[HN Gopher] Microsoft bets on Germany in EUR3.2B AI push
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Microsoft bets on Germany in EUR3.2B AI push
Author : thunderbong
Score : 122 points
Date : 2024-02-17 10:19 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| I would invest a round 4B EUR, 3.2B is an awkward number.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Probably they forgot the other wallet with 800 million euros in
| the other pants
| hef19898 wrote:
| Happens all to me all the time, really annoying when you
| don't want to be cheap on tips...
| ben_w wrote:
| If you've got enough money that EUR800 million is something
| you'd spend purely for the aesthetics of your invoice, please
| feel free to send the extra my way.
| dubcanada wrote:
| Joking, but surely Microsoft does.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| It doesn't go well when reporting on it, but clearly they must
| have actually went for 3,220,176,896 EUR, signalling to Germany
| that they are 0xBFF00000's
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Isn't power really expensive in Germany? Wonder why they would
| build data centers there.
| lispm wrote:
| Germany is in the middle of Europe? 3rd largest economy (by
| GDP) in the world? Lots of customers nearby? It has one of the
| world-wide largest Internet exchange nodes in Frankfurt (-> DE-
| CIX)? It helps to adhere to EU (-> GDPR) and German regulations
| having data local, when wanting to serve EU customers?
| openplatypus wrote:
| > It helps to adhere to EU (-> GDPR) and German regulations
| having data local
|
| Not this again. The moment you transmit data to European
| based servers under control of US corporation you could just
| as well send it straight to the US. Same difference.
|
| Nobody cares if AWS, Azure or GCP have EU datacenters. They
| are for most part understood as under US control.
| V__ wrote:
| It's on a downwards trend again after the spike created by the
| war [1]. However, I don't think this is a big factor, since
| Microsoft is the second-biggest buyer of renewable energy, so
| other prices apply.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1346782/electricity-
| pric...
|
| [2] https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/news/bloombergnef-
| corpo...
| huppeldepup wrote:
| That second link ... it's depressing how a site about
| renewable _energy_ writes an article about cumulative
| _energy_ consumption but consistently fails to tell the
| difference between energy and power.
| wanderlust2021 wrote:
| EU's best AI/ML universities are nearby (ETH, Tubingen,
| Munich,...)
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| I think British, Swiss and French universities top those in
| Germany for AI/ML.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| ETH is Switzerland. The claim was "nearby". And when you're
| in Germany's south (even in Munich, which is relatively far
| east), the major French universities are pretty accessible,
| too.
| shankr wrote:
| They could have just gone to Switzerland and Germany
| would have been nearby! Also you get Germand and French
| speakers! So easy to jump between France and Germany.
| locallost wrote:
| Electricity for the industry is cheaper, they are freed from
| some taxes (not sure which one) and obviously VAT is deductible
| which is not the case for end consumers.
|
| Regardless of that it's a myth anyway. Germany has a very
| competitive electricity market, and it basically works by
| having all the costs on the actual electricity bill (will not
| be 100% true in the coming years, but it was until now). Some
| other countries have cheaper electricity on paper, but cover
| the real costs with government money / taxes. France is the
| most obvious example as a neighbouring country.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| Why do you think it's a myth? It is true. Germany has one of
| the highest electricity prices in the world. It's well known
| because it's true.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| Residential electricity has the full rates on everything.
| Commercial electricity is a bit cheaper because taxes and
| network fees are reduced, and industrial electricity is
| even cheaper because the reductions are even higher.
|
| In case of the network fees, residential customers directly
| subsidize industrial customers: network fees cover the
| network operation costs, so it's a zero-sum game where one
| party's reduction is another party's increase.
|
| It's still somewhat expensive to operate electricity heavy
| industry in Germany, but much less outrageous than the
| residential prices that are usually used in for comparisons
| in the news.
| dubcanada wrote:
| There are also already tons of DCs in Germany. So obviously
| it's not prohibiting anything.
| leobg wrote:
| I pay ~50 Euro cents per kWh. Even if you gifted me a GPU
| server it would be cheaper for me to use the cloud.
| Scharkenberg wrote:
| Change your provider, you're overpaying by about 20 ct.
| sveme wrote:
| Why do you pay so much? Latest contracts are 23 Cents/kWh, I
| pay about the same using tibber's dynamic tariff. Sounds like
| a massive rip off.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| His current provider sends him regularly leaflets with
| windmills. No one would resist that.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| Check your provider's current rate, it's probably closer to
| 30 cents. Then call them and ask if they want you to switch
| at the next opportunity or if they're willing to hoist you
| over into the new rate.
|
| They even backdated my contract change by a few months when I
| did that.
