Posted by TechTechTech 1 day ago
The previous ICC sanctions started a lot of discussion in the EU. For example, people loose not only access to Microsoft services but also bank/credit card (Visa is USA). https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/feb/18/international-cr...
EU is slow, but poke it enough and it will leave USA services (and then never come back). For example, Nextcloud can substitute MS365, ICC itself did so after the previous sanctions: https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/international-criminal-c...
There is a lot of noise on what you mention but the reality is rather different.
Energy yes, particularly since the Iran war started. AI, not really. Like most Europeans are using US models, but the switching costs are so low here that they could easily swap these out for Chinese models.
It's the cloud/hyperscaler dependencies that are the real problems here.
Europe pretty much does not exist in AI and the political considerations at this point push it towards overwhelming dependency on the US.
Just to be clear, there's actually more of a dependency when using US models, as the vast majority of Chinese models can be self hosted.
And I would have taken the point about political considerations much more seriously pre January 2025.
Europe does not exist in AI. That is the sad truth, no need to try to pick hole in reality... It's quite healthy to listen to EU noise less because otherwise people tend to drink the kool-aid and believe that the EU (and Europe) is anywhere in most strategic developments (AI and related chips are particularly dire but also missed the boat on EV, struggling on renewables, nowhere in smartphones, etc). Yes, there is Arm so that's that (not in the EU).
And it doesn’t have to be a bad thing to not exist in AI given all the damage that is done by AI.
> Nextcloud can substitute MS365
What? I hope that’s a joke. (I run/admin Nextcloud instances)