcome to Europe, the land of sustainable business. We do not need to grow just to pollute our planet and die a painful death, individually and as a species.

If you still think your Hetzner registration process is convoluted, try getting a license for IDA Pro.

You'll love the experience, I promise.

!/s

inigyou18• 3 days ago

Yeah I've noticed that while America takes the approach of trying to keep your personal information secret, Europe takes the approach of requiring it to be shared around, but also protecting it with harsh laws for misuse. Things that are anonymous sign-up in America are KYC in Europe.

andor• 3 days ago

Low friction is cool but it leads to tons of abuse

altairprime• 3 days ago

This reads like an ad for Hetzner. Thanks, antispam experience!

cryo324• 3 days ago

I haven't found a competent supplier who doesn't want to know who you are.

I entirely exclude Digital Ocean from competent suppliers.

mr_toad2• 3 days ago

AWS, GCP, Azure don’t care either.

p-e-w• 3 days ago

Just because a company wants to know who you are doesn’t mean they are entitled to a scan of a sensitive government document that can be used to commit identity theft.

I’m amazed that it is even legal for businesses to ask for that at all, outside of a few exceptional cases of which “I want to rent a server” most certainly isn’t one.

zulban• 2 days ago

What's wrong with DO? Been happily using them for over a decade.

drstewart• 2 days ago

I haven't found a competent supplier who doesn't want to know who you are.

Thank you! Say this louder for all the people saying VPN providers shouldn't have your government issued ID on file to use them.

As you point out, Mullvad VPN and the like are NOT competent suppliers and should NOT be trusted, as you correctly point out.

raverbashing4• 3 days ago

Count on German companies to make things more complicated than they need and to squander clients for minor nitpicks

inigyou18• 2 days ago

Name one B2B relationship you have where you didn't provide ID of you or your business.

sparkling2• 3 days ago

To be fair: all hosting providers deal with A LOT of abuse happening on their systems. Malware being hosted, people abusing trial periods ands free plans etc.

No sure if requiring a ID upfront is the perfect solution (if i recall, i never had to provide a ID on my private or business Hetzner accounts) but it isn't just there to annoy you.

throw12345678915• 3 days ago

In a hostile jurisdiction, I suppose based on your argument.

mft_2• 3 days ago

If your entire business decision is driven solely by an emotional response to Hetzner having a policy that needs ID, maybe you’re not the right person to be making these sort of decisions?

akersten• 3 days ago

emotional response to Hetzner having a policy that needs ID

It seems to me more like smart business tact, figuring out early on whether your infrastructure provider will be easy to work with or a bureaucratic pain in the ass

Havoc2• 3 days ago

The German providers have always been more aggressive on KYC & simply saying no to potential clients in some cases.

duckerduck• 2 days ago

When was this? I signed up recently and don't remember this requirement.

sparkling2• 3 days ago

Airbus isn't ditching Microsoft any time soon because there's nowhere to go. Likewise Google productivity apps because the only place to go is Microsoft.

[x] doubt

There a perfectly suitable office and productivity suites, but if your requirement is that every obscure feature from a .doc file created in 2003 needs to work... well then yes, you only have one provider to choose from.

mr_toad2• 3 days ago

It’s the queue of users who want to be hand held because they can’t do X, or open Y, that IT doesn’t want to deal with.

Also, there’s no budget for training any more.

throw12345678915• 3 days ago

Do you even comprehend the timescales at which these companies operate.

Zsfe510asG• 3 days ago

Is Airbus still using Google workspaces for mail? Nice vector for industrial espionage.

Why did Airbus go to "the cloud" in the first place? It seems complete overkill for a company like that.

moebrowne• 3 days ago

Is Airbus still using Google workspaces for mail? Nice vector for industrial espionage.