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| If anyone cares to fix title, here's the character to copy-paste:
| EUR (3,2BEUR)
| culturestate wrote:
| Using the name rather than the symbol is just the Reuters house
| style for non-USD currencies in headlines.
| V__ wrote:
| I haven't seen it mentioned yet on Hacker News, but Germany is
| about to pass the "Gesundheitsdatennutzungsgesetz". This bill
| allows anonymized access for researchers to all German health
| care data. Data from over 83 million people.
|
| The example given by the health minister for how this might play
| out: Researchers find an interesting pattern in the data. They
| request the ministry to ask the matched people for permission to
| become participants in a study or direct access. If permission is
| given, the anonymization is lifted in part and a study could move
| forward. This alone would make Germany a pretty fascinating place
| for future AI research.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Sounds perhaps a bit naive, as one might expect from German
| government, when it comes to data. How much of such data does
| one need to de-anonymize someone? How easy will it be to
| accidentally slip identifying data in using whatever kind of
| system, that is supposed to be used? How easy will it be for
| any company like MS to correlate that data with all that other
| data they extracted without user consent?
| lb4r wrote:
| >How easy will it be for any company like MS to correlate
| that data with all that other data they extracted without
| user consent?
|
| Doable to some extent, but would they really learn much that
| we haven't already told them, given our propensity to Google
| for symptoms and diseases?
|
| Personally, my worry here, if I had some embarrassing medical
| history that I wouldn't want people to know about, would be
| some malicious party gaining access to de-anonymized data and
| using it to blackmail, or just simply making it public.
|
| Edit: Come to think of it, insurance companies could probably
| have a field day with a data set like this.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| The civilized world has universal health coverage, so the
| insurance thing isn't really a problem except in one
| particular country. But the malicious release is definitely
| a problem.
| fileeditview wrote:
| It never is a problem until it is. Insurance companies in
| Germany are also not benevolent. If there is a case where
| they do not have to pay they won't. If they can use data
| to save money they will do it, even if it worsens your
| conditions.
| snowpid wrote:
| " Insurance companies in Germany are also not benevolent.
| " You know, that the leaders of public insuarances are
| voted by the customers.
| angra_mainyu wrote:
| One might argue that the free market is consumer-driven
| voting.
| wirrbel wrote:
| Not all public insurances perform these elections but
| some, e.g. Barmer GEK, Techniker Krankenkasse, DAK-
| Gesundheit, Kaufmannische Krankenkasse - KKH,
| Handelskrankenkasse und BKK RWE and I think also AOK.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| It doesn't feel adversarial as a customer. Never did for
| me, never heard it from others. They aren't even regular
| companies - they have a special legal status. Private
| insurance, which is also available, is different.
| angra_mainyu wrote:
| Blatantly false.
|
| I've been in Europe two decades and aside from health
| insurance being key to more than a few countries, private
| health insurance is relatively common in tandem with
| public health services.
| wirrbel wrote:
| Quite typically there is basic service via a welfare
| system and additional or premium service with insurances.
| I pay into the public health system at a rate
| proportional to my income (which is more than what I
| would pay if I had a worse-paying job for the same
| service), and I have an additional dental insurance which
| insures my teeth.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The "civilized world" does not, however, have universal
| life insurance nor disability insurance that would cover
| the full standard of living. Those are, at least in
| Germany, privatized, and companies could benefit a lot
| from having access to some extra data.
|
| I'm not sure that getting caught using such data would be
| sufficiently bad news to be not worth it.
| graemep wrote:
| No, because medial data can also be used for things like
| life insurance, insurance against loss of earnings caused
| by sickness, and probably a lot of other things.
| V__ wrote:
| The companies and researchers get access to the data with
| oversight but the data isn't shared. They basically get
| access to a server to run their analysis but can't retrieve
| the data.
| chopin wrote:
| There is almost zero retribution for non-compliance. This
| law is ripe for abuse. It's only a question when, not if,
| the data will become public. Conveniently, people with
| private insurance are exempted, which are most of our
| politicians and all of our public servants.
| V__ wrote:
| Wrong. Potential fines for a GDPR breach, under which
| this could fall under, are 4% of the firm's worldwide
| annual revenue from the preceding financial year. But
| there is also a criminal code in the works for violating
| data provided by this bill.
| belter wrote:
| Incredibly naive. Easy to de-anonymize. First they come for
| the books, now AI practitioners come for the health data.
