AWS and Azure have regional data centers in each one of the countries. Data in EU stays in EU. The CAPEX risk is entirely borne by US companies while being operated by locals following local laws. These states can easily nationalize these data centers if, say, US does something really bad to them. So the geopolitical risk for using AWS or Azure seems low to me.
The idea that we (Canada, any EU country, etc) can "easily nationalize" data centers running on bespoke hardware that we do not have a supply chain for, bespoke software which we do not control or have the source to, running workloads for customers as dictated by business relationships with a (now hostile) foreign company, with the descriptions of those workloads almost certainly stored in said hostile foreign companies local (i.e. foreign to us) servers... is absurd.
It's even more absurd to suggest that this can be done in response to the US becoming more hostile than they are today. By the time they are more hostile, we're talking about open hostilities. It's only safe to assume that they will have exfiltrated all the data they are interested in, and then sabotaged or destroy as much of the hardware as possible (as can be done remotely), making the data center next to worthless. And prior to nationalization it was "their data-center", they were entirely within their "rights" to sabotage and destroy it.
The time to migrate away from data-centers to minimize geo political risk is now, not when the current data centers operators are actively trying to deal damage.
Similar to that jets effectively would be grounded the second that the US decides they would not be exportable to a former ally, my guess is that not many would, in this scenario, believe a former US owned AWS region in Europe to operate completely autonomously to the degree that it can be “easily” nationalized.
But long before that, I believe there will be other noticeable effects.
As someone working in a medium sized European company, with substantial investments across private infrastructures, AWS, GCP and some Azure, I can testify to that since last couple of weeks the Public Cloud Exit strategies around having services being prepared is a very hot topic. This concerns both existing services preparations as well as enforcing standards and configurations for new services.
'Data stays in EU' is not true: the US CLOUD act means that American law enforcement and intelligence agencies can and do access data stored in data centers operated by American companies, whether or not they are on American soil.
What does the hardware give you? These datacenters are dependent on US teams, US processes using US maintained software. It's just a bunch of fast deprecating assets, which would need a full reinstall by a team of an AWS-like entity built from ground up.
Like I said, go have a look at what happens when we lose reserve status and get back to me about how what you just said is in any way relevant. Parenthetically bullshit like this is why I invest in real estate.
See what happens to real estate when the boomers start dying.
The reserve status is overblown. The question is if not the USD what asset would reserves go into. Certainly not the yuan with china's currency controls.
Lol you want to know what happens to real estate when the boomers start keeling over en masse? Blackrock et al increase their rental portfolio, rent and land prices continue to rise. What, you think the largest hedge funds on the planet made a mistake when they started investing in residential real estate? Check your assumptions.
Nationalization of foreign assets occurs at an extreme level of hostility that stable European governments would have no chance of doing, unless it had been done first by the other side. It is the kind of thing that happened in Venezuela.
As a reference point, the US has not nationalized Russian or Chinese national's assets. Nationalization is much worse than poor diplomatic relations, on a scale of retaliation it is close to war.
