Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud

Palantir, Skywise, and “fighting crime” justifications

• Several comments celebrate anything that reduces Airbus’s reliance on Palantir, especially its Skywise data platform.
• Sarcastic pro‑Palantir remarks (“how else do we fight terrorists/CSAM/political opponents?”) trigger a long thread about how such rhetoric is used to justify mass surveillance and erosion of civil liberties.
• Others point out Airbus’s real threat model is industrial espionage, not CSAM, and question why a politically hostile US-linked analytics vendor is involved at all.

Strategic autonomy and US–EU rift

• Many see the move as a necessary response to an increasingly erratic, openly hostile US administration that talks about dismantling the EU and annexing European territories.
• Historical NSA spying and the CLOUD Act are cited as reasons US infrastructure is inherently untrustworthy for strategic industries.
• Others push back, framing US complaints as about NATO under‑spending, calling “anti‑Europe” narratives overblown ragebait and noting Europe’s own political dysfunction.

Comparisons with China and Huawei

• Some argue it’s hypocritical to shun Chinese vendors but happily depend on US clouds; if you don’t trust a government, don’t trust its tech.
• There’s disagreement over whether Huawei actually posed a proven security risk or was just US protectionism.
• A few suggest Europe could turn more to China if US hostility continues, while others stress China’s authoritarianism and industrial espionage record.

Capabilities and limits of “Euro cloud”

• Practitioners note that many European providers (Hetzner, OVH, Telekom Cloud, etc.) are solid for VMs, storage, Kubernetes and basic managed databases but lack the breadth and maturity of AWS/GCP/Azure/Cloudflare.
• Some claim “if you need more than compute + k8s + blob storage you’re locking yourself in,” others counter that large enterprises do need richer managed services at Airbus scale.
• Previous “sovereign cloud” initiatives are criticized as political cash‑grabs, sometimes even running on Huawei gear under the hood.

Cloud vs on‑prem for critical design data

• One camp argues that truly critical systems should run in‑house, not on any cloud. Another replies that global manufacturing, maintenance and supply chains are impossible today without internet‑connected systems.
• Debate covers whether encryption and network design make cloud vs on‑prem mostly equivalent in risk, versus claims that only air‑gapped, heavily customized crypto is acceptable for crown‑jewel IP.

Lock‑in, sovereignty, and cost

• Commenters emphasize that hyperscaler dominance is itself a strategic weakness; moving off US cloud is framed as reducing single‑vendor and single‑country risk.
• Others argue long‑term European contracts could be risky if local providers can’t absorb hardware cost swings or match hyperscaler resilience.
• Cost comparisons: EU providers often cheaper per resource unit, but lack of higher‑level services and support quality can negate that advantage.

US protectionism, AI, and the broader power game

• Some see the US banning or constraining Huawei, DJI, TikTok, Chinese EVs and AI chips as evidence it can’t compete fairly, which will push innovation and alternatives outside the US.
• A longer geopolitical thread suggests Europe is slowly forced toward its own stack (cloud, AI, telecoms) much like China did, because depending on an unpredictable US undermines long‑term sovereignty.