|
| "Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete
| datasets using generative models" -
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10933-3
|
| "...We here propose a generative copula-based method that can
| accurately estimate the likelihood of a specific person to be
| correctly re-identified, even in a heavily incomplete
| dataset. On 210 populations, our method obtains AUC scores
| for predicting individual uniqueness ranging from 0.84 to
| 0.97, with low false-discovery rate. Using our model, we find
| that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in
| any dataset using 15 demographic attributes. Our results
| suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are
| unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization
| ..."
| jimkoen wrote:
| A similar paper, ~3k citations, on deanonymization in
| sparse datasets:
|
| https://systems.cs.columbia.edu/private-systems-
| class/papers...
|
| It's well known within the sphere that anonymization is
| hard and deanonymization is trivial. The original Netflix
| prize around their recommender system also had issues with
| deanonymization.
| jimkoen wrote:
| It is important to note the the original draft for the law
| does not talk about anonymizing data, but rather
| pseudonymizing of data. So no attemt is made at keeping
| identities of patients truly anonymous (which has been
| repeadeatly proven to be impossible in sparse datasets).
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I would hope that there is a way for the subjects themselves to
| be involved in the decision before their data is de-anonymised
| luplex wrote:
| I think the plan is an opt-out solution. But they really
| don't want many people to actually opt out.
|
| And it's a legal challenge to make sure that everyone
| understands how and why they should opt out, even my grandma.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| How much I love these solutions where you're stripped of
| your rights to privacy be default, but if you want it back
| you need to invest your free time in order to go through
| the awesome process of bureaucracy, really for these people
| we're just disposable beings that should be ready to give
| up their limited time in order to act on any bullshit
| politicians think about
| CaptainFever wrote:
| The issue is that an opt in solution might make the
| system unviable in the first place, which reduces utility
| for everyone. Of course, opt out should be simple, but if
| the majority of people don't care and the data is
| anonymised properly, I don't really see the issue since
| this is used to further the sciences.
| V__ wrote:
| Do you mean the bullshit to allow innovation in healt
| treatments and research?
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| There is always a greater good that can be used to strip
| people of what they want is their right to a private and
| quiet life, what was yesterday, encryption in
| communication for safety, their medical data for
| research? There is always something to take away, I don't
| care about medical research, it is my right to have my
| medical data not shared with researchers, if someone else
| wants, then it's their right, I don't see why the default
| has to be to take away
| RandomLensman wrote:
| When using public healthcare resources and anonymized
| data?
| dizzydes wrote:
| This should absolutely be done everywhere.
|
| It will exponentially reduce time to cures for various
| diseases. The amount of red tape in academia and pharma to do
| simple data studies is wild...
| chopin wrote:
| My medical data is affected and I can't disagree more. As
| well pharma is not interested in finding cures, for obvious
| reasons. I am getting all the downsides with no of the
| upsides.
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| Sweden is usually ranking vet high on health care, both in
| results and research/innovation. One big reason for this is
| that we very early on gathered a lot of medical statistics on
| the population through the "health ministry", which have later
| been used in research. All this have fostered and cultivated
| innovation. The biggest victory however is the benefit of the
| results it had brought the population (and the world).
|
| If done with care this can have a big impact! Very exciting
| Germany is doing this!
| rcbdev wrote:
| When it comes to digitalization and privacy in Germany, no
| good intention goes unpunished.
| peteradio wrote:
| Doesn't sound anonymous if it can be trivial unmasked. Sounds
| like the setup for one of the most egregious medical leaks of
| all time. Germany pwned.
| V__ wrote:
| It can't be trivially unmasked. If approved researchers get
| controlled access to the data with oversight, but the data
| itself isn't shared with the companies.
| Lichtso wrote:
| There is no such thing. Information is not a physical good
| that you can store in a safe. Access to it implies sharing
| it. At best what you can do is an API limit so that the
| thing is not immediately copied in its entirety. But then
| again, what possible statistical insights could you gain
| with only a small fraction?
| V__ wrote:
| They get access to servers and/or data centers where they
| can run their analysis. Its trivial to control for data
| egress in such a scenario.
| chopin wrote:
| None of this is mentioned in that law. The worst thing
| that can happen is getting excluded from the data for
| some time.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Next thing you see is letter from _Rundfunkbeitrag_ suggesting
| to pay for the whole year in advance because your cancer doesn
| 't have good prognosis. Nothing personal or fraudulent you
| know... it will be _convenient_.
| shankr wrote:
| I don't think people understood the joke since they might not
| know what Rundfunkbeitrag is!
|
| Everyone outside of German has to face death and taxes. In
| Germany you face death, taxes and Rundfunkbeitrag.
| jug wrote:
| This might be good strategically from the perspective of EU
| companies where the physical location of operations can matter a
| lot depending on your field of business, e.g. NIS 2 Directive for
| energy companies and other sensitive infrastructure.
