> So far, however, the law has done little to spur the construction of new semiconductor factories in Europe. The European Court of Auditors concluded last year that the EU is unlikely to achieve its goal of doubling Europe’s share of the global chip market by 2030.
They should make another law and probably a few more commissions of auditors.
I get the sarcasm, but its not like e.g. TSMC popped up in a environment of pure libertarian free market capitalism. It was, from the beginning, a project of the Taiwanese state, and without significant public influence there is no way it would have become what it is. Are the EU laws what's needed? IDK. But without a proper public industrial policy besides "low taxes and few regulations" there is no way Europe will be able to get significant semiconductor-production up, the rich-get-richer phenomenon is just to strong.
I think the point is that laws alone mean nothing. As you note, Taiwan was more active than just having commissions and signing papers.
Airbus proves the EU can do this. It remains to be seen if they still have the ability to take constructive action, or if “add more bureaucracy” is the only tool remaining in the toolbox.
Airbus has been grandfathered into the current legal situation. Today a future Airbus would not be able to even start collecting data for its initial Environmental Impact Study.
I get its sarcasm but TSMC has done so much to try to get the Americans getting some decent yields in their new factories and it's failing so hard, there's real questions about whether they can ever meet their targets. They've sent thousands of existing Taiwanese workers to help at this point and from anecdotal things I hear it's not going well. (I live in Taiwan)
This stuff is all blood, sweat and tears to get it done, and to be honest a culture.
You can't just buy it off the shelf. If that was possible everyone would have gone paid for it like an Ikea product years ago.
Investment is risky and uncertain. If you did not do anything because it might fail, you would do nothing at all.
The inability to cope with failure is a culture that is common in Europe. Failure is so personally devastating, so destructive to social and cultural standing that not only must you not take risks but other people must be actively prevented from taking risk.
Maybe the US investment doesn't work, but the US will have tried at least. Taiwan is, ironically, the perfect example of where the initial impetus came from the government because there was no culture of risk-taking. Parts of Europe have a savings culture that is very similar to Taiwan and led to very poor growth and very high inequality.
If the US keeps trying, they will succeed. On here, the view was that China could never build out this capacity, they did. The only way to guarantee failure is to never try.
> They've got huge monetary losses, if you're ok with that
USA passed the CHIPS Act and is spending close to a trillion dollars to strategically re-home all of TSMC's most advanced fab technology to Arizona as a matter of national security. Monetary losses don't matter when the point is to not be reliant or China in the event of South China Sea conflict.
I think the point of this article, and the warnings from ASML, is that Europe is not making the same effort.
But that's sorta of hits to the heart of my comment, it's not particularly working well. TSMC has 2 fabs in China and yields+costs are a fraction of whats coming out of Arizona, let alone in Hsinchu.
Like are you really going to buy a chip that costs 70% more out of national pride? Might work on some but think that very few else will sign up for that.
I don't want to speak bad about them but it's just general demand for semiconductors at this point, everyone is just buying it all up because they can. The Arizona plant still doesn't seem to be pumping out and the self-sufficiency target for the US doesn't seem all there. Im sorry to be the bearer of bad news but honestly it's a culture that's hard to replicate and its how it somehow gets done in one country on Earth. The 2030 target for the states surely isn't happening, it's way too ambitious.
People really don't understand how this stuff is borderline magic turning silicon into these things. There's so much that can go wrong at every step, it's the most advanced manufacturing process on Earth.
Once upon a time chips went down in value but I don't think that's happening anymore, lot of other people seem aware of that. Not to mention the semiconductor talent is getting eaten up like pancakes everywhere.
Well, we're stuck between a left-wing party and a left-wing party, both of whom, despite what they say, hate economic growth and try to restrict it at every opportunity.
And that's largely because the average Brit has terrible beliefs that actively make them poorer. A shockingly high percentage of people believe that building more houses won't lower costs.
I live in amerifatland. They're building new houses all the time, everywhere I look, entire complexes of them. "McMansions," we call them.
I make average US wages, have my entire adult life. I cannot afford a house in my city unless I buy a literal ruin in the ghetto. The suburbs are far more expensive, and that's where the McMansion complexes are. I don't know who's buying them, but it isn't me and likely never will be.
For left-wing governments in Britain, building houses is putting yourself out of a job.
