Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud
57 comments
·December 20, 2025flumpcakes
Some people in the US deride it's close allies as "freeloaders" because they choose to use and buy US tech, reinforcing the US's position as a global powerhouse. (Meanwhile US tech is built on the shoulders of their allies.) Now we see these same allies are starting to look inward and invest in technology they own completely because the US is acting decisively not like an ally. Something unthinkable since WW2.
I don't see this news as anything but a good thing. For every technology out there, the EU needs a native alternative. It's clear the current US administration wants to make the EU worse based on a politics of grievance.
jimnotgym
I agree, this is a good thing. Long term stable large contracts are great simulation for a market. Airbus obviously has a large amount of military work, and its data needs to stay in Europe.
What we also need is a faster acceleration of military spending so this can happen with more companies.
bambax
Of course it's a good thing. It's an excellent thing. Is there any European company or individual arguing otherwise?
kakacik
Country of Ukraine? Those suckers who bought F-35s or at least paid for them? And few other cases.
Long term, I agree with you.
hulitu
[flagged]
nosianu
> Almost all computer equipment companies are from US.
Made in a few Asian countries. I think it's kind of funny reading the contents of your post and how it ignores Asia, that's actually behind most of it. How much of a Dell PC is US-American?
jimnotgym
Was it laziness and stupidity, or was it protection money. I thought the deal since WW2 was a US security guarantee, in return for letting the US have our money. A protection racket. Or perhaps it was more like Europe paying tribute to its colonial master.
Anyhow it is clear the protection is not to be relied upon, so it is time to stop paying. It is dangerous making deals with gangsters. It is perhaps more dangerous to change the deal. But when the protection is not there, it is time to build strength.
Well done to France for maintaining its independent nuclear deterrent through this era. Britain made a mistake letting that go
tonyedgecombe
>Britain made a mistake letting that go
https://thebulletin.org/premium/2024-11/united-kingdom-nucle...
tacker2000
Wouldnt say its laziness.
The US has a long history of funding the Silicon Valley expansion using Darpa and other federal agencies for example.
Europe never had such a thing, and they had a fragmented market for a long time.
The big money is in the US, thats why the talent goes there.
digitalengineer
And where would Silicon Valley be without CERN, that created the www?
atoav
Your words are displaying the mindset that is the main driving force behind the currently ongoing decline of the American empire. Incredible hubris paired with ignorance and a lack of self reflection. Great qualities if you want to go further down that line.
rurban
Almost all computer equipment is from China.
mschuster91
Production yes, but design is firmly in American hands - for now.
pyrale
> More on the laziness and stupidity of their allies.
s/laziness and stupidity/corruption/g
See, for instance, what happened to Gemalto.
unmole
> Some people in the US deride it's close allies as "freeloaders" because they choose to use and buy US tech
This is a disingenuous straw man. The allies are derided for derided for literally freeloading on US military protection while underinvesting in their own defense.
jimnotgym
Freeloading?
My country spends less on defence as a percentage of GDP than the US. But it spends much of that with US companies. This is not Freeloading. It was a deal. Cancel TSR-2, and buy American and we will lend you some money. Cancel your nuclear program and buy US submarine launched missiles and we will help you look after yourself. Now let Visa and Mastercard skim off all your transactions and we will keep you secure to keep the money flowing. Sweetheart tax deals for US companies to operate, and we will keep you safe to keep the money flowing. It is not Freeloading, it is colonialism
oliwarner
How's that? How many Middle Eastern refugees are America sheltering from the fallout of American aggression and the regimes it props up?
The US isn't anywhere close to paying its way.
tonyedgecombe
Let's not pretend this was something the US didn't want for most of the last seventy years.
esperent
[delayed]
amelius
> "I need a sovereign cloud (...)," says Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital
Is this her decision or EU's decision?
jillesvangurp
Much of what people call cloud is a commodity at this point. If you need vms, object storage, load balancers, vpcs, etc., which is what most people would need, that works in a lot of solutions. And you can usually also find managed databases, redis, and a few other bits and bobs. If you like Kubernetes (I personally don't), the whole point of that is that it kind of works everywhere.
