GoKawiilOPINION European aerospace giant Airbus has lined up on the runway and is pushing the throttles forward as it prepares to evict apps from America.
Airbus has named French cloud services provider Scaleway as the destination for some 900 applications, with an initial 70 getting priority onboarding, as it seeks to put critical systems and data under European control. AWS, like all American platforms, can't protect Airbus's crown jewels from Donnie the Data Burglar, so it's best to repatriate them sharpish.
This by itself shows that digital sovereignty is a real commercial driver and not something concocted by Europe as some sort of virtue signal or a bargaining chip. Nobody would put sensitive data where the Russian or Chinese states could help themselves. America is now on that list. The details of the announcement are arresting too, with the critical list including ERP, CRM, and manufacturing systems.
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What isn't mentioned is supply chain management, which sure looks like a critical system from here considering that Airbus has 18,000 suppliers globally. This is a thorny problem, one that's far harder to bring home than even a 900-app migration. Supply chain management is all about moving data between companies, and of those 18,000 suppliers, 17,998 will be Microsoft shops.
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Even if the supply chain is managed through a lovely EU-hosted portal, all the supplier data will also live on those suppliers' systems. Airbus isn't ditching Microsoft any time soon because there's nowhere to go. Likewise Google productivity apps because the only place to go is Microsoft.
It doesn't matter that all of the above is as vital to Airbus pushing the tin out of the door as anything else. There's no quick fix, and no medium-term fix either. Longer term is another matter, and Airbus's announcement will figure heavily in this.
The other big lacuna in the announcement is AI. On the face of it, this is even more intractable. America is making a trillion-a-year gamble on developing frontier models and bit barn bonanzas, and if you want in, you have to be there. Thing is, Airbus doesn't want in. It has a six-pronged AI strategy, but none of those prongs involve agents or code generation or line-of-business automation. Knowledge extraction, support chatbots, decision support, flight automation – all things that can be built and deployed on-prem. Besides, would you even want your aircraft running code by Claude?
We can't truly know the mind of Airbus from what it chooses to tell us, but it looks very much like it doesn't want AI in critical systems, and where that's unavoidable, it wants to do it itself.
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