Scotland is a good example: every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences so they attempt to build council houses, it is impossible for the government to build enough council houses to make up for multiple decades of underbuilding (this problem has accelerated significantly whilst they have been promising to build housing, had explicit targets, etc.), but at the next election they make the same promises (and people vote for them because there is no alternative).
The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.
The politics of this topic are very strange. The public is still at the stage where they think in vague terms that the problem is a lack of housing.
I believe the problem is worse in Scotland because the growth in council housing in the 60/70s was organised in order to create this permanent bloc vote. The same has happened in London where you have whole constituencies where 70% of the effective vote is void.
> every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences
This doesn’t add up. Promising to get more housing built is getting these people elected, but they can’t make good on this promise because then they will lose their election?
Happy to hear India got mentioned by the same executive during that conversation. We are just started buying from them. I went to Semicon India 2026, held in delhi last week. The energy was amazing. Really pleasant. all big names including ASML.
It's is heartening looking at a country like India and thinking that it only seems to be a little behind China on the same trajectory. The little flashes of news as they start settling in to more interesting and high tech industries. Whatever good or evil comes out of their growing geopolitical power at least that is another billion people with a clear enough path to wealth and prosperity.
I remember when China was poor and everyone was talking about how their communal society guarenteed poverty. Then they started getting wealthy and the story became their communal society was what allowed them to be wealthy. The US is similarly either propelled by or crippled by their individualism depending on whether they've had a good year or not. India will no doubt be similar.
IMO the evidence suggests it is mostly tax policy and whether people are allowed to start and run businesses. Culture is important insofar as it affects those areas of policy. Getting wealthy is literally as simple as being able to create new wealth and keep it, plus lots of time. People don't choose to stay poor unless someone with a gun forces them to be poor.
You could say the same of the aristocracy of Europe over the last few hundred years, but that has effedtively crumbled. There's remnants of "old money" families that were upper-class, but for the most part the merchant class took control of the system that held them down. It took many generations, but the blue blooded dynasties are a dying breed.
Arguably India has the class system tied to the prevailing religion, but religion too has faded with modernity. Systems have a habit of breaking under strain and time.
I am a critic of Indias caste system but China has a state sanctioned caste system while the caste system is condensed by the Indian state and the state takes explicit (many think it over does it) steps to try to mitigate the effects of the caste system
China on the other hand defined your government benefits and the jobs you may get based on where you were born. People born rurally have to fake documents to work illegally in cities.
India has a ton of problems, but china is much worse when it comes to human rights. It's not even right to compare the two countries. India is a flawed somewhat liberal democracy (especially for the region of the world, India is a shining beacon on a hill surrounded by repressive regimes), while China is essentially a dictatorship
I'm from what would have been considered a low caste in India. The moment people mention India, people bring up the caste system as if it's the cause of every issue there or as if other countries don't have similar problems. Unequal wealth distributions are common. While it makes sense for Indian nationals to want their government to do better than other countries and eliminate social inequality (a feat no other country has ever accomplished), outside observers comparing ought to benchmark countries against one another fairly. All countries have social inequality. If India were to eliminate social inequality it would become superior to most countries on the planet. That seems to me a utopian dream, but I understand why someone living there might want that.
For the rest of us, I think we need to be reasonable in our assessments, especially when the other country under discussion is China.
The Dutch govt is slowly nationalising the chip industry, by making taxes so high no company can survive international competition, and then using this tax money to buy stock in all deep tech companies calling it investing.
I'm fed up with the regular euro bashing. People are underestimating what EU countries can do. The whole history was similar. France, for example, was neither the first to build high-end luxury products nor was it the first to embrace the Industrial Revolution. It managed to catch up in any case.
EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.
I wish that the EU did the same as China did years ago, and that is to block any non-EU tech company from entering the market. We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.
China still does not have many companies on the level of American technology firms. Just restricting foreign competition in the domestic market is not enough for most places to compete; their domestic markets and investment levels are too underdeveloped to produce globally competitive companies.
The thing that produces competitive industries is requiring them to compete globally. That's how Chinese cars got good (Tesla joint venture -> independent Chinese Tesla -> competitive domestic companies).
The three main reasons why the EU struggles to produce strong text companies are, IMO:
1. EU laws and regulations are very burdensome and cover everything from employees to packaging waste.
2. There is not enough capital that gets invested in EU tech companies to pay high tech salaries, again largely driven by more restrictive financial rules.
