24 ms·

Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud

519 points by saubeidl 10mo ago

_ache_ 10mo ago
Good, and them get ride of Palantir as a "data manager". It's a step in financing EU sovereign cloud providers.
- hulitu 10mo ago
  > Good, and them get ride of Palantir as a "data manager". And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ?
  - j_maffe 10mo ago
    Please add a /s we can't afford sarcasm in this climate anymore
    - pyrale 10mo ago
      The sarcasm is too damn high!
  - t43562 10mo ago
    Seems extremely dangerous to be doing those kinds of things with software from someone politically hostile. Perhaps the EU should be weaning itself off that too?
  - _ache_ 10mo ago
    I don't think Airbus is fighting terrorists, child abuse or political opponents. So what is your point ? Airbus is fighting industrial espionage.
    - TeMPOraL 10mo ago
      Missed the sarcasm. But FWIW, all three are legitimate threat actors for a strategic airplane manufacturer.
      - _ache_ 10mo ago
        I don't see how child abuse content is a risk for a airplane manufacturer but that is not how Palentir is used at Airbus. I'm talking about the Skywise data platform. https://www.aircraft.airbus.com/en/services/enhance/skywise-data-platform/skywise-core-x https://www.aircraft.airbus.com/en/services/enhance/skywise-...
  - general1465 10mo ago
    > And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ? You can make exactly same argument for client (phone) scanning and depreciation of encryption.
  - mschuster91 10mo ago
    > And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ? By doing police legwork and by prevention work (i.e. offer help to pedophiles, don't go and wreck MENA countries for funsies, but invest in helping the civilian populations).
  - bambax 10mo ago
    Your comment may be sarcastic, IDK; but if it is I concur. Fighting "CSAM" is absurd and ridiculous, and used as a justification for eroding public liberties. So is the fight against "terrorism". The US government has decided to kill innocent fishermen en masse and labelled its victims "narco-terrorists" as a justification for these crimes. We absolutely do not need Palantir.
    - dzhiurgis 10mo ago
      > Fighting "CSAM" is absurd and ridiculous, and used as a justification for eroding public liberties. So is the fight against "terrorism". Labelling like this works both ways you know.
flumpcakes 10mo ago
Some people in the US deride it's close allies as "freeloaders" because they choose to use and buy US tech, reinforcing the US's position as a global powerhouse. (Meanwhile US tech is built on the shoulders of their allies.) Now we see these same allies are starting to look inward and invest in technology they own completely because the US is acting decisively not like an ally. Something unthinkable since WW2. I don't see this news as anything but a good thing. For every technology out there, the EU needs a native alternative. It's clear the current US administration wants to make the EU worse based on a politics of grievance.
- jimnotgym 10mo ago
  I agree, this is a good thing. Long term stable large contracts are great simulation for a market. Airbus obviously has a large amount of military work, and its data needs to stay in Europe. What we also need is a faster acceleration of military spending so this can happen with more companies.
  - ExoticPearTree 10mo ago
    > thing. Long term stable large contracts are great simulation for a market. They are not. It can hurt Airbus very much if a provider says they can provide a certain level of hardware/software for 10 years and in three years the RAM or storage goes through the roof and the provider is not big enough to absorb all the losses. People don’t choose the hyperscalers because they are based in the US, they choose them because they are too big to fail and have pretty much unlimited resources and have multiplr streams of revenue.
    - jimnotgym 10mo ago
      I would expect a contract review for millions in hosting to review how the company will mitigate those costs. Normally you would expect them to contract away the risk themselves. In fact the current rise in RAM costs is due to exactly this, big hosters contracting for long term RAM certainty.
    - everfrustrated 10mo ago
breve 10mo ago
A necessary step to reduce risk to infrastructure given that the US government has become erratic and has decided it is now anti-Europe. The US means to undermine the EU: https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-hungary-from-eu/a-75134777 https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-h... The US means to annex European territory: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j9l08902eo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j9l08902eo It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- petcat 10mo ago
  > It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it. Doesn't Europe actually have a lot of Chinese equipment in their telecom infrastructure? Is this an effort just to try not to make that mistake again?
  - VWWHFSfQ 10mo ago
    Europe will just end up doing whatever is cheapest. It's the same story as always. They'll say some stuff publicly but they'll quietly come back to American tech once they see the price tag difference. They're very cost sensitive and their investors are extremely risk-averse.
    - victorbjorklund 10mo ago
      US says that Europe is their number one enemy. Using American tech is the most risky thing you can do since Trump declared that they are now a hostile enemy with intents of overthrowing European democracies.
      - andsoitis 10mo ago
PeterStuer 10mo ago
Good, but how independent of US service providers is S/4HANA in practice?
- frm88 10mo ago
  I mean, they are offering their own, European cloud: https://news.sap.com/2025/11/sap-eu-ai-cloud-unified-vision-europe-sovereign-ai-cloud-future/ https://news.sap.com/2025/11/sap-eu-ai-cloud-unified-vision-...
sylware 10mo ago
Airbus is putting all its design on internet? wow...
- raverbashing 10mo ago
  You'd be fooling yourself if you think any moderately complex company still hasn't moved to the cloud or isn't thinking about it (with rare exceptions)
  - notahacker 10mo ago
    Yeah, not really sure how a globally distributed manufacturing operation with a complex supply chain and customers all over the world that need access to data for their operations is supposed to function effectively without it. (and I say that as someone that used to sell commercial aviation data that came on CDs...)
    - sylware 10mo ago
      I don't think this is related to that "critical" stuff. It seems there is a misunderstanding over the classification of 'critical' stuff. We may all have a very different definition. All I know: the second your are connected to internet, you are cooked.
