Hetzner struggles with "Made in EU" AI initiative, cites unexpected hurdles

A startup founder's attempt to build exclusively on European infrastructure revealed significant operational friction. The project required extensive self-hosting and piecing together services from multiple providers to avoid U.S. giants.

The founder, identified only as Robert, detailed his technical stack in a post on Hacker News. He cited data sovereignty, GDPR compliance, and reducing dependency on American hyperscalers as primary motivations for the project.

Core computing and storage needs were met by German provider Hetzner. Robert praised its pricing and performance for virtual machines, load balancers, and object storage.

Other European firms filled critical service gaps. France-based Scaleway provided transactional email, a container registry, and an observability stack. Slovenia’s Bunny.net delivered content delivery, DNS, and DDoS protection.

AI inference workloads presented a major challenge. Robert identified Nebius as one of the few viable European options for GPU compute, a key requirement for many modern applications.

The project required self-hosting numerous applications to maintain data locality. This included running Gitea for source control and Plausible for analytics on a personal Kubernetes cluster.

Transactional email services proved particularly difficult to source within Europe. Robert noted that options like Scaleway’s TEM service lack the ecosystem and integrations of U.S. competitors like SendGrid.

Leaving the GitHub development platform was described as a significant hurdle. The move away from its integrated ecosystem of Actions and Issues was likened to "leaving a city you've lived in for a decade."

The effort highlights the practical obstacles facing the EU's push for technological sovereignty. While achievable, building a complete stack requires accepting more complexity and a less mature service ecosystem.

Developing.