The governance of innovation, digital sovereignty under the troubled skies of the cloud
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Nvidia has announced a “multi-year partnership” with Microsoft to build “one of the world’s most powerful AI supercomputers,” designed to handle the massive processing workloads needed to train machine learning algorithms. It will be the first public cloud – the infrastructure is Azure – to incorporate the entire Nvidia AI kit: GPU, networking and software. If you ask a European technologist what he thinks, he will tell you that it is one of those news that marks the umpteenth flight forward of non-European cloud providers. The supercomputer could in fact be used to “research and further accelerate advances in generative AI”, such as Dall-E and Stable Diffusion which use self-learning algorithms to create a wide range of content, such as text, code, digital images, video and audio.
According to Synergy Research Group estimates, global spending on cloud infrastructure services in the third quarter of the year soared to $57 billion. With Amazon, Microsoft and Google alone representing two-thirds of revenues and with
the top eight largest suppliers controlling more than 80% of the market.
Without wanting to be too sovereign of these eight giants, two are Chinese
and you are American.
Meanwhile, the team of Gaia-X, the association that supports digital sovereignty for Europe, is enriched by a new member: the European Central Bank. A year ago the European Cloud Alliance wanted by the European Commission was born. Both initiatives are born to offer a solution to the fragmentation of the European cloud market. But things aren’t going very well.
Here we would have the national strategic pole (PSN) of the cloud, wanted by the former minister Vittorio Colao, who launched the initiative to create a “national champion” to manage the public administration cloud and related services. The dossier is in the hands of the homonymous project company owned by Tim (45%), Leonardo (25%), Cdp (20%) and Sogei (10%) and led by the managing director Emanuele Iannetti. The new government seems to like the national champions a lot but one wonders if a more decisive political push isn’t needed for the project to go through. When fully operational, the hub will have to lead 75% of Italian administrations to use cloud services by 2026. It doesn’t seem like it but times are tight, indeed very tight. And not having a dedicated innovation ministry might not help. Upstream, however, the questions are different. Are we sure that the cloud and its services are not too complex a business to be managed by an in-house company? And even more upstream: is there still a digital sovereignty made in Europe?
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