      - notahacker 10mo ago
        I'm not sure what the 'critical' stuff is either or what the details of Airbus' network hosting and knowledge compartmentalization strategy is, but you're not going to run a globally distributed manufacturing business with complex supply and maintenance requirements without having technical specs, CAD files, diagnostic criteria customer records etc sitting on computers connected to the internet.
    - kyboren 10mo ago
      You do know that the Internet and "the cloud" are not the same thing, right?
jasonvorhe 10mo ago
Having worked with all major European clouds: Good luck, have fun opening a lot of support cases for things that should work ootb.
- letmetweakit 10mo ago
  It's better than having the rug pulled from under your company one day. This is the point in history we're at unfortunately.
  - nxm 10mo ago
    This is pure fear-mongering
    - apelapan 10mo ago
      Tell that to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Why wouldn't a bunch of Airbus executives be next in line to be sanctioned by the US? They represent a threat to the profitability of Boeing.
  - DaSHacka 10mo ago
    > It's better than having the rug pulled from under your company one day. This is the point in history we're at unfortunately. Source?
    - letmetweakit 10mo ago
      Source??? A US administration that is completely out of control.
      - DaSHacka 10mo ago
        They're doing what they were voted in to do though? Most of what they're doing has high baseline approval ratings, just not in the specific implementation.
jillesvangurp 10mo ago
Much of what people call cloud is a commodity at this point. If you need vms, object storage, load balancers, vpcs, etc., which is what most people would need, that works in a lot of solutions. And you can usually also find managed databases, redis, and a few other bits and bobs. If you like Kubernetes (I personally don't), the whole point of that is that it kind of works everywhere. People over pay for AWS mostly because of brand recognition. And it's not even small amounts. You get a lot more CPU/memory/bandwidth with some of the competitors. AWS makes money by squeezing their customers hard on that. Competitors do the obvious thing of being a bit more generous. Companies could save a ton just switching to competing solutions. Try it. It's not that hard. Some solutions are obviously not as complete. This not about US vs. EU but about sovereignty. If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself. Ask yourself how hard it would be to move to Google cloud. Or Azure. Or whatever. If that's very hard, you might have a problem when Amazon jacks up the prices or discontinues a product. We use a mix of Google Cloud and Telekom Cloud for some of our more picky customers in Germany. Telekom Cloud is not very glamorous. But it's essentially openstack. Which is an open source thing backed by IBM and others. I wouldn't necessary recommend Telekom Cloud (it has a few weaknesses in support and documentation). But it does the job. And unlike AWS, I can get people on the phone and they are happy to talk to me.
- general1465 10mo ago
  > If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself I have tried Lambdas and then got this "oh-shit moment" when I have realized that if AWS would be to kick me out, I would be absolutely screwed. Now I am slowly dispersing and using VMs instead and avoiding all the AWS-specific stuff as much as I can.
  - reese_john 10mo ago
    Most cloud providers have a similar offering to AWS Lambda, plus it is not that hard to convert your code from the event handling pattern impose by AWS Lambda to a long running container running in K8s or VMs like you are doing yourself IMO the lock-in fear is overblown as the top cloud offerings (S3, Lambdas, K8s as a service etc) are already commoditized among the top providers, the exception being specialized databases like DynamoDB, Spanner, Cosmos … Not saying there wouldn’t be some major work to switch your operations from eg AWS to GCP, but it is also not a hard lock-in
Doches 10mo ago
I wonder if this includes Skywise, the Palantir-built data lake and design stack that they use for many many internal operations (design, airline support, manufacturing). Not sure what difference it really makes where the data is hosted if the folks doing the hosting call home to Colorado…
- Zigurd 10mo ago
  I'm sure there are 10 other things nearly as bad. No reason not to start the journey.
- apelapan 10mo ago
  From what I've seen of Skywise, it is just a glorified SharePoint. Different systems upload CSV files that get turned into database tables. Then you can define views across these tables that other systems can consume by having them dumped to CSV and dropped on an SFTP. Performance is not great, so you need middleware and batching anyway. As far as I am concerned, it wouldn't be a great loss if Skywise disappeared and just the SFTP with CSV:s remained.
tjpnz 10mo ago
Sounds like they're adopting EU cloud but will continue to use Google Suite. Surely there are viable EU based alternatives further up the stack?
andrewstuart 10mo ago
Weird. If it matters so much, run your own computer systems don’t use any cloud.
wrxd 10mo ago
> estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider It would be nice to know what the requirements are. There are plenty of providers in the EU happy to sell cloud services
- mft_ 10mo ago
  They should read HN. Don’t they know you can get Hetzner servers starting from $5/month?
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    Lmao but in all honesty, there are a lot of european cloud providers that I know and they are even cheaper than american counterparts like aws, azure, gcp. Personally I like european cloud too but I dont have so much as an preference and it depends but the current environment of america does seem a little hostile but not the fault of datacenters in america but I hope that hostility slows down
    - AndroTux 10mo ago
      There are a lot of European “cloud” providers, but there’s not one that offers anything even close to AWS/GCP/Cloudflare. If you need more than compute and S3, you’re pretty much SOL.
      - antonkochubey 10mo ago
        If you need much more than compute, managed k8s and blob storage, then you're architecting yourself for a vendor lock-in.
        tormeh 10mo ago
        Absolutely not. There's a gazillion cloud providers out there with hosted postgres+kafka+redis and the other big open source softwares. Hetzner is just not one of them.
sunshine-o 10mo ago