Whatever email provider they use, people will always be the ultimate vector, clicking links they shouldn't.

vachina2• 3 days ago

Why phish when your victim store their entire company on your drives.

inigyou18• 3 days ago

Everyone went to "the cloud" because they want to make their IT problems someone else's problem. It's no different from the previous era of MSPs, except that there are now only, like, five MSPs in the world.

Note: I mean the Google Docs and Microsoft 365 type of cloud not the AWS and Azure type of cloud

ownagefool3• 3 days ago

My take is it's actually because of poor performance of internal teams.

With a cloud provider, you can get an account by filling out a sign-up page and handing over a credit card. Internal teams will often hide behind Bureaucracy and a ticket system, with processes that make hosting a simple web app take multiple quarters.

Now there are layered reasons for that, some of them with legitimate basis, but at the end of the day they're usually low skilled teams click-ops-ing some VMWware, delivering a terrible service.

prasadjoglekar• 2 days ago

A symptom of the larger problem to want to divest and outsource everything not considered a "core competence". Hence the outsourcing of everything from housekeeping to IT

shrubble• 3 days ago

Management listened to the siren call of "it's easier and cheaper".

Now they still have to pay for the same senior sysadmins they were told they wouldn't need anymore, but, with the added bonus of paying 10-1000x for bandwidth over what they could get if they had stayed on-prem.

30gd4n2• 1 day ago

Doubt sincerly any exec or manager ever belived the easier and cheaper motto !

In opposition to what has been said in this thread their IT teams are very good and have raised (in vain) warnings against GCP since the beginning.

The official motivations for the GCP move as given to us, plebs (already mentionned in other comms) : - Financial move from CAPEX model (hosting own DC) to OPEX. - Transfer of responsability in case of fail; you can charge ($$$) GCP for downtime, could't really do that on your own teams. - Focus on business value and not on IT. (IMHO all of them are wrong, beginnig with the last one : you design & assemble planes on computers; IT is obviously part of your core business model, even a strategic one !).

And about the why GCP vs a french local actor the answer was because of tech maturity.

The 'easy and cheaper' is tech propaganda, this never was part of debate simply because it's false and we all know it, even the high execs in their ivory tower. Same thing as AI : haven't seen any big EU firm lay off big chunk of people to replace them with IA whereas in the US all the big ones already fired AND got the people back; US believes in it's own propaganda, EU doesn't ! Noone here thought we could fire sysadmins by moving services to CSPs, that always seemed like fake ad and reality is here to prove us right !

numpad0• 2 days ago

... is this a reverse Dropbox comment? Everyone up to COVID was treating companies not moving some infra to AWS like how hardware companies would be treated without a mockup humanoid to show around.

traceroute662• 2 days ago

Why did Airbus go to "the cloud" in the first place?

The same reason that so many companies went to "the cloud", because the hyperscalers warpped the C-suite round their little finger.

There are two things any C-suite like doing that the hyperscalers could help them tick boxes on.

First, shifting capex to opex. They love doing that because of the accounting treatment. Opex goes into your P&L, so it reduces your taxable profit and therefore it reduces your tax bill. Meanwhile capex goes onto the balance sheet and is deprecated over the asset's life, so the "only" benefit you might get is to claim allowances (e.g. R&D) from your tax authority.

Second, it allows lots of things to be made "someone else's problem". Security ? Their problem. Staff ? Their problem. Tick-boxes to keep the compliance department happy ? Their problem.

So the hyperscalers can turn up and spin a ready-made story that the C-suite will lap up. Perhaps accompanied by a nice lunch and a round of golf. ;)

There is no doubt, companies such as Airbus have the technical competence and the financial means to do it all in-house. Sadly the C-suite calls the shots ....

30gd4n2• 2 days ago

More adequate question would be why did Airbus go GCP instead of pushing a local french actor like OVH, Clever or Scale, decison that seemed right all along and that is eventually in place ? The answer is because of the bribe ex-CEO took !

