Germany asks if US hyperscalers hold keys to AI kingdom

Three American hyperscalers are the gatekeepers to AI, as they possess the necessary compute infrastructure and access to the volumes of data required to train and deploy models at scale.  This was the consensus of a group of European tech companies after a meeting called by Germany's national competition regulator, the …

[ecofeco]

All I hear is whining

Is someone stopping them from making their own AI? Building their own computers? Hiring their own scientists and engineers?

Not only do I hear whining, but I CLEARLY hear them trying to grift money at the taxpayers' expense.

[Don Jefe]

Re: All I hear is whining

Well yeah, they are being stopped from building their own systems. The US controls the distribution of processors and GPUs as well as model weights. Even European IC companies have to comply with US export regulations in order to do business in the US. Allied countries have to comply with the validated end user rules and even then they can only get low performance ICs. Those user validation requirements are structured like arms control protocols and are designed to prevent small companies from participating.

NVIDIA, as well as other IC manufacturers and designers have massively increased their lobbying presence here in DC because the export regulations are harming their business because they aren’t allowed to ship their most valuable products.

For all their talk, the US is extremely hostile to free markets. Free market hostility has grown even worse under the current administration which favors corporatism, xenophobia, and theocracy.

[ecofeco]

Re: All I hear is whining

Who is forcing them to buy U.S. kit?

Was my post not clear? I guess the hell not.

WHO IS STOPPING THEM?

Funny how I get down votes when I slag on rich industrialists (and ivory tower administrators) for being lazy, whiny wankers. Seems like a trend. It's a mystery! /s

[Don Jefe]

Re: All I hear is whining

The U.S. is stopping them from buying from anyone. That’s the point. Foreign companies have to comply with US export regulations, even if the U.S. isn’t involved in the transaction.

For example, Renesas a Japanese company, cannot sell certain products to certain countries without U.S. approval. ASML, a Dutch company that is the sole manufacturer of EUVL cannot sell EUVL photolithography equipment to anyone outside the Netherlands without U.S. approval. There is no HPC or AI at scale without EUVL. Since the U.S. controls who can manufacture high performance semiconductors and controls where finished goods can be sold, the U.S. strangles the global market.

It’s not just semiconductors either. Grundfos, a company in Denmark, provides the coolant system pumps and fluid system components for hyperscale data centers, and they have to get approval from the U.S. for sales.

Complying with U.S. export regulations, even if the U.S. isn’t involved in the transaction, is a part of doing any business in the U.S. Companies that sell export regulated products (which includes obvious things like aerospace, defense, and technology, but also agricultural products, synthetic foodstuffs, medical devices and drugs, intellectual property, and transportation products) have to support the political agendas of the U.S. if they want to do any business here.

It’s why most of the world, even our allies, accuse the U.S. of being an imperialist state and why small countries really dislike the U.S. The policies of institutionalized market manipulation really do prevent growth of other economies and keep a lot of the world held down.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: All I hear is whining

Since the first Trump administration Hauwei has invested in it's own AI chips and design software etc. They even have their own AI chips, the AI-RAN 6G and a CUDA competitor.

ARM has their own AI accelerators.

Alot of sovereignty talk from the EU, but not much action except a few governments moving to open source and local clouds. It's not new either, everytime the U.S and E.U disagree it pops up to some degree. I don't like Trump or his policies, but holy cow did the EU just go back to complacence after Biden got elected or what?

[HuBo]

Fickle pickle competitle

Yeah, as Bert Hubert noted " The first thing is that users say, 'I must have the original, real Microsoft' ". As long as that attitude persists, say with 'I want the real ChatGPT, not Lucie', it's gonna be throbbingly hard indeed to establish local sovereignty in office-productivity suites, their cloud support infrastructures, and the AIs that seek to ride atop it all, not to mention the 'social-networking' likes of Facebook and TikTok, and the chippery and networking kit underneath.

The solution might be to pay "every office worker in Europe [...] a €100-a-month" bonus if they use local tech, thereby advantageously redistributing expenditures to favor both sovereign ops and the local economy!

[sketharaman]

Did USA stop EU from developing the ethos of speed and risk-taking? If EU companies had indexed on speed and risk-taking, they might have overtaken American companies in AI. Nobody but the "slow and steady" culture of EU should be blamed for EU losing the AI race to USA (if it has lost it). But, since I don't expect too many people in EU to accept that, I'm guessing we'll see yet another exhibit of what seems to be the charter principle of EU: "Build Nothing, Regulate Everything".

[CA Dave]

This is a rather interesting take, and it does seem rather interesting that you don't hear from the EU countries actually encourage, foster, or develop the means to generate a necessity and desire for "grassroots" EU tech, particularly now when it comes to AI.

You hear about US and China going at it, and Japan and the UK to a lessor degree, but where's the hype itself from the EU, as opposed to yet more complaints? The EU is indeed really good at complaining over something that's already after-the-fact, when they realize they don't like how it seemingly poofed like magic to them.

Where indeed is the initiative especially from Germany? They can design and manufacture great automobiles, but stagnate over other tech?

[CA Dave]

"Writing on the wall"

What did they honestly expect? When the three companies in question were the first (along with Apple to an extent I'm sure) to even generate a customer support bot model - already the ire of everyone needing help, that was ultimately a precursor to AI right? Wasn't that the famed "writing on the wall"?

Just because you're caught flat-footed with the inability to see that AI was going to be more than just a fad for several more years, doesn't mean you get to cry foul that you didn't get a chance at a cookie later after most of everything has been established.

AI has ultimately been around for a few years now in one way or another, with Bixby, Google Assistant, Siri, and the like on our smartphones, as we "Star Trek" our way into the future by talking to them and issuing commands with them.

Lest we not forget, that by virtue of allowing those three mega companies to act as point to do your shopping, shipping, bidding, uploading, storage, and more, you've already lost the game because you took too long to realize the future.

Or you just took the lazy convenient way out by using their services. Peace.