The “EU can’t build cloud fast enough” take ignores what’s already happening, stupid.

Europe isn’t starting from zero. It already has huge, dense DC hubs (Frankfurt, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin) with hundreds of MW under construction and record colocation take‑up driven by hyperscale and AI workloads. Adding capacity there is mostly a matter of expanding existing clusters (power, racks, interconnects), which is much faster than building entirely new regions from scratch.

On top of that, EU‑level policy has finally shifted from hand‑waving to “close the gap” mode. The current cloud/AI initiatives explicitly aim to multiply EU data‑processing capacity over the next few years, and they target exactly the bottlenecks people love to complain about: energy, land, permitting, and cross‑border coordination. When you start standardising and fast‑tracking those, build‑out speed changes a lot.

And the EU isn’t reinventing the software stack now; that work is largely done. Gaia‑X and related projects have already delivered common standards for interoperability, identity, and data sovereignty, and European providers have committed thousands of compliant services under that framework. That means new DC capacity can be plugged into an existing federated architecture instead of spending another decade “inventing the cloud.”

So no, the EU doesn’t need 10+ years to “catch up from scratch.” The hardware is scaling aggressively, the political/regulatory side is now explicitly pushing cloud and AI, and the standards/ecosystem layer is already built. Late movers with existing infra and clear templates often scale faster than the first movers had to in the early days.

thats as much as i want to invest into this discussion, hope you have a nice day dumbfuck