And about espionage there's not much to spy on : no new plane ongoing, no fancy tech detained by Airbus, all the tech is the suppliers, Airbus is only an assembler. To prove my point see chinese aviation : it's been 20years we litteraly gave them the A320 and they are still far from producing anything of their own, they barely managed to have that copy called Comac flying !

benhurmarcel2• 1 day ago

Well I don’t miss the days of sending Word and Excel files as attachments back and forth to collaborate

inigyou18• 3 days ago

I don't fully understand why companies use AWS. Is it a management driven or engineering driven decision? I assume management - in big companies some exec from Amazon comes to play golf, and in small companies the managers copy what the big companies are doing?

vachina2• 3 days ago

Mostly because they’re the defacto SaaS providing that niche product for your niche usecase. The breadth of AWS in incredible.

bowsamic• 3 days ago

It’s easier in most companies to get a cloud bill approved than to ask for a big chunk of cash for hardware and also to pay someone to set it up

LastTrain3• 2 days ago

Also, not having to deal with the kind of assholes that are capable of both setting up and maintaining your physical infrastructure and are willing to travel on a moments notice to put out fires. Worth the price of AWS just to not have that dysfunctional lot to deal with.

PaulRobinson3• 3 days ago

Allows you to move stuff from capex to opex while remaining in compliance and governance lines.

They’re not idiots. A lot of thought went into it, and the idea it’s all just incompetent BS dreamt up on a golf course is madness.

hahahaa2• 2 days ago

Also incredible horizontal scale.

and vertical scale

and fuck fuck fuck load of features.

inigyou18• 2 days ago

To be fair most compliance and governance stuff is dreamt up on a golf cause to cause lock-in

ubermonkey• 2 days ago

I can try to answer for US.

We're small (< 25 people). We maintained a single rack in a colo, and all the servers were showing their age. We weighed lease cost for replacement (along with hassle of actually doing it), and migrated into AWS last January.

It's been ... messy. I'm not certain we'll stay. It's easier in the sense that we can bring up arbitrarily many new machines without needing to call Dell when a host gets full, but it's definitely not cheaper. And weirdball AWS-only things get in the way. Oh, and literally nothing is simple or easy in administration or setup.

If I had it to do over again, I think I'd have bitten the bullet and leased more boxes instead.

hahahaa2• 2 days ago

It ain't cheaper on AWS lesson getting relearned everywhere.

inigyou18• 2 days ago

It's not just AWS vs selfhost, it's AWS vs DO/Hetzner/Rackspace/random-VPS-provider

bob1029• 2 days ago

Not enough humans to deal with physical machines and the compliance issues around them.

I agree if we are operating a cat meme distribution business that AWS starts to look a bit overkill. Something like a banking consultancy is a different matter. Good luck passing due diligence as a bank's vendor when you are also physically responsible for the machines. You can do this, but it sucks and it's your entire job + overtime + on call.

AWS has a dedicated feature (artifact) that can serve as the foundation of your compliance package. If you are racking your own machines you get to start with a blank pile of forms.

inigyou18• 2 days ago

Genuine question: is using AWS for compliance any better or worse than using Delve for compliance?

apelapan• 2 days ago

Sure, of you are a one-man shop trying to sell IT services in a regulated category to banks, hosting is not something you want to add to your list of problems.

This is not comparable to the situation in a company like Airbus, with perhaps 10k people of every imaginable expertise employed in just the IT department. Not comparable to most companies that are 1/50th of Airbus size either.

For a largish company (1000+ people, 500M+ turnover), assigning ten FTE:s to managing the racks and general core infra on a 365/24 basis and another five lawyers and general bureaucrats to deal with the general paperwork is nothing.

The reason for the big cloud shift in the 2010s was other things. A lot of hype/lies about how fast, cheap and easy things would be. And in many companies probably also a feeling that internal IT were a bunch of morons who failed at anything you asked them to do, and that anything else must be better.

lelanthran3• 2 days ago

I agree if we are operating a cat meme distribution business that AWS starts to look a bit overkill. Something like a banking consultancy is a different matter.

