alt Hacker NewsAs a European I have to say I am extremely jealous of a government with the willingness of doing something as radical as this.
Europe desperately needs to secure its own semi conductor supply chain. Neither the EU nor any member states seems willing to do anything about this though.
Europe still is in a position, where it feasibly could control 100% of the semiconductor value chain on the continent. But besides meaning posturing there is nothing being done.
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Isn't Europe the source of almost all the tooling that goes into brand new fabs?
> Europe still is in a position, where it feasibly could control 100% of the semiconductor value chain on the continent.
That's not possible. There are just too many different parts going into semiconductor production and they're scattered around the world.
Case in point: the source of the best semiconductor-grade quartz is located in Spruce Pine, North Carolina and while there exist alternatives, for cost-competetiveness you want that.
Hilariously enough it belongs to Sibelco, which is a Belgian company, but it's still US territory, so subject to local politics.
Intel was supposed to build something in Germany some years ago, didn't really work out because of reasons which seems to have been outside of Germany's control. So it's not that they are unwilling, but it just didn't succeed yet.
They would have to include the UK and it would actually be a good European project (not just EU) to maybe bring them back into the fold.
They are doing _something_ according to https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/european-c... . It'd be good for someone with more knowledge to summarise what this act means though.
The Netherlands has its own semi supply chain, from photolithographs to chip design to printing the actual chips.
At least European countries excel at introducing new regulations and taxes.
This is a good initiative from Japan's government. On the other side, their bet on hydrogen is probably a very expensive blind alley.
European countries are willing to make big bets. The issue is with incompetent leadership. For example they made very big bets on quantum computing and particle accelerators for HEP, both of which have close to zero ROI. Meanwhile, up till very recently AI was sneered at as not "scientific" enough. This is a problem with leadership. The issue is mostly that we put people in leadership positions, who are experts in past technologies but those instincts do not translate well to present technologies.
We spent the last 30 years showing deference to good old Uncle Sam, sometimes back-stabbing other member states in the process. How would we ever have the nerves to do something of this scale with all the cooperation, supply chain logistics and engineering complexity that this would involve ?
Hah... europe will become king of the world! We'll tax and regulate ourselves to enormous wealth! No... jokes aside, europe is a failed union, and will slowly collapse or decompose in a decade or two.
Then we can again focus on trade, lowering taxs and creating value. The only thing that is happening now is that the political class has become enormously rich through bribes and by having managed to phase out democracy and enriching themselves.
> Europe desperately needs to secure its own semi conductor supply chain.
To be fair, Europe does have ASML which has something like 2/3 market share in DUV and almost monoplistic in EUV.
The moat is enormous, so they are unlikely to face any serious competition for at least a decade if not more.