Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 13, 2026 21:56 UTC (Fri) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850)
In reply to: Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them) by Cyberax
Parent article: FOSS in times of war, scarcity, and AI

There's no doubt that hyperscalers are efficient on their end of the business, which is of course why they're making lots of money per unit of whatever they sell. But even though the prevailing wisdom these days is to go with them and just pay the bill (which can sometimes be a reasonable business decision), quite a few who have done the math have ended up with the conclusion that it's cheaper to run your own infrastructure, as long as it can be utilized fully and load isn't hugely variable (and unpredictably so).

I think the complaints about hyperscalers are twofold:

For one, they're (pretty much by definition) huge companies, so almost inevitably they end up doing huge company things like lobbying, tax "optimization", and so on. Exhibit A: "Do no evil."
They structure their pricing in a way that it's easy and cheap to get hitched, but very expensive compared to their actual costs once you scale up later. As you say, that's about as ethical (or not) as any other business trying to increase its profits - but it can be a valid argument against using their services.

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Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 13, 2026 22:31 UTC (Fri) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link] (1 responses)

> cheaper to run your own infrastructure,

I think the real problem is that the people controlling the money don't understand the language of the technical people
they need to run the infrastructure. In particular, they have no real way of knowing if they even are competent at their job.

That said, there are a number of objective advantages to using something like a fully managed database where you just write the SQL and it just works the same whether the query needs a single worker for a second or ten thousand workers for an hour.

One thing the EU could do would be do mandate interoperability, force the vendors to agree on common SQL, common orchestration etc.

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this though, just mandating USB for phones took about fifteen years...

Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 16, 2026 9:46 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

There are pretty much zero advantages to being able to scale up to tens of thousands of workers for an hour for 99% of all applications since those run on a single small-ish cloud server just fine.

Also, I used to think the problem was that the people controlling the money couldn't determine the competence of the technical people but I think the evidence becomes more and more clear that the people controlling the money can't even tell if they themselves or their peers doing their job are competent.

Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 13, 2026 23:25 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> quite a few who have done the math have ended up with the conclusion that it's cheaper to run your own infrastructure, as long as it can be utilized fully and load isn't hugely variable (and unpredictably so).

Sure, and that's fine. This is just normal commercial activity, you check available options and decide which one is the best for you. This also happens all the time with "classic" businesses that need to do lease-vs-own calculations or find suppliers for some components.

> For one, they're (pretty much by definition) huge companies, so almost inevitably they end up doing huge company things like lobbying, tax "optimization", and so on. Exhibit A: "Do no evil."

I actually like that. Business interests of companies should influence the lawmakers. I just don't necessarily like the _level_ of their influence.

> They structure their pricing in a way that it's easy and cheap to get hitched, but very expensive compared to their actual costs once you scale up later. As you say, that's about as ethical (or not) as any other business trying to increase its profits - but it can be a valid argument against using their services.

It really depends. I know AWS from inside out, so I can easily keep my costs way below what I'd pay for a similar service if I were to build it myself. But I agree that AWS makes it very easy to build infrastructures that just burn through money. But it's also not necessarily a sign of "evilness", especially since AWS provides tons of tools to control the costs.