I think it's the other way around. At the extreme scales you don't want AWS.

If you're running a cat meme distribution business, a single senior skilled techie will cheaply get you set up on a VPS (or a bunch of them) with the services you need.

If you're a bank, you have all the budget in-house to babysit your own VPS and stand up your own equivalents to whatever the fuck it is you were using on AWS, and follow all regulations. Because, face it, as a bank, the type of regulations you meet by using AWS is a tiny fraction of all the regulations you have to follow, so there is literally a team within the bank tasked purely with making sure all banking regulations are followed, and that team exists even if you're on AWS for everything.

The only place AWS makes sense is if you're a company with no technical department in the first place.

cube00• 2 days ago

Smaller annual opex is far easier to get approved then large multiyear capex with deprecation.

AWS was also cheaper in the beginning but has been slowly ratcheting up the pricing making colocation or on-premise viable again for some workloads which have steady compute demands.

inigyou18• 1 day ago

So we all just forgot you can rent servers significantly cheaper than AWS

khurs7• 2 days ago

AWS were first and dominated.

Microsoft moved late with Azure, but as they had so many customers in B2B already with SQL Server and Office, that they soon grew market share. Google Cloud followed and acquired companies like Firebase to differentiate.

    Market Share 2026


    AWS 28%
    Azure 21%
    Google 14%

https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-...

vlovich1232• 2 days ago

Anyone who’s actually used Azure knows it’s an unmitigated disaster for uptime. The problem is that this has been consistently true for like a decade now. This indicates real core architectural deficiencies they’ve been unable to address.

inigyou18• 1 day ago

Rackspace was first.

lelanthran3• 2 days ago

IME quite a lot of poor tech decisions come down to techies being too dogmatic in their beliefs[1].

Move to AWS? All techies want to add that to their CV so sure why not... Who cares if it's the best decision as long as the CVs get improved.

============================

[1] My personal bugbear are techies who are adamant that nothing but google chrome can be used by the regardless of the fact that when pressed they can't find a single site that doesn't work on FF. Usually the goalposts are moved at some point in the discussion from "sites don't work on FF" to performance even though FF with uBlock origin cuts actual downloading of ads to zero compared to the uBlock lite on chrome. They'll next complain about memory used in FF compared to google regardless of the lack of any measurements and even though these same techies are using bloated electron apps daily anyway!

As you can tell, this really is a personal bugbear of mine.

ifwinterco• 2 days ago

For very small companies (startups) AWS makes a lot of sense because you have very few employees and you don’t want that limited employee time being spent managing servers

yardie• 2 days ago

They get you hooked on a teaser tariff. Like $100k worth of AWS, Azure, GCP credits. Like a good drug dealer, the first hit is free. Once you've convinced yourself that moving to AWS is the right move, based on the teaser rate, they've got you in their jaws. Most of your IT team is gone, most of your on-prem/colo hardware is outdated, and for tax reasons it's better to lease than to purchase capital intensive equipment. But now the low AWS rate is gone, you can't go back, and you'd look like a fool for calling your decision a mistake.

I really like AWS. But I feel like there is a lot of money to be made in consultants overselling services built on it. And a lot of traditionally expensive IT teams are being replaced with even more expensive cloud "architects".

andrewla2• 2 days ago

What do you see as the alternative for the purposes of this discussion? Are we talking cloud vs. on-prem or colo, or are we talking AWS vs. other-cloud?

For the first (cloud vs. non-cloud) it's clear that cloud has some advantages because you don't have to manage hardware.

For the second (AWS vs. other-cloud), at least in my experience, AWS is simply the best experience available. If anything the other cloud providers go out of their way to offer special deals and cozy customer relationships to try to get customers to switch, but AWS is still the gold standard in availability and uptime and ease of use.