|
| But they'll face competition too of course! I can't wait to see
| more development from European actors and projects like Mistral,
| TrustLLM, and also GPT-SW3 for the Nordics! There's much in
| motion on the European stage right now.
| schleck8 wrote:
| They don't face much competition for datacenter locations in
| Europe. Germany has a really good location being relatively
| centered to the continent depending on the city, and DE CIX as
| a gigantic internet exchange. Most datacenters are located
| around that exchange. The only two locations that come close to
| Frankfurt am Main in datacenter count to my knowledge are Paris
| and Amsterdam, but neither has that geographical advantage for
| latency.
| lima wrote:
| It goes both ways, of sorts - DE-CIX is also a consequence of
| all the large DCs being there :-)
|
| Interestingly, Tier 1 transit pricing is increasingly
| competitive and DE-CIX access is more expensive (relatively
| speaking) in recent years.
| dalex00 wrote:
| Conspiracy view... Maybe just an indirect bribe so German
| government votes in favour for the tech giant on EU level laws...
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| "Legal bribes" with dedicated budgets and departments at
| corporations are absolutely a thing (lookup Siemens), only in
| Europe we avoid the word "lobbying". It's not conspiracy at
| all.
| rcbdev wrote:
| "Kickbacks" is the term used internally at Siemens for this
| modus. They only document it well for their CEE subsidiaries
| but the fish rots at the head.
| supergirl wrote:
| hard to understand what exactly they are investing in. just
| building a data center to suck up the green energy is not such a
| great deal for germany
| lencastre wrote:
| Something something Dreiundzwanzig und Ich.
| ladyanita22 wrote:
| care to explain?
| andsoitis wrote:
| 23andme
|
| (dreiundzwanzig und mich)
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Didn't they have a recent data leak?
| Hendrikto wrote:
| I think that was OP's point: Gathering such data in a
| centralized place is inherently risky.
| ruszki wrote:
| Are there countries which have universal healthcare, and health
| care data is not stored already at a centralized place? This is
| not new at all. At least definitely not in Europe.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Romania has universal healthcare, if pathetic, and health
| care data is likely not stored at all, and in any case not at
| a centralized place. And we're definitely in Europe, the EU
| even.
|
| Admittedly, this may be a bit besides the point. Still, I
| think the universality of your assertion is based mostly on
| thinking that the world is made only of a handful of
| "important" countries.
| Lichtso wrote:
| Germany had many big external investment + government subvention
| projects involving factories, data centers etc. announced in the
| recent years. None of them materialized and they got canceled
| because of the German balanced budget amendment [0].
|
| [0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuldenbremse_(Deutschland)
| fahrradflucht wrote:
| What exactly does it mean to invest 3.2BEUR in Germany? Does it
| mean this is actually spend in Germany - as in for goods and
| services produced in Germany, or does it mean they order an
| astonishing amount of GPUs at Nvidia and put them into the
| Frankfurt region because that's just one of the most popular
| regions latency wise to serve Europe?
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39411061
| m3kw9 wrote:
| MS need its own AGI strategy as they ain't getting it from OpenAI
| from that 10b investment
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > MS need its own AGI strategy as they ain't getting it from
| OpenAI from that 10b investment
|
| Microsoft will neither get AGI from their own nor the OpenAI
| investment. The whole story of AGI is just a nice science-
| fiction story marketing pitch to relieve investors of their
| money. :-)
| charles_f wrote:
| > double the capacity of its AI and data centre infrastructure in
| the country and expand its training programmes,
|
| So installing GPUs in the existing German Azure datacenters
| (likely most of the money), and spending some of the time of
| their existing field teams to train customers to use it.
|
| I think the "bet" is a bit emphatic there, Germany has had
| protective laws for their data for a long time, which is why
| they've had local datacenters for a long time.
|
| It's a logical place to start massive deployment of GPUs in
| Europe if you don't want to exclude its largest economy from the
| party
| alephnerd wrote:
| Microsoft also has a Privacy Shield re-certification coming up
| this year [0].
|
| [0] -
| https://www.privacyshield.gov/ps/participant?id=a2zt0000000K...
| aj7 wrote:
| Is Germany being used for development or as a database?
|
| I have reservations about Germany's 9-5/work-life balance culture
| being compatible with high performance in development.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I thought Germany was famously an OSS leader? Thought all govt
| machines ran Linux. Maybe it's just certain municipalities.
| undebuggable wrote:
| Someone somewhere is using WSL. Was enough to tick the "OSS"
| checkbox.
| Krasnol wrote:
| There is an interesting story on this topic:
| https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/
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