People over pay for AWS mostly because of brand recognition. And it's not even small amounts. You get a lot more CPU/memory/bandwidth with some of the competitors. AWS makes money by squeezing their customers hard on that. Competitors do the obvious thing of being a bit more generous. Companies could save a ton just switching to competing solutions. Try it. It's not that hard. Some solutions are obviously not as complete.
This not about US vs. EU but about sovereignty. If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself. Ask yourself how hard it would be to move to Google cloud. Or Azure. Or whatever. If that's very hard, you might have a problem when Amazon jacks up the prices or discontinues a product.
We use a mix of Google Cloud and Telekom Cloud for some of our more picky customers in Germany. Telekom Cloud is not very glamorous. But it's essentially openstack. Which is an open source thing backed by IBM and others. I wouldn't necessary recommend Telekom Cloud (it has a few weaknesses in support and documentation). But it does the job. And unlike AWS, I can get people on the phone and they are happy to talk to me.
general1465
> If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself
I have tried Lambdas and then got this "oh-shit moment" when I have realized that if AWS would be to kick me out, I would be absolutely screwed.
Now I am slowly dispersing and using VMs instead and avoiding all the AWS-specific stuff as much as I can.
_ache_
Good, and them get ride of Palantir as a "data manager". It's a step in financing EU sovereign cloud providers.
hulitu
> Good, and them get ride of Palantir as a "data manager".
And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ?
bambax
Your comment may be sarcastic, IDK; but if it is I concur.
Fighting "CSAM" is absurd and ridiculous, and used as a justification for eroding public liberties. So is the fight against "terrorism".
The US government has decided to kill innocent fishermen en masse and labelled its victims "narco-terrorists" as a justification for these crimes.
We absolutely do not need Palantir.
t43562
Seems extremely dangerous to be doing those kinds of things with software from someone politically hostile. Perhaps the EU should be weaning itself off that too?
general1465
> And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ?
You can make exactly same argument for client (phone) scanning and depreciation of encryption.
mschuster91
> And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ?
By doing police legwork and by prevention work (i.e. offer help to pedophiles, don't go and wreck MENA countries for funsies, but invest in helping the civilian populations).
wrxd
> estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider
It would be nice to know what the requirements are. There are plenty of providers in the EU happy to sell cloud services
mft_
They should read HN.
Don’t they know you can get Hetzner servers starting from $5/month?
Imustaskforhelp
Lmao but in all honesty, there are a lot of european cloud providers that I know and they are even cheaper than american counterparts like aws, azure, gcp. Personally I like european cloud too but I dont have so much as an preference and it depends but the current environment of america does seem a little hostile but not the fault of datacenters in america but I hope that hostility slows down
AndroTux
There are a lot of European “cloud” providers, but there’s not one that offers anything even close to AWS/GCP/Cloudflare. If you need more than compute and S3, you’re pretty much SOL.
Doches
I wonder if this includes Skywise, the Palantir-built data lake and design stack that they use for many many internal operations (design, airline support, manufacturing). Not sure what difference it really makes where the data is hosted if the folks doing the hosting call home to Colorado…
sunshine-o
He is my free advise for Airbus:
1/ First migrate out your "17 years Accenture veteran" executive vice president of digital [0] (who probably sold you MS and Google cloud in the first place)
2/ Then appoint any inside good engineer and ask him to investigate this: "As one of the most prominent and sensitive aerospace corporation, do you think we can setup servers and run our software on it?"
If the answer is no, Airbus might not be fit for the 21th century.
- [0] https://www.airbus.com/en/about-us/our-governance/catherine-...
PeterStuer
Good, but how independent of US service providers is S/4HANA in practice?
andrewstuart
Weird.
If it matters so much, run your own computer systems don’t use any cloud.
tjpnz
Sounds like they're adopting EU cloud but will continue to use Google Suite. Surely there are viable EU based alternatives further up the stack?
A necessary step to reduce risk to infrastructure given that the US government has become erratic and has decided it is now anti-Europe.
The US means to undermine the EU: https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-h...
The US means to annex European territory: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j9l08902eo
It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.