The gap is narrowing as the field becomes more commoditized though. And I think that's what we're really seeing here. As things like k8s get more common, solutions are becoming more and more substrate-independent, so companies hunt for smaller, more local, cheaper, ambitious alternatives. Everyone is scared of vendor lock-in so it's getting harder for cloud providers to offer distinguishing features.

inigyou18• 2 days ago

Are we talking cloud vs. on-prem or colo, or are we talking AWS vs. other-cloud?

We all just forgot you can rent a server huh

himinlomax• 2 days ago

They provide a service that simply nobody (except GCP and Azure) can easily match.

It's expensive, but you get what you pay for.

everfrustrated• 2 days ago

Because AWS technical expertise are second to none. And for most companies their AWS spend is small % of overheads. Sure they could spend less but their marketing department is lighting money on fire so that would be premature optimization.

NeuroWinter• 2 days ago

It was there first, and it used to be the one stop shop for everything you needed.

Then it got not only complicated but complex, and full of vendor lock in.

It used to be easy to orchestrate, there were terraform modules for everything. I chose it multiple times for that exact reason.

The cost structure used to also be good, you knew how much your bill was gonna be, you could get cheaper pricing if you went for spot instances etc.

PaulRobinson3• 3 days ago

US tech does not understand or comprehend the amount of damage they’ve self inflicted in the last couple of years. There will be a steady drip of this in years to come, I suspect.

khurs7• 2 days ago

US Tech does understand, US Administration does not.

troupo• 2 days ago

I doubt US tech understands.

For one, they are deeply in bed with the current administration (for any definition of current, past, and future).

For another, they fight tooth and nail any and all sovereignity of data even within their own walled gardens. See decade of battles by Google, Apple, Facebook etc. in the EU.

LastTrain3• 2 days ago

US tech helped the US administration get there, and instead of speaking up, gives it gold trinkets for special favors.

pupppet• 2 days ago

The tech bros lining up at Donald’s inauguration to kiss his ring suggests otherwise.

UltraSane2• 2 days ago

Trump wrecks everything he touches.

throw0101d2• 2 days ago

US Tech does understand, US Administration does not.

US tech bros got a front-row seat, sitting in front of Cabinet picks, at the inauguration:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgpqeq82rvo

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/trump-inaugu...

sharts• 2 days ago

Why should they care? Shareholders > stakeholders.

Krishnaswaroop• 2 days ago

Vendor lock-in has always been a concern, but AI workloads make the conversation even more important. Designing portable architectures from day one is becoming a competitive advantage.

khurs7• 2 days ago

Think getting away from vendor lock-in was one of the primary reason Kubernetes took off

spwa4• 2 days ago

So after the 2008 spying scandal (cia got caught using German intelligence bases to steal airbus designs), Airbus ran it's critical applications ... on AWS?

Wow.

cleverfoo2• 2 days ago

What doesn't get talked about in these articles is the increasing impact to small business in the US.

I run a small business (scanii.com) and I've noticed over the past year an increasing number of customers leaving us to European competitors, customers that have been happy with us for years, using our European region, but now have concerns over US foreign policy and are giving preferred treatment to EU suppliers. When I asked they said, I'm paraphrasing here, "happy with the product but management wants EU supplier".

What this means in practical terms is that, if the tide doesn't change, US entrepreneurs will have a potential buyer population that is roughly cut in half if they can only sell to US buyers. This will have a cascading negative effect in the number of startups that succeed - impossible to quantify at this point.

Large corps can skirt around this issue by establishing an EU entity and trying to buy goodwill that way but that's not an option easily available to small businesses.

I fear rough waters ahead.

traceroute662• 2 days ago

using our European region

To be fair, it was always obvious to anyone with half a brain that "European region" from a US provider was fake-EU.

The problem is that PARIOT act, CLOUD act and everything else has gone from being a paper tiger to real and present danger. No longer a theoretical risk.

So even people willing to previously turn a blind eye to the crystal clear risks can no longer do so.

