So you're saying building an AWS equivalent is harder to do than building ASML? Again: if Europe could come up with ASML (which is just an example I'm familiar with, I assume there are successful companies), why can't it build in AWS equivalent? Which is even easier to do since the problem of scaling server instances is better understood and more intuitive than developing lithography machines like ASML is doing.
You should really reconsider your assumptions about server scaling and AWS business in general. AWS builds truely complex and ahead-of-time distributed systems that humans could never build before because of lack of knowledge and concentrated efforts. Distributed systems are really hard and not very well understood and algorithms are immensly complex and even harder to to engineer espeically on AWS scale. See DynamoDB for example, it's a masterpiece of engineering in distributed systems. You can read the paper entitled "Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-Value Store" to get a real feel of the challenge. I consider the way you see things as another part of Europs failure to build software quality awareness that can compete with the US engineering.
The main business in AWS is not DynamoDB. I'm not even sure what it is without checking, and seems like people hosting on Google / Microsoft / other big corp can do without.
Nor does Europe need to copy 100% of AWS's feature set.
And ASML has competition as well in Canon and Nikon, although they’re ahead of them in EUV.
Are you an EE? Or a Physicist? I’m wondering why you’ve shrouded ASML in such a golden halo? They’re a company doing basic research in solid state physics, but there are a lot of companies like that.
And the issue here isn’t EU vs US - it’s private vs public industry. ASML is a private company that was spun off of Siemens. Building any kind of a successful venture that actual produces real value is hard - private and public. But public ventures have more money and can’t weed out failures as aggressively as the tough justice of the market.
We’ll have to see how this Gaia-X turns out, but I’m not optimistic.
ASML is just an example of a complicated, competitive, hi-tech leading company coming from Europe. None of the competitors you listed are on par with ASML at the moment as you said. So we've established Europe can actually make tech critical competitive products (sorry for being hung up on ASML, I live in the Netherlands so that example comes to mind)
As for the government vs private venture, I cannot say it's set in stone. China is developing crazy ass infrastructure and companies, all very techy, and none of it is free market. So we've had bad precedents like USSR but also contradicting successful examples like China.
Also - Europe doesn't have to make Gaia-X BETTER than AWS. It doesn't have to become a 1T dollar market cap company. It just needs to do it's job and reduce reliance on China and U.S , that is the whole goal.
and companies, all very techy, and none of it is free market
Whoa - sorry but that just isn’t true. Other than Huawei which is a Trojan horse for Chinese intelligence services, none of the dynamism in the Chinese economy is happening in state owned companies. NONE! Look at Tencent or Alibaba or Xiaomi or DJI or any of the big Chinese tech leaders. Or look at SMIC - they guys ASML we’re going to make that big sale to! NONE of these are state owned firms. If you seriously think that any of what’s happening now in China is any kind of a counterpoint to the abject failure of the planned economy, I can’t help you.
Maybe Gaia-X will be a success - but it is as I said - making a successful venture is always against the odds. But private industry will realize that sooner and waste less capital on failures. Public funding takes years past clear failure to turn off the money spigot. Good luck!
I’m pretty sure that under the hood a lot of AWS services like S3 are backed by dynodb, and if so then ‘chopping up and selling dynodb’ is a pretty core focus.
You're comparing to Amazon the company, the whole e-commerce business unit which is huge.
AWS is big but I don't know how big; competition is fierce. They were there first but other companies are catching up.
1. Culture, tradition, apathy, risk-averseness
2. Regulations