He is my free advise for Airbus: 1/ First migrate out your "17 years Accenture veteran" executive vice president of digital [0] (who probably sold you MS and Google cloud in the first place) 2/ Then appoint any inside good engineer and ask him to investigate this: "As one of the most prominent and sensitive aerospace corporation, do you think we can setup servers and run our software on it?" If the answer is no, Airbus might not be fit for the 21th century. - [0] https://www.airbus.com/en/about-us/our-governance/catherine-jestin https://www.airbus.com/en/about-us/our-governance/catherine-...
- BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
  You had me right up until 21th
- g-mork 10mo ago
  do you really suppose replicating the technical requirements of a security-sensitive company of this size in-house would be so easy? I've been doing infrastructure for 25 years and wouldn't want anywhere near this project. but what you will no doubt find is a pool of overconfident volunteers creating exactly the kind of risk outsourcing the problem allowed them to avoid in the first place
  - sunshine-o 10mo ago
    The way I understand it is today is when I board on an Airbus I enter an hybrid of a mechanical and digital machine. I understand there is a lot of complex and sensitive software embedded/hosted on that plane that hopefully are not gonna kill me. So computers are actually core to their business. They probably almost invented things like PLM too. Nothing Airbus does is easy, this is why there are only about 2 companies like that in the world. This is why I do not see why their hosting have to be outsourced...
deleted 10mo ago
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esperent 10mo ago
It seems every single comment in the thread is understanding "cloud" here to mean AWS vs Hetzner. But it's clear from the first paragraph of the article that what they actually mean is MS 365 Dynamics vs SAP. They primarily want a managed ERP + CRM solution, not servers.
- Sammi 10mo ago
  Cloud must be the most uselessly overloaded term ever. I have no way of knowing what you are actually talking about when you use it.
  - apelapan 10mo ago
    Cloud always means "somebody else's computer".
    - Sammi 10mo ago
      Even that isn't generic and broad enough. I've noticed so many people mean SaaS when they say cloud. That isn't even a hardware or server or infrastructure meaning. It's referring to a whole cohesive IT product that you subscribe to. Actually I'd say "cloud" says more about the business model than it says about the actual product.
    - fulafel 10mo ago
      If only. But it can also mean your own computers ("private cloud").
      - apelapan 10mo ago
        My experience is that when people say "private cloud", they usually mean a VPC or similar that is located on somebody else's computer. I'm sure some people use the term correctly, at least sometimes!
  - everfrustrated 10mo ago
    In there early days of cloud there were actual definitions created for it. Nobody seems to remember or care any more.
jacquesm 10mo ago
And not just Airbus. Very quietly there is a lot of stuff being moved out of the US and away from MS, AWS, Google etc. Trump has absolutely no idea what he's doing and comes across as the proverbial bull in a China shop. History books a hundred years hence will have some choice things to say about how we all stood by and let this happen.
- nxm 10mo ago
  Any concrete evidence of any of that outside of a few companies "exploring" the move? For most companies it's a non-starter
  - DaSHacka 10mo ago
    Well, they really, really, really want it to be true, so surely that means it practically is.
  - avh02 10mo ago
    On a very small personal/hobby level: backblaze (which i like as a company) lost my business, moved stuff over to a European company. I'm not a multi million dollar business but I've started to do what i can. Would have loved to visit the US and see all the things it has to offer, but absolutely not planning to in this climate. I think the US is currently at billions lost in just Canadian tourism?
thdrtol 10mo ago
It is amazing how quick a country can turn into a corrupt dictatorship. Airbus has the ability to move their data to another location, but it is very problemetic that all people with a social account can't. Sure, you can delete your Facebook account but it will take years for you profile to be gone because we all know your data is sold to other parties. My only option is to keep in mind that everything I put online will one day be read by some evil entity. Even my IP address that Hacker News might store (I don't know, but servers log stuff).
- DaSHacka 10mo ago
  > It is amazing how quick a country can turn into a corrupt dictatorship. I know, watching the fall of the UK and European countries has been really depressing to see. It's unfortunate, but it seems the US will have to carry the torch alone going into the mid-to-late 21st century.
  - thdrtol 10mo ago
    At least we agree that a country turning into a corrupt dictatorship is depressing to see.
  - p2detar 10mo ago
    I hope this is satire, especially in the light of these latest news. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cbs-60-minutes-story-trump-deportees-el-salvador-bari-weiss-rcna250441 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cbs-60-minutes-story-tr...
crabmusket 10mo ago
> estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider I must be terribly fussy but this genuinely tripped me up while reading. What does this phrasing even mean? Is it an 80% chance of success? This seems like someone has heard the phrase "80/20 rule" and applied it somewhere it makes no sense.
eurekin 10mo ago
"sovereign Euro cloud", ah good chuckle
Havoc 10mo ago
I really hope regulators don't back down on this. Half a billion people shouldn't be reliant on whether a guy with clown makeup is having a dementia moment. Key infra (gov, utilities, news etc) has to be in house or at least in a EU country. Actually in house not big tech EU "sovereign" cloud wink wink nudge
- ExoticPearTree 10mo ago
  > Key infra (gov, utilities, news etc) has to be in house or at least in a EU country. For some EU functionalities there is eu-lisa which develops and hosts services - mostly for police, immigration, biometrics and a slew of others. The problem is that they are very closed environments with a lot if bureaucracy involved and the development is done at snail pace.
  - DaSHacka 10mo ago
    > The problem is that they are very closed environments with a lot if bureaucracy involved and the development is done at snail pace. Wow, so they're authentically European! Glad to see they're off to a great start.
jmyeet 10mo ago
