It would be a just a hefty fee for most EU companies and not much more. From what I've seen Azure is pretty popular in most bigger companies and smaller shops and websites use often AWS or Google cloud. Microsoft Windows and Office is also everywhere - it would be a tax on European business with little effects on the USA because moving away from big clouds won't happen because there is no realistic alternative.
Last I've looked "Lidl Cloud" from Schwartz-IT that is often mentioned as alternative is basically managed Kubernetes for more than double the price of Azure/AWS before rebates. They have that idiotic meaningless TÜV button on their websites and unfortunately it's not technical excellence but rather a trap for boomer CEOs...
Europe missed that boat unfortunately and I don't see that changing soon. Hetzner/OVH and so on only provide bare metal or virtual machines for little money but there is no European cloud with serious IaC and managed services that are stable and battle tested as far as I know.
Changing taxation rules is the interesting topic but unfortunately EU countries are competing on that and that would destroy the business model of countries like Luxembourg or Ireland - I'm all for changing it and it would be better in the long-term but it's probably impossible to pull off at the moment.
It seems to me that replacing foreign computer services is actually easy compared to physical goods: no need to build factories, no need to buy expensive machinery etc, just wrap some open source solution and sell it. For example, China has domestic computer services, from messengers to AI models. And by observation, once you ban foreign services, local competitors start appearing like mushrooms after rain.
It's this attitude that is common in Europe, at least in Germany that is the reason we are so behind. Worked for so many companies that just wrapped some open-source and sold it. Never worked well, nobody understood how it worked. No money for competent devs and so on. Both times the product was what made the company money. Say what you want about USA tech companies but at least some actually have technical excellence. I've lost hope that Europe, especially Germany will understand that.
Yeah sure but then you do promote EU alternatives out of necessity.
On the long term this can really make EU more sovereign, less dependent and it's not a crazy thing.
I have never understood the argument of "yeah tariff would hurt us because we are dependent on foreign tech". Yeah that's precisely a problem at a country level. Promoting local alternative is best than winner takes all.
There's also a price in not looking tough when you're getting bullied sometimes.
Both OVH and scaleway provide managed k8s (and both have terraform providers). But yes, definitely much less sophisticated than the hyperscalers. But if you use k8s, maybe s3 and Kafka, and some databases, it's definitely possible to do the switch.
Swapping an enterprise’s cloud provider is at least a 6 month endeavor and that would be with all hands on deck, I estimate two years at least and that’s still with significant tail wind. While things are crazy, best bet is to hold tight and sign the checks and prepare.
My experience is that it can be anything from relatively easy to frocking impossible. Very hard to put a timeline on.
But if we are talking about tariffs (and not a ban) then a partial move is also relevant. And, at least in my anecdotal experience, a non-trivial fraction of our cloud-cost is pretty simple services which can be moved. It's almost like a 95/5 kind of thing, moving 95% of the stuff would take 5% of the time.
Having a hybrid cloud setup is clearly more hassel, but it's doable.
Last I've looked "Lidl Cloud" from Schwartz-IT that is often mentioned as alternative is basically managed Kubernetes for more than double the price of Azure/AWS before rebates. They have that idiotic meaningless TÜV button on their websites and unfortunately it's not technical excellence but rather a trap for boomer CEOs...
Europe missed that boat unfortunately and I don't see that changing soon. Hetzner/OVH and so on only provide bare metal or virtual machines for little money but there is no European cloud with serious IaC and managed services that are stable and battle tested as far as I know.
Changing taxation rules is the interesting topic but unfortunately EU countries are competing on that and that would destroy the business model of countries like Luxembourg or Ireland - I'm all for changing it and it would be better in the long-term but it's probably impossible to pull off at the moment.