Trump's actionism bluntly shows that the trade war - which is currently still primarily taking place between the US and China - has escalated into a technology war.

"We are only at the beginning of the escalation spiral," Jörg Wuttke, President of the European Chamber of Commerce, told Capital in September. "This has had little impact on European companies so far," Wuttke continues, "but it will come!"
This makes it all the more worrying that the German flagship project Industry 4.0 is becoming increasingly dependent on the American tech giants - above all Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. The trend towards comprehensive IoT solutions in the cloud is clearly playing into the hands of the US tech giants. They invest billions in expanding their cloud offerings every year.
Which German or European company could keep up?

Although the original German companies such as Bosch, Siemens and Trumpf initially thought they were in a pool position for the task of digitizing factories, the paint is now off: all of them enthusiastically tackled the market with their own Industry 4.0 platforms and all of them failed more or less miserably.
Only Siemens is still bucking the US dominance with Mindsphere.
dominance. So is the game already lost before it really gets going?

The resistance

Meinrad Happacher, Editor at Large of Computer&AUTOMATION

© WEKA Trade Media

Europe is not yet admitting defeat: a delicate resistance is forming against the data dictatorship of the US tech giants - both with regard to the data of private individuals and companies.
In June, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Peter Altmaier and his French counterpart Bruno Le Maire announced the establishment of the GAIA-X Foundation in a virtual press show.
The founding members include companies such as BMW, Bosch, Deutsche Telekom, the Friedhelm Loh Group, SAP and Siemens. The Foundation's project objective is to maintain European data sovereignty by creating a common digital ecosystem. The start-up funding of 40 million euros thrown into the ring by Altmaier is not expected to make a big splash, but it is a start. And at least the name - a mix of realism and optimism - is encouraging: after all, the name of the project is derived from Gaia, one of the first Greek deities to emerge from chaos!

Your thoughts on the subject? Write to Meinrad Happacher directly with your opinion or assessment. We look forward to hearing from you.

More articles by Meinrad Happacher:

The tuned 5G

The requirements for the edge

More collaboration thanks to the cloud

The reality of industrial 5G