Europe's shot to emerge from Silicon Valley shadow

NEVER LET A good crisis go to waste is an adage Europe could use now.

- Bloomberg

tunity if lawmakers and regulators move quickly to bolster its tech sector, a critical growth driver.

With key services from America like cloud computing and artificial intelligence potentially becoming more expensive, Europe's home-grown tech industry can reap an immediate advantage.

Trump may complain loudly about how the US has been a victim of global trade, but the biggest beneficiaries of the booming AI business have been American.

Now so-called hyperscalers — Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Alphabet — could suffer from Trump's tariff plans as the steel, aluminum, and copper they need to build vast data centers will become costlier.

Those expenses, coupled with the international resentment that Trump is cultivating, could increasingly put off Silicon Valley's foreign clients.

Dutch lawmakers have been calling on the government to stop the flow of data and apps to American cloud services.

Lucky for Europe it doesn't have to go far for alternatives, like France's OVH Groupe, Italy's Aruba, and Scaleway.

The French cloud computing firm, owned by telecommunications giant Iliad, has a low-single-digit share of the European cloud market, which is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.