Thierry Labro: What are your two big announcements today?
Anthony Cirot: Firstly, we're opening an office with Google teams in Luxembourg. An 'official' Google office with teams who will be there to look after our customers, whether in the private or public sector, but also to drive the ecosystem around the subjects that are dear to us: data management and the application of artificial intelligence models to this data. The second is the opening of a centre of excellence dedicated to artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, in partnership with the University of Luxembourg. In the same way, this will enable us to stimulate the ecosystem, whether students, SMEs or large companies, to benefit from digital skills in these two areas, with the aim of moving Luxembourg forward. There's an announcement within the announcement, because in terms of cybersecurity, via our Google Dot Org programme, we're going to make an endowment of $500,000 that will give the university access to course content and advanced training on cybersecurity.
In terms of team size, could you tell us what this means for employment?
Our office will have between 10 and 100 people.
Why are these announcements being made now? Has there been a change in strategy?
It's really part of our expansion strategy. We always look at these issues in terms of local affinity and the desire to work with us. That's a determining factor. Since we announced in 2023 the launch of Clarence, the sovereign cloud, a joint venture between Proximus and LuxConnect, we have sensed a local appetite, particularly from the government, at the time of [the then] prime minister Xavier Bettel. An appetite to work with Google. We said to ourselves that we should go further. Let's bring Google's expertise to deploy our philosophy on AI and cybersecurity in the Luxembourg ecosystem.
Clarence is a pioneering project in Europe, and it's important to understand that while Google 'lends' its technologies, it doesn't make the updates itself and has no means of accessing the data... Which takes away some of your 'control' over the cloud value chain, doesn't it?
We're not obsessed with control. What matters is what companies are going to do with our technologies. This disconnected cloud offering is a pioneering use of this platform. The aim is to provide access to our services and Clarence will develop applications, such as for the [Luxembourg financial regulator] CSSF and the [Luxembourg government IT service] CTIE. Customers can locate data. A local player operates the system. But we will continue to make new technologies available, and it will be up to Clarence to decide whether or not to implement them. It's totally disconnected. Operated entirely in Luxembourg.
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Let's not get political, but the arrival in power of the Trump administration may put you in a tricky situation, since on the one hand it is asking you for access and on the other you are developing sovereignty products elsewhere than in the United States.
What's interesting, regardless of politics, is that we anticipated these sovereignty issues well before 2023. If you look at my region, Southern Europe and the Middle East, over the last three years we have created partnerships in most of the major European countries, including Luxembourg with Clarence, Thales in France, Telecom Italia in Italy and Inmarsat in Spain. A sphere of sovereign clouds, because customers want them. When it comes to defence, it's necessarily disconnected, everyone understands that. But we can also see that the public sector and regulated sectors such as finance and insurance are also asking us for this type of solution in order to comply with their regulatory frameworks. It's a response to market expectations.
What's also interesting is that Europeans complain about regulation, whereas companies like yours consider that it's part of the environment and that we have to live with it.
Our philosophy is to adapt to the ecosystem as it is. And to comply with the demands of the regulators. We anticipate. We are trying to find the most effective technical schemes possible, which is why we are in discussions, including with the European Commission and the European Central Bank. We need to keep up the pace. Companies cannot wait one or two years. The one-year cycles for releasing an application have become more like three-week-one-month cycles. In three weeks, we want to have an AI-based application up and running. We're somewhere in between. We have a very, very strong innovation movement and regulators who are doing their job, and we are trying to find compromises. But we need to build momentum. Today, we are ready. Today, if we are asked for sovereign artificial intelligence applications, we in Luxembourg are capable of delivering them today.
The other aspect is cyber security. Here again, the US president's statements suggest that Luxembourg, like other countries, will have to spend more on defence. But it won't necessarily be buying tanks or fighter planes. So can your initiative be seen as accompanying this trend?
Absolutely. We have the good fortune and bad fortune to live in a world of constant attacks. We have to protect ourselves as application providers - I'm talking about Google - our attack surface is very large. We have put procedures in place to protect ourselves. We have turned these procedures into products. And we make these products available to the ecosystem. One way of protecting ourselves - bearing in mind that the fortress [approach] hasn't worked for years, whatever the firewalls or whatever you put in place - is to have the capacity to manage a huge amount of data, to correlate data, and so we need to use Big Data and AI technologies to automate and understand what happens when we are the victim of an attack. You need 'cameras' inside and outside and if you understand what's going on, you can put policies in place. You just need to know that you're under attack. It's all this knowledge of the world of cybersecurity that we've put into courses, which we're going to deliver in partnership with the University of Luxembourg.
Google has a participative philosophy. Open source is not just an empty word with us. Open training is about giving back to the community. And if you tell yourself that they are the best adapted, so much the better, if not, you will have acquired in-depth knowledge of what is going on. If you invest, it's clear that you expect a return on your investment. What will speak louder will be the partnerships that are gradually formed. Including in the world of digital natives, the startups. We currently incubate 20 to 25 Luxembourg startups. It would be great to see Luxembourg unicorns emerge and to support them over the long term.
A second part of this interview, conducted ahead of an event held Thursday at the Philharmonie, will be devoted entirely to the Bissen data centre. It will be published on Friday morning.
Read the original French-language version of this interview here / lire en français