Google’s $15 billion Indian data centre has drawn protests reading “We cannot drink DATA.” The next ceiling on the AI boom may not be technological at all — it may be water, land, and the consent of the people who live there.
On July 16, Airbus signed a multi-year contract to move roughly 900 of its most critical applications — ERP, CRM, manufacturing and aircraft-design systems — from Amazon Web Services to the French cloud provider Scaleway, to keep them under European control and beyond the reach of US law. It is the largest public defection by a European industrial prime from a US hyperscaler on sovereignty grounds — and the Scaleway infrastructure already runs Mistral’s models. gafam.ai flagged the cloud layer as Europe’s blind spot three weeks ago. This is what closing it looks like — and what it still does not solve.