#europe-strategic-independence

#europe-strategic-independence

OpenAI announced plans for its Stargate program, a global data center initiative valued at $500bn, to be established in the UK, specifically at Cobalt Park on Tyneside. The project aimed to house around 8,000 Nvidia AI processors by the first quarter of 2026, but that deadline has now passed without any construction starting.

66% of internet users live where political or social sites are blocked, and 78% are in countries where people have been arrested for online posts. New social media regulations have emerged in dozens of countries in the past year alone.

The UK has about 1.59GW of currently installed datacentre capacity at just under 190 sites. If we add existing capacity to that which is planned to complete by 2030 and which has planning consent, we get 4.9GW.

The new checks, part of the EU's new Entry/Exit System (EES), collect digital personal records of third country nationals travelling to the Schengen area and replace the manual stamping of passports.

Austria's Defense Ministry stated, 'There have indeed been requests and they were refused from the outset.' The refusal is based on the country's neutrality policy, which has been in effect since 1955.

Sovereignty, locality, and 'alternative cloud' strategies are often treated as simple settings in hyperscaler consoles. Pick a region, check a compliance box, and move on. IT consultancy Coinerella posted about replacing a typical US-centric startup baseline with a 'Made in the EU' stack. They treat sovereignty as an architectural posture and an operating model that can save money.

Prost, whose name now shares the same list as some of the world's most dangerous people, from terrorists to North Korean hackers and Iranian spies, described the effect of sanctions on her life as "paralyzing" in an interview by The Irish Times. This high-profile case provides a glimpse into the disruption that being cut off from the U.S. can have on a person's everyday life; lawmakers and government leaders across Europe are growing more aware of the looming threat facing them at home, and their over-reliance on U.S. technology.

AWS has moved quickly to flood the European continent with its elastic compute fabric, but while it may take two years to bring a new datacenter online, securing power for the facilities can take up to seven years, Pamela MacDougall, who heads energy markets and regulation for AWS EMEA, said in an interview with Reuters this week.