The result of these two is that European engineers tend to leave for the US, and European companies struggle to grow to American size.
Around 70% of American billionaires made their money themselves, while in the EU a similar share inherited it. Despite all the talk about social mobility in Europe being better than in the US, the truth is that the ultrawealthy in Europe have created a regulatory environment which makes it nearly impossible for real competition to exist.
> EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.
Was that the halcyon period where they were too broken to fight back and got the continent split between the Americans and the Communists? Or the modern period where it turns out the security situation in Europe was so totally mishandled that we ended up with the Ukraine war?
The spectre of nukes getting used isn't dropping over time and this sort of grinding destructive war is probably raising the risk of a big conflagration. Everyone seems to be rearming.
This is not remotely racist. It's simply a fact, and the result of a lack of nationalist ideology.
Turns out if it's more economically efficient to simply import skilled workers, or outsource, then that's what will happen. Breeding and educating your own citizens in a first world country is very expensive. So you don't do it.
The only reason not to do this is national preference. Economically it makes sense, on a national level it makes sense, individually it's genocide.
Individually, you have to accept migrants if your personal demographic is below the replacement rate. Otherwise you will never retire, and your kids (if any) will work in a nursing economy at minimum wage.
It's petty and anti-nationalist to demand that your nation destroy it's own economy to fit your arbitrary political mold.
Misleading article, they are selling to corporations already who in turn have plans to create a few fabs in Europe. So it is maybe more about European companies who are not buying, but that rests on difficult capital availability and fragmented nature of the continent. Europe is not one country after all, someone wants a fab in Germany, but the why is it not in France or Sweeden.
The fab itself can still be "state of the art" even when the product isn't (Germany needs chips for its industry, not for gaming PCs or AI data centers).
You probably mixed it up with the Infineon Smart Power Fab.
The Infineon Smart Power Fab was opened some months ago and builds power ICs for the energy market. Probably something like ACDC and DCAC converter ICs. This is also needed in AI data centers.
https://www.infineon.com/de/regional/dresden/smart-power-fab
European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC), the TSMC fab in Dresden is still under construction and will produce logic chips in 28nm or 16nm. Bosch, Infineon, and NXP each have 10% share in this fab. I assume that it will mostly produce products which will be sold by these 3 companies, probably just the next generations from what they already sell. This fab was 50% subsidized by the German government.
GlobalFoundries also has a big 20nm Fab in Dresden.
The most advanced logic fab in the EU is the Intel fab in Ireland.
Bosch never said that though, the "AI" stuff was about the production methods used in the fab (along with a couple other buzzwords), it was never claimed that the fab produces chips "for AI". Instead these are fairly simple controllers for the automotive industry.
Can you share any official communication where somebody claimed this fab was for AI?
It was pretty clear that this fab - much like the other Bosch facilities - is going to be for automotive and industry ICs, not for high end node sizes in CPUs or GPUs.
I think I've read "power management chips for AI" somewhere. Probably technically correct, but also a somewhat gratuitous reference to the current thing for silly PR reasons.
1. They provided evidence (construction of a fab in Dresden).
2. Executives lie all of the time.
Aside: after all of the denunciations of AI companies claims of danger, I expected comments here to be denouncing this as a “ASML shill article trying to get the government to buy more of their product”. Not that I believe, but the contrast is striking.
since when are executives statements meant to produce more investment into them trustable?
even more so it is reasonable to assume their (executive) statement was a simplification ignoring small for the overall statement irrelevant exceptions
like ignoring there being a factory build which is small and only meant for older nodes producing embedded chips and is for the car industry only
because honestly while the factory does matter for Bosh, it doesn't really make much difference for the larger picture of chip production in the EU
They are not cracking EUV, they are finding ways that actually scale. Chips can be much cheaper than they are currently. I mean yes, obviously we cannot be confident ntil it happens, but they are already making 5nm with DUV.
When China leads chip making the rest of the world is just vasal states.
Going to higher densities with DUV needs high multi patterning which is very inefficient and ends up costing more than if they could do EUV with fewer patterns.
It's well known tech that is used globally, just not to that degree as yield and throughput goes way down
Philosophy, theory, and arts are so intertwined with technology that a nation which does not build cannot be expected to remain at the forefront of those three.