This administration has done more to undermine US power than probably any in history. This isn't a new statement either (eg [1]). Personally, I think that's not such a bad thing because we are the bad guys. I know people get all in their feelings when you say stuff like that but the number of democratically elected governments we've overthrown, just to get their resources, is indefensible. This week it broke that China is pretty far along in duplicating EUV litthography. The US restricts ASML, a Dutch company, from exporting their best machines to China and Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese companies from exporting their chips to China. The second one was a massive mistake. Why? Because it created a marekt for China to produce chips because they had no other choice. Geopolitically I think this is very similar to the USSR copying the atomic bomb in just 4 years after WW2 where US leaders either thought it was impossible or would take 20+ years. The US has become unpredictable and unreliable. Ukraine is a big part of this because Europe is waking up to them having to be responsible for their own defense and that ultimately will undermine US power projection through NATO. Since very early in this administration, probably back when the tariff nonsense began, I believed that Europe would be forced to distance themselves from US tech giants and at some point the EU would require cloud storage to be within EU borders and eventually require European companies to own and run that cloud rather than US companies. China has their own version of virtually every tech company. I can see the EU moving in this direction for key functions and cloud is likely the first of those. What's really precarious is the entire US economy is now essentially a bet on US companies owning a global AI future and I honestly don't think it's going to happen, mainly because China won't let it happen. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow for this and only the beginning. What you really need to remember about the current administration is we're not even 1 year into a 4 year term with everything that's happened and the entire foreign policy is kleptocratic not strategic in nature. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45775985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45775985
adamcharnock 10mo ago
In case any SME-sized companies here are wanting to do something similar but are looking askance at the risk/investment/hiring required, then we'd [0] love to talk to you. We specialise in doing this but on a smaller scale. Eg. 10-100 person companies that have 0-to-a-few DevOps engineers. Included is DevOps time each month to use as you wish, we're on call for SLAs, around 50% reduced cost vs AWS/Google/Azure, etc. Somewhat differently to most, we deploy onto bare metal. In addition to dropping costs we typically see at least a 2x speed-up overall. Once client just reported a 80% reduction in processing time. CTOs like us because we're always on-hand via Slack (plus we're the ones getting woken up in the night), and CFOs like us because billing becomes consistent. Anyway, blatant pitch complete. [0]: https://lithus.eu/ https://lithus.eu/ adam@ above domain
antman 10mo ago
Given it was revealed that CIA specifically targeted 200million deals and above, it was political naivety amounting ti gross negligence on behalf of Airbus executives that it took them 10 years. Same for many other large organisations and countries, unbelieveable. Why did it have to be Trump to make them take action? https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-france-wikileaks-economy/u-s-spy-agency-wiretapped-two-french-finance-ministers-wikileaks-idUKKCN0P92QT20150630/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-france-wikileaks-economy/...
- baq 10mo ago
  Maybe Trump kicked the DGSE out of Boeing
7492632928 10mo ago
Sovereign from the EU regime?
constantcrying 10mo ago
I do not understand what this is supposed to be about. What is this "Euro Cloud" and what does it have to do with "ERP, manufacturing execution systems, CRM, and product lifecycle management (aircraft designs)"? For example I am not aware that Microsoft, Amazon or Google offer any PLM services. The companies offering those would be Siemens, Dassault and so on. Is the issue that those PLM providers are themselves running on Microsoft, Amazon or Google Services? But then the issue is with Airbus needing to force their suppliers into changing where there services are delivered from, but AFAIK these PLM providers offer on prem services, so it seems like a relatively trivial issue. What exactly is the "Euro Cloud" supposed to mean here, what is the actual issue with Airbus switching their PLM to on prem? TO be honest I find it hard to imagine that this isn't already the case. So what is going on here?
scirob 10mo ago
So which one, scale way, hetzner... Tell us who wins ?
graemep 10mo ago
The headline is misleading. They hope to hope to move on-prem stuff to a European provider, but not all the stuff that is already on US clouds.
throw-12-16 10mo ago
Trusting the US is a bad idea. Just ask Ukraine.
- kvuj 10mo ago
  The same Ukraine that has taken 175 billion USD in aid from the US?
  - throw-12-16 10mo ago
    And is now getting betrayed? Yes.
  - avh02 10mo ago
    Been given aid*, they didn't rob your banks.
kachapopopow 10mo ago
this might be rather unrelated to the article, but I hate seeing companies being bought up by the US in europe and it especially makes me upset to see that the american president has the audacity to claim that european countries are just leeching off the US when in reality the whole world feeding the US is what allows it to do things that would cause any other country to go bankrupt.
insane_dreamer 10mo ago
Ultimately this plays into China's hand. They have been promoting "sovereign internet" for many years now (to justify their tight control and the GFW). See the Wuzhen "World" Internet Conferences.
deleted 10mo ago
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clickety_clack 10mo ago
It always puzzled me that big corps don’t have their own infrastructure. Surely there’s a point where hiring a team to manage it properly becomes economical at a certain point, and they take a lot of security risks out of a third party’s hands.
tremon 10mo ago
Quite frankly, I'm astonished that large players like Airbus are/were still relying on US infrastructure providers at all, given public knowledge of ECHELON in the 90s and the BND-NSA espionage in the 00s.
rldjbpin 10mo ago
> The aerospace manufacturer...now wants to move key on-premises applications...to the cloud. most of the discourse here is missing the point. it is not to migrate a cloud resource away from (assumed) US-based services, but rather moving to the cloud for core services. now "sovereign" is the hot word in these parts, and of course it would be a priority. but if it ends up running American HW/SW, is it really being independent? regardless, the article also mentions Google workspace, which is not in the scope of migration. regardless of which part of the fence one is in, things are easier said than done especially when IT services is a cost to the company rather than revenue stream.

