> thing. Long term stable large contracts are great simulation for a market.
They are not. It can hurt Airbus very much if a provider says they can provide a certain level of hardware/software for 10 years and in three years the RAM or storage goes through the roof and the provider is not big enough to absorb all the losses.
People don’t choose the hyperscalers because they are based in the US, they choose them because they are too big to fail and have pretty much unlimited resources and have multiplr streams of revenue.
Airbus is ~30% government owned by France/Germany/Spain and others. It is funded both as a private business and as a European "champion" to compete with Boeing.
It is also likely to get the majority of the European civil, commercial, and military orders now.
There is no reason why Europe can't build a hyperscalar cloud service. The skills and the software and hardware are all transferrable technology.
European defence budgets are being ramped up, spending some billions on data centres and comms is a no-brainer as part of that.
European governments contracting to a European cloud provider would be more than enough to fund the provisioning.
I would expect a contract review for millions in hosting to review how the company will mitigate those costs. Normally you would expect them to contract away the risk themselves. In fact the current rise in RAM costs is due to exactly this, big hosters contracting for long term RAM certainty.
There's a futures market for RAM prices if you want to hedge that risk. No different than corn.
> There's a futures market for RAM prices if you want to hedge that risk. No different than corn.
Yeah, and that's a fine vehicle for insuring against this risk for a finance company or for an individual.
I am prepared to be wrong on the following take (as it is based on nothing more than just "it came to me in a dream"), but my hunch is that neither Airbus nor the EU state governments are currently even attempting to hedge the RAM price risk by accumulating a RAM futures stash on the market.