The EU needs to stop acting as if all is fine. The EU commission is totally useless, from A to Z. There is zero strategy in play here. They need to take a much more pro-active stance - fining US companies that work against europeans is fine, but you also need to have viable alternatives. And that simply is not happening right now.
No? If that’s common knowledge that’s a common lie. It’s not really growing much but there is no collapse occurring. And if you look more specifically at countries some are growing rapidly
A lot of the "growth" is debt and money going in circles. We'll see how much of it actually stays around next year. So far the US already has to bail out the datacentre expansion by funding transmission lines upgrades instead of asking for money for it from the companies.
What single source would satisfy you that the current US economy is a Ponzi scheme? I don't think it's really provable or falsifiable until long after the fact. We could start by pointing to the bond market or the price of gas?
They should make another law and probably a few more commissions of auditors.
Airbus proves the EU can do this. It remains to be seen if they still have the ability to take constructive action, or if “add more bureaucracy” is the only tool remaining in the toolbox.
*could.
Airbus has been grandfathered into the current legal situation. Today a future Airbus would not be able to even start collecting data for its initial Environmental Impact Study.
This stuff is all blood, sweat and tears to get it done, and to be honest a culture.
You can't just buy it off the shelf. If that was possible everyone would have gone paid for it like an Ikea product years ago.
The inability to cope with failure is a culture that is common in Europe. Failure is so personally devastating, so destructive to social and cultural standing that not only must you not take risks but other people must be actively prevented from taking risk.
Maybe the US investment doesn't work, but the US will have tried at least. Taiwan is, ironically, the perfect example of where the initial impetus came from the government because there was no culture of risk-taking. Parts of Europe have a savings culture that is very similar to Taiwan and led to very poor growth and very high inequality.
If the US keeps trying, they will succeed. On here, the view was that China could never build out this capacity, they did. The only way to guarantee failure is to never try.
Older article, but seems like things are going pretty ok?
The Taiwanese are doing a lot to try get it up but all the reports on the ground level are rough.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...
USA passed the CHIPS Act and is spending close to a trillion dollars to strategically re-home all of TSMC's most advanced fab technology to Arizona as a matter of national security. Monetary losses don't matter when the point is to not be reliant or China in the event of South China Sea conflict.
I think the point of this article, and the warnings from ASML, is that Europe is not making the same effort.
Like are you really going to buy a chip that costs 70% more out of national pride? Might work on some but think that very few else will sign up for that.
You'll do that because of national adversity?
People really don't understand how this stuff is borderline magic turning silicon into these things. There's so much that can go wrong at every step, it's the most advanced manufacturing process on Earth.
Once upon a time chips went down in value but I don't think that's happening anymore, lot of other people seem aware of that. Not to mention the semiconductor talent is getting eaten up like pancakes everywhere.
And that's largely because the average Brit has terrible beliefs that actively make them poorer. A shockingly high percentage of people believe that building more houses won't lower costs.
I make average US wages, have my entire adult life. I cannot afford a house in my city unless I buy a literal ruin in the ghetto. The suburbs are far more expensive, and that's where the McMansion complexes are. I don't know who's buying them, but it isn't me and likely never will be.
Scotland is a good example: every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences so they attempt to build council houses, it is impossible for the government to build enough council houses to make up for multiple decades of underbuilding (this problem has accelerated significantly whilst they have been promising to build housing, had explicit targets, etc.), but at the next election they make the same promises (and people vote for them because there is no alternative).
The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.
The politics of this topic are very strange. The public is still at the stage where they think in vague terms that the problem is a lack of housing.
I believe the problem is worse in Scotland because the growth in council housing in the 60/70s was organised in order to create this permanent bloc vote. The same has happened in London where you have whole constituencies where 70% of the effective vote is void.
This doesn’t add up. Promising to get more housing built is getting these people elected, but they can’t make good on this promise because then they will lose their election?
Politicians continue with the lie that they will build council houses. Voters continue with the lie that voting will change the outcome.
Depends on what you mean by "a little behind". Reading Patrick McGee's "Apple in China" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China) made me think otherwise.
I'm hoping for India development but that is quite far from the truth yet.