It is also no longer possible to trust those tasked with implementing it not to bow to political pressures.

A long time ago now, Microsoft (Azure) put up a fight when the US came calling for some data hosted in their "EU (Ireland) region". I think there is zero chance of them putting up a fight today if Donny boy picked up the phone to Satya .

And that's before we get to the example of a Texas court ordering Verisign to cut off the .com domain from a Dutch company.[1]

Sadly I have limited sympathy for a country that having witnessed Donny's first term thought "you know what, we'll have more of that" and voted accordingly.

[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-...

ghaff• 2 days ago

Sovereignty has gone from being a theoretical concern that a lot of cloud (esp. AWS) advocates poo-poohed to something that is a very real concern in the minds of many. It's not just US foreign policy either. It's even within Europe--to say nothing of things related to China.

petilon• 2 days ago

I fear rough waters ahead.

For 2.5 more years.

BigTTYGothGF• 2 days ago

The long-term trends don't exactly reverse under Democratic administrations.

Frieren• 2 days ago

For 2.5 more years.

That would not be a big problem. But the next Republican president may be even worse than Trump. Trump is just the symptom of a deeper corruption problem.

That things will fix themselves when Trump is not in the White House anymore is a dangerous misconception.

newsclues• 2 days ago

What’s the excuse for when the problems remain when the leadership changes?

dylan604• 2 days ago

It'll be longer than that. If during that 2.5 years more and more companies move away from US companies, why do you think they would just abandon the non-US company to move back to a US company? The non-US company would have to be sooooo bad for that to happen. Also, there's no guarantee that the next US administration will be the opposite of the current, and even if it is there's no guarantee the one after that won't flip back.

permalac• 2 days ago

Midterm may accelerate the process.

kergonath• 2 days ago

No, that’s the new status quo. Even if democrats get in power next time:

1) it’s fairly unlikely that they give up on more powers voluntarily (exactly how much of the patriot act and the post-9/11 rules were given up by Obama and Biden?)

2) there is always the possibility of a future switch to another populist nutcase (or hell, any nutcase really). We are not going to trust American voters to be sensible anymore. We’ll need a couple of sane administrations and long-term polling data for that.

TiredOfLife• 2 days ago

And then at least 4 more years times 2.

throw0101d2• 2 days ago

For 2.5 more years.

Who is going to trust US voters with not voting for a man-child?

Remember: Trump got in twice.

dzhiurgis• 2 days ago

Yes European GDP, especially buying power has been pretty flat over last decades. They simply cannot afford US made products anymore.

cleverfoo2• 2 days ago

I disagree, that's a price point concern not a market accessibility one. I strongly prefer to be able to sell to another 400M people than not have the option to do so.

ezst2• 2 days ago

US-made... Cloud products? Like there's anything US-specific or unique about Taiwan made/China assembled computers the instant it's sold by a US corporation?

khurs7• 2 days ago

Jane Street recently posted a video of their datacenter warehouse in USA on YouTube

Most of this large building was empty... they said that as compute had become dense along with advancements in liquid cooling, the same amount of power x years ago now only required few racks.

No need for many companies to go on cloud, at a minimum should be hybrid on prem.

leopoldj• 2 days ago

This link is an opinion piece. For a better technical and legal background this link from the same The Register is much better:

https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/07/16/airbus-...

atonse• 2 days ago

Thank you. That’s already better than the original article that comes off as an unhinged rant with name calling.

andrewla2• 2 days ago

I think a lot of commenters here are missing the ball with the idea that this is a foreign policy or anti-US sentiment emerging.

The core reality is that cloud infrastructure is becoming commoditized, and substrate-independence is becoming not only possible but the default. So companies looking for things like lower cost or better customer support are looking around and seeing that smaller rising competitors are going to be a better option. Compliance with local regulatory regimes are going to be a factor as the EU continues its efforts to push European companies towards using EU infrastructure.

Airbus Takes Flight from AWS

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