519 points by saubeidl 10mo ago

_ache_ 10mo ago

Good, and them get ride of Palantir as a "data manager". It's a step in financing EU sovereign cloud providers.

hulitu 10mo ago
> Good, and them get ride of Palantir as a "data manager". And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ?
- j_maffe 10mo ago
  Please add a /s we can't afford sarcasm in this climate anymore
  - pyrale 10mo ago
    The sarcasm is too damn high!
- t43562 10mo ago
  Seems extremely dangerous to be doing those kinds of things with software from someone politically hostile. Perhaps the EU should be weaning itself off that too?
- _ache_ 10mo ago
  I don't think Airbus is fighting terrorists, child abuse or political opponents. So what is your point ? Airbus is fighting industrial espionage.
  - TeMPOraL 10mo ago
    Missed the sarcasm. But FWIW, all three are legitimate threat actors for a strategic airplane manufacturer.
    - _ache_ 10mo ago
      I don't see how child abuse content is a risk for a airplane manufacturer but that is not how Palentir is used at Airbus. I'm talking about the Skywise data platform. https://www.aircraft.airbus.com/en/services/enhance/skywise-data-platform/skywise-core-x https://www.aircraft.airbus.com/en/services/enhance/skywise-...
- general1465 10mo ago
  > And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ? You can make exactly same argument for client (phone) scanning and depreciation of encryption.
- mschuster91 10mo ago
  > And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ? By doing police legwork and by prevention work (i.e. offer help to pedophiles, don't go and wreck MENA countries for funsies, but invest in helping the civilian populations).
- bambax 10mo ago
  Your comment may be sarcastic, IDK; but if it is I concur. Fighting "CSAM" is absurd and ridiculous, and used as a justification for eroding public liberties. So is the fight against "terrorism". The US government has decided to kill innocent fishermen en masse and labelled its victims "narco-terrorists" as a justification for these crimes. We absolutely do not need Palantir.
  - dzhiurgis 10mo ago
    > Fighting "CSAM" is absurd and ridiculous, and used as a justification for eroding public liberties. So is the fight against "terrorism". Labelling like this works both ways you know.

flumpcakes 10mo ago

Some people in the US deride it's close allies as "freeloaders" because they choose to use and buy US tech, reinforcing the US's position as a global powerhouse. (Meanwhile US tech is built on the shoulders of their allies.) Now we see these same allies are starting to look inward and invest in technology they own completely because the US is acting decisively not like an ally. Something unthinkable since WW2. I don't see this news as anything but a good thing. For every technology out there, the EU needs a native alternative. It's clear the current US administration wants to make the EU worse based on a politics of grievance.

jimnotgym 10mo ago
I agree, this is a good thing. Long term stable large contracts are great simulation for a market. Airbus obviously has a large amount of military work, and its data needs to stay in Europe. What we also need is a faster acceleration of military spending so this can happen with more companies.
- ExoticPearTree 10mo ago
  > thing. Long term stable large contracts are great simulation for a market. They are not. It can hurt Airbus very much if a provider says they can provide a certain level of hardware/software for 10 years and in three years the RAM or storage goes through the roof and the provider is not big enough to absorb all the losses. People don’t choose the hyperscalers because they are based in the US, they choose them because they are too big to fail and have pretty much unlimited resources and have multiplr streams of revenue.
  - jimnotgym 10mo ago
    I would expect a contract review for millions in hosting to review how the company will mitigate those costs. Normally you would expect them to contract away the risk themselves. In fact the current rise in RAM costs is due to exactly this, big hosters contracting for long term RAM certainty.
  - everfrustrated 10mo ago

breve 10mo ago

A necessary step to reduce risk to infrastructure given that the US government has become erratic and has decided it is now anti-Europe. The US means to undermine the EU: https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-hungary-from-eu/a-75134777 https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-h... The US means to annex European territory: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j9l08902eo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j9l08902eo It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.

deleted 10mo ago
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petcat 10mo ago
> It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it. Doesn't Europe actually have a lot of Chinese equipment in their telecom infrastructure? Is this an effort just to try not to make that mistake again?
- VWWHFSfQ 10mo ago
  Europe will just end up doing whatever is cheapest. It's the same story as always. They'll say some stuff publicly but they'll quietly come back to American tech once they see the price tag difference. They're very cost sensitive and their investors are extremely risk-averse.
  - victorbjorklund 10mo ago
    US says that Europe is their number one enemy. Using American tech is the most risky thing you can do since Trump declared that they are now a hostile enemy with intents of overthrowing European democracies.
    - andsoitis 10mo ago

PeterStuer 10mo ago

Good, but how independent of US service providers is S/4HANA in practice?

frm88 10mo ago
I mean, they are offering their own, European cloud: https://news.sap.com/2025/11/sap-eu-ai-cloud-unified-vision-europe-sovereign-ai-cloud-future/ https://news.sap.com/2025/11/sap-eu-ai-cloud-unified-vision-...

sylware 10mo ago

Airbus is putting all its design on internet? wow...

raverbashing 10mo ago
You'd be fooling yourself if you think any moderately complex company still hasn't moved to the cloud or isn't thinking about it (with rare exceptions)
- notahacker 10mo ago
  Yeah, not really sure how a globally distributed manufacturing operation with a complex supply chain and customers all over the world that need access to data for their operations is supposed to function effectively without it. (and I say that as someone that used to sell commercial aviation data that came on CDs...)
  - sylware 10mo ago
    I don't think this is related to that "critical" stuff. It seems there is a misunderstanding over the classification of 'critical' stuff. We may all have a very different definition. All I know: the second your are connected to internet, you are cooked.
    - notahacker 10mo ago
      I'm not sure what the 'critical' stuff is either or what the details of Airbus' network hosting and knowledge compartmentalization strategy is, but you're not going to run a globally distributed manufacturing business with complex supply and maintenance requirements without having technical specs, CAD files, diagnostic criteria customer records etc sitting on computers connected to the internet.
  - kyboren 10mo ago
    You do know that the Internet and "the cloud" are not the same thing, right?

