alt Hacker NewsOne aspect of the AI bubble that is not talked about very much is how the European market is a key factor in any serious calculation about future revenue. If Europe decides to, or is forced to decouple its digital infrastructure from the US, that essentially slashes the addressable market of a company like chatGPT by a third. And Europe has some of the richest customers too.
In other words, Sam Altman et al. should be hardcore Atlanticists at this point.
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You are right, but I have the feeling that the Google, Microsoft, ... and the IA companies think that the EU is a acquired market. It's false, they can shift off the US, they eventually will.
It also destroys the winner takes all market. Investors would count on the winner takes all market and give infinite VC money to a start up, so that they would make a product that is slightly better than the competitor and kill the competition early on.
Maybe this will happen eventually but decoupling any time soon is a pipe dream. For the foreseeable future, Europe's BATNA is shit.
Forget Microsoft and Google services, what about the hardware? To support all this new demand for European infrastructure you'll have to buy tons of new gear from mostly American companies: AMD, INTC, NVDA, MU, etc.
Are cutting-edge European competitors going to suddenly spring into existence to satisfy that demand? Is TSMC gonna allocate wafer spins to some scrappy EU startup instead of NVDA, AAPL, AMZN, MSFT, AMD, INTC, AVGO, QCOM?
I dunno if you've been paying attention to the market but demand for all data center components has gone through the roof and supply is already spoken for for years to come. The hardware you'd need to decouple simply isn't available, when it becomes available you'll be competing with nearly $1T in annual hyperscaler CapEx, and Europe has no capability to produce domestic alternatives.