IMO the evidence suggests it is mostly tax policy and whether people are allowed to start and run businesses. Culture is important insofar as it affects those areas of policy. Getting wealthy is literally as simple as being able to create new wealth and keep it, plus lots of time. People don't choose to stay poor unless someone with a gun forces them to be poor.
Arguably India has the class system tied to the prevailing religion, but religion too has faded with modernity. Systems have a habit of breaking under strain and time.
China on the other hand defined your government benefits and the jobs you may get based on where you were born. People born rurally have to fake documents to work illegally in cities.
India has a ton of problems, but china is much worse when it comes to human rights. It's not even right to compare the two countries. India is a flawed somewhat liberal democracy (especially for the region of the world, India is a shining beacon on a hill surrounded by repressive regimes), while China is essentially a dictatorship
For the rest of us, I think we need to be reasonable in our assessments, especially when the other country under discussion is China.
Europe will keep making manufacturing equipment, but leave the actual production to those who have the grid capacity and capital.
EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.
I wish that the EU did the same as China did years ago, and that is to block any non-EU tech company from entering the market. We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.
The thing that produces competitive industries is requiring them to compete globally. That's how Chinese cars got good (Tesla joint venture -> independent Chinese Tesla -> competitive domestic companies).
The three main reasons why the EU struggles to produce strong text companies are, IMO:
1. EU laws and regulations are very burdensome and cover everything from employees to packaging waste.
2. There is not enough capital that gets invested in EU tech companies to pay high tech salaries, again largely driven by more restrictive financial rules.
The result of these two is that European engineers tend to leave for the US, and European companies struggle to grow to American size.
Around 70% of American billionaires made their money themselves, while in the EU a similar share inherited it. Despite all the talk about social mobility in Europe being better than in the US, the truth is that the ultrawealthy in Europe have created a regulatory environment which makes it nearly impossible for real competition to exist.
Was that the halcyon period where they were too broken to fight back and got the continent split between the Americans and the Communists? Or the modern period where it turns out the security situation in Europe was so totally mishandled that we ended up with the Ukraine war?
The spectre of nukes getting used isn't dropping over time and this sort of grinding destructive war is probably raising the risk of a big conflagration. Everyone seems to be rearming.
I don't want the problems those kind of companies bring. The world would be better without Facebook and Instagram in particular.
Turns out if it's more economically efficient to simply import skilled workers, or outsource, then that's what will happen. Breeding and educating your own citizens in a first world country is very expensive. So you don't do it.
The only reason not to do this is national preference. Economically it makes sense, on a national level it makes sense, individually it's genocide.
It's petty and anti-nationalist to demand that your nation destroy it's own economy to fit your arbitrary political mold.
The Infineon Smart Power Fab was opened some months ago and builds power ICs for the energy market. Probably something like ACDC and DCAC converter ICs. This is also needed in AI data centers. https://www.infineon.com/de/regional/dresden/smart-power-fab
European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC), the TSMC fab in Dresden is still under construction and will produce logic chips in 28nm or 16nm. Bosch, Infineon, and NXP each have 10% share in this fab. I assume that it will mostly produce products which will be sold by these 3 companies, probably just the next generations from what they already sell. This fab was 50% subsidized by the German government.
GlobalFoundries also has a big 20nm Fab in Dresden.
The most advanced logic fab in the EU is the Intel fab in Ireland.
It was pretty clear that this fab - much like the other Bosch facilities - is going to be for automotive and industry ICs, not for high end node sizes in CPUs or GPUs.
So you seem to know more about ASML's business than the ASML executive quoted in this article.
1. They provided evidence (construction of a fab in Dresden).
2. Executives lie all of the time.
Aside: after all of the denunciations of AI companies claims of danger, I expected comments here to be denouncing this as a “ASML shill article trying to get the government to buy more of their product”. Not that I believe, but the contrast is striking.
even more so it is reasonable to assume their (executive) statement was a simplification ignoring small for the overall statement irrelevant exceptions
like ignoring there being a factory build which is small and only meant for older nodes producing embedded chips and is for the car industry only
because honestly while the factory does matter for Bosh, it doesn't really make much difference for the larger picture of chip production in the EU
oddly cheering for this but I doubt it will end well
* https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manh...
When China leads chip making the rest of the world is just vasal states.
It's well known tech that is used globally, just not to that degree as yield and throughput goes way down
We will keep working on philosophy, theory and arts. Let the rest of the world get their hands dirty building things.