Quite an odd thing for a British journal to pretend ARM doesn't exist...

So what's being proposed here? Why bother and just use US clouds?

So what is the solution? Can Europe start building the next gen fab now already? And if it can technically, and if it can politically, even at great expense, should it?

I think people miss the point about sovreignity.

Part of what got Microsoft into this position in the first place is that they built and sold software.

Now, they don't build and sell software, they sell services. Services means you're buying access to data.

The data is the problem.

There's a certain amount of soft power you have when you can disallow access to data and services for foreign officials[0] arbitrarily.

The old world order would of course permit us to sanction new sales of things, but in the new world: this is crucially tied with current access to services.

I think the easiest way to think about it is:

Would you depend on another nation selling you the parts to build a power plant, or would you prefer to depend on them supplying you the power- in fact it's worse than that because not only are you buying power you're also giving up a lot of information on who uses it, how it's used, and enough control to cut it off for an individual person.. totally crazy.

the EU itself was designed around the idea that if you are crucially tied in this way then war becomes unthinkable. But that only works when you're equivalently sized entities. The US uses this position to bully the world.

The GPU situation is even more concentrated. NVDA data center was $39B last fiscal year — roughly 90% of their total revenue. No European alternative exists for AI compute workloads.

Even if Europe could replace the dependence of Intel and AMD processor, for example with home grown RISC-V processor, where in Europe could such processor be manufacture in a secure and somehow cost effective way? Then there are other chips and components like memory chips, network components. How about secure European network routers which for networks and datacenters in Europe?

https://www.techspot.com/news/107073-researchers-uncover-hid...

Silicon level backdoors.

https://www.wired.com/2016/06/demonically-clever-backdoor-hi...

Francillon seems very dismissive of the risk, citing his "castle walls", but there's a flaw in his thinking, partially described in the article. Francillon seems to anticipate adversarial traffic only flowing in, not out. Sure, he can block packets before they ever reach CSME or PSP. But there are several embedded assumptions in there which are unsupported: that the behavior of these systems is known, auditable, or understood well enough to assume that they're not sending outbound communications as a covert C2 channel, and that attackers reaching in need to send packets directly to these systems, rather than surreptitious delivery mechanisms to the main OS that CSME and PSP can observe, like a certain WLAN name broadcast from a wireless radio, or certain device firmware being present, or even a specific targeted ad being served to a browser running in the main OS. The claim that these criticisms make the entire framework he designed worthless is obviously untrue, but it's also a strawman. The true claim isn't that it makes the framework worthless, but rather, it makes the framework incomplete. This is inconvenient for Francillon because it tasks him with addressing a class of problem that may be partially possible to detect, but impossible to solve, in practice. And you can't have a conclusion that there is an unsolvable problem, even if it's true.

I guess there are two types of "sovereignty" people talk about here.

First is "data sovereignty", which is what the current (data) migrations are all about. As long as the data remains in place where it cannot be suddenly locked away by the US government, people don't care if the CPU was purchased from the US, as the government cannot suddenly disable those (as far as we know at least).

Second is "hardware sovereignty", which is what this article talks about, about the geographical locations where the hardware is designed and built. This is obviously much harder, but also less important at this very moment. That's why you're not seeing people suddenly rushing to fund EU fabs for silicon, there are more important things to focus on right now, with real implications.

The article kind of does everyone a disservice by mixing the two and not clearly separating which ones it's actually talking about. But to be fair, if they did that, then they've wouldn't have been able to publish this whole "Look how they aren't actually sovereign after all" article if they did so, here we are...

Now this is a perfect time to be just a little patient. After Trump literally threw Taiwan under the incoming Chinese bus, during his fervent trip in the area, this while chip design and building ought to change. And not in the direction of "build in America (as in MAGA one)" direction.

Sovereignty is not necessarily about spying but about having control over their destiny.