Intel ME and AMD PSP operate at Ring -3, below the OS and hypervisor, and sit outside every European sovereign cloud certification framework.
Key Takeaways
Intel CSME and AMD PSP run independently with their own memory, network stack, and clock; host OS cannot monitor or block their traffic.
RISAA 2024 classified hardware manufacturers including Intel and AMD as “electronic communications service providers” subject to secret US government orders with gag clauses.
Intel AMT exposes TCP ports 16992-16995 for KVM, storage, and Serial-over-LAN redirection; PLATINUM nation-state actors used SOL as a covert exfiltration channel in 2017, exploiting a feature not a bug.
France’s SecNumCloud has nearly 1,200 requirements but ANSSI’s own director confirmed it contains no direct requirement for firmware backdoor prevention at the hardware layer.
AMD SEV-SNP confidential computing, meant to harden the PSP layer, was defeated in April 2026 by the Fabricked attack with 100% success rate via software-only exploit.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters flagged that the article ignores ARM entirely, which is a meaningful architectural alternative even if current datacenter marketshare is low and migration friction is real.
The GPU dependency angle was raised as a larger and more immediate gap: no European alternative exists for AI compute, with Nvidia data center revenue around $39B annually.
Discussion split on whether the article offers any actionable path forward, with some commenters questioning whether European fab investment or US cloud adoption is the more realistic outcome.
Notable Comments
@clearstack: GPU concentration may be the harder problem; no European alternative for AI compute workloads exists at any scale.