jasonvorhe 10mo ago

Having worked with all major European clouds: Good luck, have fun opening a lot of support cases for things that should work ootb.

letmetweakit 10mo ago
It's better than having the rug pulled from under your company one day. This is the point in history we're at unfortunately.
- nxm 10mo ago
  This is pure fear-mongering
  - apelapan 10mo ago
    Tell that to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Why wouldn't a bunch of Airbus executives be next in line to be sanctioned by the US? They represent a threat to the profitability of Boeing.
- DaSHacka 10mo ago
  > It's better than having the rug pulled from under your company one day. This is the point in history we're at unfortunately. Source?
  - letmetweakit 10mo ago
    Source??? A US administration that is completely out of control.
    - DaSHacka 10mo ago
      They're doing what they were voted in to do though? Most of what they're doing has high baseline approval ratings, just not in the specific implementation.

jillesvangurp 10mo ago

Much of what people call cloud is a commodity at this point. If you need vms, object storage, load balancers, vpcs, etc., which is what most people would need, that works in a lot of solutions. And you can usually also find managed databases, redis, and a few other bits and bobs. If you like Kubernetes (I personally don't), the whole point of that is that it kind of works everywhere. People over pay for AWS mostly because of brand recognition. And it's not even small amounts. You get a lot more CPU/memory/bandwidth with some of the competitors. AWS makes money by squeezing their customers hard on that. Competitors do the obvious thing of being a bit more generous. Companies could save a ton just switching to competing solutions. Try it. It's not that hard. Some solutions are obviously not as complete. This not about US vs. EU but about sovereignty. If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself. Ask yourself how hard it would be to move to Google cloud. Or Azure. Or whatever. If that's very hard, you might have a problem when Amazon jacks up the prices or discontinues a product. We use a mix of Google Cloud and Telekom Cloud for some of our more picky customers in Germany. Telekom Cloud is not very glamorous. But it's essentially openstack. Which is an open source thing backed by IBM and others. I wouldn't necessary recommend Telekom Cloud (it has a few weaknesses in support and documentation). But it does the job. And unlike AWS, I can get people on the phone and they are happy to talk to me.

general1465 10mo ago
> If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself I have tried Lambdas and then got this "oh-shit moment" when I have realized that if AWS would be to kick me out, I would be absolutely screwed. Now I am slowly dispersing and using VMs instead and avoiding all the AWS-specific stuff as much as I can.
- reese_john 10mo ago
  Most cloud providers have a similar offering to AWS Lambda, plus it is not that hard to convert your code from the event handling pattern impose by AWS Lambda to a long running container running in K8s or VMs like you are doing yourself IMO the lock-in fear is overblown as the top cloud offerings (S3, Lambdas, K8s as a service etc) are already commoditized among the top providers, the exception being specialized databases like DynamoDB, Spanner, Cosmos … Not saying there wouldn’t be some major work to switch your operations from eg AWS to GCP, but it is also not a hard lock-in

Doches 10mo ago

I wonder if this includes Skywise, the Palantir-built data lake and design stack that they use for many many internal operations (design, airline support, manufacturing). Not sure what difference it really makes where the data is hosted if the folks doing the hosting call home to Colorado…

Zigurd 10mo ago
I'm sure there are 10 other things nearly as bad. No reason not to start the journey.
apelapan 10mo ago
From what I've seen of Skywise, it is just a glorified SharePoint. Different systems upload CSV files that get turned into database tables. Then you can define views across these tables that other systems can consume by having them dumped to CSV and dropped on an SFTP. Performance is not great, so you need middleware and batching anyway. As far as I am concerned, it wouldn't be a great loss if Skywise disappeared and just the SFTP with CSV:s remained.

tjpnz 10mo ago

Sounds like they're adopting EU cloud but will continue to use Google Suite. Surely there are viable EU based alternatives further up the stack?

andrewstuart 10mo ago

Weird. If it matters so much, run your own computer systems don’t use any cloud.

wrxd 10mo ago

> estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider It would be nice to know what the requirements are. There are plenty of providers in the EU happy to sell cloud services

mft_ 10mo ago
They should read HN. Don’t they know you can get Hetzner servers starting from $5/month?
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  Lmao but in all honesty, there are a lot of european cloud providers that I know and they are even cheaper than american counterparts like aws, azure, gcp. Personally I like european cloud too but I dont have so much as an preference and it depends but the current environment of america does seem a little hostile but not the fault of datacenters in america but I hope that hostility slows down
  - AndroTux 10mo ago
    There are a lot of European “cloud” providers, but there’s not one that offers anything even close to AWS/GCP/Cloudflare. If you need more than compute and S3, you’re pretty much SOL.
    - antonkochubey 10mo ago
      If you need much more than compute, managed k8s and blob storage, then you're architecting yourself for a vendor lock-in.
      - tormeh 10mo ago
        Absolutely not. There's a gazillion cloud providers out there with hosted postgres+kafka+redis and the other big open source softwares. Hetzner is just not one of them.

sunshine-o 10mo ago

He is my free advise for Airbus: 1/ First migrate out your "17 years Accenture veteran" executive vice president of digital [0] (who probably sold you MS and Google cloud in the first place) 2/ Then appoint any inside good engineer and ask him to investigate this: "As one of the most prominent and sensitive aerospace corporation, do you think we can setup servers and run our software on it?" If the answer is no, Airbus might not be fit for the 21th century. - [0] https://www.airbus.com/en/about-us/our-governance/catherine-jestin https://www.airbus.com/en/about-us/our-governance/catherine-...

BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
You had me right up until 21th
g-mork 10mo ago
do you really suppose replicating the technical requirements of a security-sensitive company of this size in-house would be so easy? I've been doing infrastructure for 25 years and wouldn't want anywhere near this project. but what you will no doubt find is a pool of overconfident volunteers creating exactly the kind of risk outsourcing the problem allowed them to avoid in the first place
- sunshine-o 10mo ago
  The way I understand it is today is when I board on an Airbus I enter an hybrid of a mechanical and digital machine. I understand there is a lot of complex and sensitive software embedded/hosted on that plane that hopefully are not gonna kill me. So computers are actually core to their business. They probably almost invented things like PLM too. Nothing Airbus does is easy, this is why there are only about 2 companies like that in the world. This is why I do not see why their hosting have to be outsourced...

deleted 10mo ago

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esperent 10mo ago

It seems every single comment in the thread is understanding "cloud" here to mean AWS vs Hetzner. But it's clear from the first paragraph of the article that what they actually mean is MS 365 Dynamics vs SAP. They primarily want a managed ERP + CRM solution, not servers.

Sammi 10mo ago
Cloud must be the most uselessly overloaded term ever. I have no way of knowing what you are actually talking about when you use it.
- apelapan 10mo ago
  Cloud always means "somebody else's computer".
  - Sammi 10mo ago
    Even that isn't generic and broad enough. I've noticed so many people mean SaaS when they say cloud. That isn't even a hardware or server or infrastructure meaning. It's referring to a whole cohesive IT product that you subscribe to. Actually I'd say "cloud" says more about the business model than it says about the actual product.
  - fulafel 10mo ago
    If only. But it can also mean your own computers ("private cloud").
    - apelapan 10mo ago
      My experience is that when people say "private cloud", they usually mean a VPC or similar that is located on somebody else's computer. I'm sure some people use the term correctly, at least sometimes!
- everfrustrated 10mo ago
  In there early days of cloud there were actual definitions created for it. Nobody seems to remember or care any more.

jacquesm 10mo ago

And not just Airbus. Very quietly there is a lot of stuff being moved out of the US and away from MS, AWS, Google etc. Trump has absolutely no idea what he's doing and comes across as the proverbial bull in a China shop. History books a hundred years hence will have some choice things to say about how we all stood by and let this happen.

nxm 10mo ago
Any concrete evidence of any of that outside of a few companies "exploring" the move? For most companies it's a non-starter
- DaSHacka 10mo ago
  Well, they really, really, really want it to be true, so surely that means it practically is.
- avh02 10mo ago
  On a very small personal/hobby level: backblaze (which i like as a company) lost my business, moved stuff over to a European company. I'm not a multi million dollar business but I've started to do what i can. Would have loved to visit the US and see all the things it has to offer, but absolutely not planning to in this climate. I think the US is currently at billions lost in just Canadian tourism?

thdrtol 10mo ago

It is amazing how quick a country can turn into a corrupt dictatorship. Airbus has the ability to move their data to another location, but it is very problemetic that all people with a social account can't. Sure, you can delete your Facebook account but it will take years for you profile to be gone because we all know your data is sold to other parties. My only option is to keep in mind that everything I put online will one day be read by some evil entity. Even my IP address that Hacker News might store (I don't know, but servers log stuff).

DaSHacka 10mo ago
> It is amazing how quick a country can turn into a corrupt dictatorship. I know, watching the fall of the UK and European countries has been really depressing to see. It's unfortunate, but it seems the US will have to carry the torch alone going into the mid-to-late 21st century.
- thdrtol 10mo ago
  At least we agree that a country turning into a corrupt dictatorship is depressing to see.
- p2detar 10mo ago
  I hope this is satire, especially in the light of these latest news. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cbs-60-minutes-story-trump-deportees-el-salvador-bari-weiss-rcna250441 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cbs-60-minutes-story-tr...

crabmusket 10mo ago

> estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider I must be terribly fussy but this genuinely tripped me up while reading. What does this phrasing even mean? Is it an 80% chance of success? This seems like someone has heard the phrase "80/20 rule" and applied it somewhere it makes no sense.

eurekin 10mo ago

"sovereign Euro cloud", ah good chuckle

Havoc 10mo ago

I really hope regulators don't back down on this. Half a billion people shouldn't be reliant on whether a guy with clown makeup is having a dementia moment. Key infra (gov, utilities, news etc) has to be in house or at least in a EU country. Actually in house not big tech EU "sovereign" cloud wink wink nudge

ExoticPearTree 10mo ago
> Key infra (gov, utilities, news etc) has to be in house or at least in a EU country. For some EU functionalities there is eu-lisa which develops and hosts services - mostly for police, immigration, biometrics and a slew of others. The problem is that they are very closed environments with a lot if bureaucracy involved and the development is done at snail pace.
- DaSHacka 10mo ago
  > The problem is that they are very closed environments with a lot if bureaucracy involved and the development is done at snail pace. Wow, so they're authentically European! Glad to see they're off to a great start.

