Posts tagged: sovereignty
Sovereignty Has No Free Tier
I tried to run a side project without a single US company touching it. Turns out Cloudflare's free tier makes building almost free, and nothing in Europe or Germany comes close. That missing free tier is quietly killing companies before they're ever founded.
June 21, 2026Europe Has the Apps. Nobody Uses Them. Here's Why.
Everyone blames the Cloud Act for why we're all still on Discord and Slack. But the EU alternatives mostly exist, and some of them are good. The reason they never get traction isn't the one we keep telling ourselves.
July 4, 2026Europe Is Finally Building a Frontier Model. The Money Says Otherwise.
The EU just picked a team to build an open-source frontier model in all 24 languages. It's the right move, honestly. Then you look at what OpenAI loses in a single month, and at why Mistral's reasoning story stalled, and the size of the bet gets hard to ignore.
July 6, 2026GPT-5.6 Is Very Good. You Need Washington's Permission to Use It.
OpenAI's new flagship model looks excellent. It also shipped with something I've never seen on a commercial product before: an access list that was, in OpenAI's own words, shared with the US government. The sovereignty argument I kept waving off just got a very concrete shape.
July 10, 2026I Keep Writing That Europe Is Losing. Munich Just Switched On 10,000 GPUs.
I've written a run of gloomy posts about European sovereignty. Then I actually added up what got built and funded this year, and I owe the continent at least a partial apology. Emphasis on partial.
July 17, 2026Soofi Is Germany's First Open Model. It Comes With a Form, Of Course.
The first sovereign German open model was trained on the Munich cloud I just praised, tops the German benchmarks, and is arguably the most genuinely open thing in this whole story. To download it I had to fill in a form and wait. One step forward, two steps back, and I say that as a German.