So you decided to modernize your company. You are in the EU and producing highly technical products and/or handling sensitive data, like advanced electronics, military or medical. You have not been living under a rock, so you now that there is power in measurement and data, and especially big data, and a lot of measurements. The industry meta-game is to offload the data handling to Google Cloud, AWS or Microsoft Azure, but sending all your data to servers in the US concerns you. Especially with the current state of global politics. So what options do you have?
Let’s Explore!
EU’s plans
The EU have taken some initiatives in areas relating to Edge Computing:
- GDPR 1
- Horizon Europe
- European Chips Act
GPDR is often bashed as a bureaucratic excercise creating unnecessary hurdles for innovation. And it has indeed been very difficult to change our habits around personal data since it came out. I can testify to this as a scout leader, not being able to carry the phone numbers and names of my scouts has been very impractical. But it turned out to be nothing more than that. A change of habits. Now I would argue that this is mostly a guardrail for our personal lives. One of the few official ones. GDPR is many things, and with respect to Edge Compute it states some basic principles seeking to minimize collection, storage and transfer of data. For this purpose Edge Computing fits “as a foot in a sock” as a dane would say it. Edge computing turns IoT on it’s head, and moves the powerful compute as close to the devices as possible, leaving initial data processing and some “decision making” to the devices themselves or a nearby server on the same local network. Note that I included the less used intermediary term Fog Compute under Edge Compute, since I believe that with respect to privacy concerns, this is mostly the same thing.
Infrastructure issues
Edge computing is of course enabled by the compute actually being possible on smaller devices or at least less expensive machines, since you will have to deploy more of them.
Horizon Europe Some investments Edge Computing may be funded by the money in this initiative.
European Chips Act is €43 billion being invested in doubling the electronic chips production to 20% of global output by 2030.
Edge computing also has its bright future in AI, called Edge AI. I purchased my self a device with the rediculous name “Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit”, to test out one of the products driving IoT further. So i look forward to testing different models for local LLM users and comparing them in a future blog post. Maybe also reflect on the limitation of the models currently available for edge compute.
I hope that European chip making capabilities will be in the game at some point, but until then, we must at least be the best at USING the modern technologies available to us.
Skills issues
EU may also have some gaps in the skills necessary for building a healthy infrastructure for modern IoT and Edge Compute and AI. Gaia-X 2 may be a solution. Let’s explore this in a future post.