jmyeet 10mo ago

This administration has done more to undermine US power than probably any in history. This isn't a new statement either (eg [1]). Personally, I think that's not such a bad thing because we are the bad guys. I know people get all in their feelings when you say stuff like that but the number of democratically elected governments we've overthrown, just to get their resources, is indefensible. This week it broke that China is pretty far along in duplicating EUV litthography. The US restricts ASML, a Dutch company, from exporting their best machines to China and Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese companies from exporting their chips to China. The second one was a massive mistake. Why? Because it created a marekt for China to produce chips because they had no other choice. Geopolitically I think this is very similar to the USSR copying the atomic bomb in just 4 years after WW2 where US leaders either thought it was impossible or would take 20+ years. The US has become unpredictable and unreliable. Ukraine is a big part of this because Europe is waking up to them having to be responsible for their own defense and that ultimately will undermine US power projection through NATO. Since very early in this administration, probably back when the tariff nonsense began, I believed that Europe would be forced to distance themselves from US tech giants and at some point the EU would require cloud storage to be within EU borders and eventually require European companies to own and run that cloud rather than US companies. China has their own version of virtually every tech company. I can see the EU moving in this direction for key functions and cloud is likely the first of those. What's really precarious is the entire US economy is now essentially a bet on US companies owning a global AI future and I honestly don't think it's going to happen, mainly because China won't let it happen. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow for this and only the beginning. What you really need to remember about the current administration is we're not even 1 year into a 4 year term with everything that's happened and the entire foreign policy is kleptocratic not strategic in nature. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45775985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45775985

adamcharnock 10mo ago

In case any SME-sized companies here are wanting to do something similar but are looking askance at the risk/investment/hiring required, then we'd [0] love to talk to you. We specialise in doing this but on a smaller scale. Eg. 10-100 person companies that have 0-to-a-few DevOps engineers. Included is DevOps time each month to use as you wish, we're on call for SLAs, around 50% reduced cost vs AWS/Google/Azure, etc. Somewhat differently to most, we deploy onto bare metal. In addition to dropping costs we typically see at least a 2x speed-up overall. Once client just reported a 80% reduction in processing time. CTOs like us because we're always on-hand via Slack (plus we're the ones getting woken up in the night), and CFOs like us because billing becomes consistent. Anyway, blatant pitch complete. [0]: https://lithus.eu/ https://lithus.eu/ adam@ above domain

antman 10mo ago

Given it was revealed that CIA specifically targeted 200million deals and above, it was political naivety amounting ti gross negligence on behalf of Airbus executives that it took them 10 years. Same for many other large organisations and countries, unbelieveable. Why did it have to be Trump to make them take action? https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-france-wikileaks-economy/u-s-spy-agency-wiretapped-two-french-finance-ministers-wikileaks-idUKKCN0P92QT20150630/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-france-wikileaks-economy/...

baq 10mo ago
Maybe Trump kicked the DGSE out of Boeing

7492632928 10mo ago

Sovereign from the EU regime?

constantcrying 10mo ago

I do not understand what this is supposed to be about. What is this "Euro Cloud" and what does it have to do with "ERP, manufacturing execution systems, CRM, and product lifecycle management (aircraft designs)"? For example I am not aware that Microsoft, Amazon or Google offer any PLM services. The companies offering those would be Siemens, Dassault and so on. Is the issue that those PLM providers are themselves running on Microsoft, Amazon or Google Services? But then the issue is with Airbus needing to force their suppliers into changing where there services are delivered from, but AFAIK these PLM providers offer on prem services, so it seems like a relatively trivial issue. What exactly is the "Euro Cloud" supposed to mean here, what is the actual issue with Airbus switching their PLM to on prem? TO be honest I find it hard to imagine that this isn't already the case. So what is going on here?

scirob 10mo ago

So which one, scale way, hetzner... Tell us who wins ?

graemep 10mo ago

The headline is misleading. They hope to hope to move on-prem stuff to a European provider, but not all the stuff that is already on US clouds.

throw-12-16 10mo ago

Trusting the US is a bad idea. Just ask Ukraine.

kvuj 10mo ago
The same Ukraine that has taken 175 billion USD in aid from the US?
- throw-12-16 10mo ago
  And is now getting betrayed? Yes.
- avh02 10mo ago
  Been given aid*, they didn't rob your banks.

kachapopopow 10mo ago

this might be rather unrelated to the article, but I hate seeing companies being bought up by the US in europe and it especially makes me upset to see that the american president has the audacity to claim that european countries are just leeching off the US when in reality the whole world feeding the US is what allows it to do things that would cause any other country to go bankrupt.

insane_dreamer 10mo ago

Ultimately this plays into China's hand. They have been promoting "sovereign internet" for many years now (to justify their tight control and the GFW). See the Wuzhen "World" Internet Conferences.

deleted 10mo ago

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clickety_clack 10mo ago

It always puzzled me that big corps don’t have their own infrastructure. Surely there’s a point where hiring a team to manage it properly becomes economical at a certain point, and they take a lot of security risks out of a third party’s hands.

tremon 10mo ago

Quite frankly, I'm astonished that large players like Airbus are/were still relying on US infrastructure providers at all, given public knowledge of ECHELON in the 90s and the BND-NSA espionage in the 00s.

rldjbpin 10mo ago

> The aerospace manufacturer...now wants to move key on-premises applications...to the cloud. most of the discourse here is missing the point. it is not to migrate a cloud resource away from (assumed) US-based services, but rather moving to the cloud for core services. now "sovereign" is the hot word in these parts, and of course it would be a priority. but if it ends up running American HW/SW, is it really being independent? regardless, the article also mentions Google workspace, which is not in the scope of migration. regardless of which part of the fence one is in, things are easier said than done especially when IT services is a cost to the company rather than revenue stream.