- 389comments
- 278comments
- 20comments
- 14comments
- 4comments
- 7comments
- 110comments
- 3comments
- 278comments
- 21comments
- 34comments
- —discuss
- 19comments
- 127comments
- 154comments
- 462comments
- 3comments
- —discuss
- 156comments
- 32comments
- 36comments
- 105comments
- 21comments
- 2comments
- 84comments
- 8comments
- 12comments
- 540comments
- 391comments
- 60comments
yet another ai cloud
Yeah, but this time like... In EU!
Verda is great! The only thing bad about Verda is that it's sold out fairly often :-) So the $189M will hopefully help with that.
Excellent news for European tech stack - congrats!
$198M for AI Cloud when US has a company that pays one of it's employees about that?
That American AI companies waste money like that is a good argument for them being vulnerable to leaner companies.
AI cloud? I guess 189 mil will buy nvidia GPUs to host inference for Chinese models for Europeans? Is that what this is?
That's a real risk.
Hopefully it's for buying VSORA or Euclyd machines, but well...
Can you buy these already? I think not.
The VSORA machines, possibly. They are apparently delivered and being installed at Scaleway.
The Euclyd machines, probably many months away.
Yeah the sold out bit is telling, and it's rarely the cards, it's finding racks with enough power and cooling ready to take them.
Very good dev experience! Congrats
Sincere congrats to the Verda team :-)
Can someone please help me understand what their competitive advantage is, versus the likes of AWS / Azure et al, who are also available in the EU.
I love a good underdog story, but I'm not understanding the economics of it.
There are several regulated industries that need to have their computing done in the EU without ties to US companies. Sovereignty is currently a big political topic.
Them putting services in EU (even as subsidiaries) is just a marketing strategy where they are straight up lying to customers so they can get more money.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Cloud Act: The CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act) is a U.S. federal law passed in 2018 that allows U.S. law enforcement to compel U.S.-based tech and cloud companies to hand over customer data, even if that data is stored on servers located outside the United States
The data sovereignty stuff is mostly just lip-service. Both the EU and Canada are in the process of negotiating reciprocal CLOUD Act arrangements with the US government similar to what UK and Australia already have in place.
[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/e-evidence/
Verda's own website is sitting behind Cloudflare! So is consilium.europa.eu! The dependence is pervasive.
They ain’t Americans.
Because US-in-EU is fake-EU.
CLOUD act, PATRIOT act etc. etc. US headquarters doesn't escape the arm of US law.
Remember a long time ago there was a famous case where Microsoft fought the US DoJ when they came looking for somebody's data in Azure Ireland ?
That was then. Now is now. Do you honestly think Microsoft would put up the same fight today, especially if the US President decided to lean on them ? I don't !
CLOUD/PATRIOT etc. has gone from a theoretical risk to a real one. And now you have a US President in office who doesn't care much for bypassing all that anyway.
Is it a risk anyone cares about? There is very little actual switching. In many ways dependence is increasing as everything moves to apps (including the EU's own age verification app) that only run on US controlled devices.
I work in a European government institution. This is definitely a risk we care about, and we would switch to sovereign clouds in a heartbeat if we had any good ones in Europe.
So you basically confirmed that being located in Europe isn't enough.
TBF (and the subject of government tech and procurement aside) there are good ones in Europe.
The problem tends to be how much of the US-cloud cool-aid your organisation has drunk.
If you've drunk the whole bottle, i.e. the random alphabet-soup of interdependent microservices, then sure you'll have a tough time finding a like-for-like equivalent.
But if you've still got old-school IT brains in your IT team, then its perfectly feasible to find equivalence in Europe.
Not only that, but you'll probably pay at least 10x less in Europe because you're not paying through the nose for the alphabet-soup of random interdependency.
Also the EU providers price sheets are clear and it is easy to reliably forecast how much you will be paying. As opposed to the US provider's muddy price sheets full of small-print and all sorts of random invented proprietary billing units that are nigh on impossible to reason about.
Are you also going to switch your end user devices, or are you going to remain reliant on Google, Apple and Microsoft? The data flows through those.
Do other institutions care? Some people and some institutions do, but how many?
What about the private sector? Even if you moved all government services entirely away from the US, your economy can still be reliant on American suppliers and communications between the government and the private sector and individuals will too.
What is wrong with the options you have in Europe? That comment suggests to me you do not care enough to do anything that takes effort.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225112 (subthread with citations of switching)
The economics of it are the same as for Hetzner. AWS is trying to split the difference by offering services that are supposedly run exclusively by EU citizens, from data centers located in the EU. The reasoning is pretty solid for at least the next two or three years. It might take another five to restore trust in US tech. Not a bad amount of runway.
It's a bit sad that the only responses you get is "It's based in EU". If that's the only thing, it's not really impressive is it?
Don't get me wrong, as a European I'm all for EU, but we should offer products and services that are at least as good as abroad competitors. My company still relies heavily on US tech, for the simple fact that lots of it is plain better and/or cheaper.
This is wonderful, congrats to everyone at Verda!
Gongratulations to the team! Their solutions not only allow the data to actually stay in the EU, but are otherwise competetive as well!
Could you clarify what you mean? Cloud-related data stay in the EU, but yeah, marketing/payment stack are more diverse.
Disclaimer: I work at Verda.
If only I was in Helsinki. This would be an interesting time to work in this area.
Awesome city
I'd love to give someone at Verda a demo of https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ to show them how they could actually do fast provisioning and automation. Seeing Ansible+Kubernetes+K* stuff in their jobs offering does not inspire confidence that they're innovating in building their core infra. You can't out-compete AWS or even the smaller clouds there.
If you want to see a different perspective, lmk.