alt Hacker NewsIt's just an insane amount of money to invest with the long-term effect of you oversaturating the chip market.
Throwing 20B into a chip fab in the EU would be politically a very unpopular move, if it's done as a public company or worse directly state owned, you'll royally piss of Taiwan, South Korea and China and it's likely they'd retaliate by e.g. subsidising their auto industry more in order to give the death blow to the EU auto industry.
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It shouldn't be a politically unpopular move. Other countries can get pissed off, but those other countries also cannot guarantee that Europe will get chips when times are tough. If you want to build modern drones and missiles you need access to a large amount of computer chips. In a crisis will those still be available to Europe?
The issue with national investment in the EU is that it might be attacked as state sponsored activity where one can complain that public money are used for market moves or if it is EU wide initiative, then the governments will squabble whose economy will get the money. The framework is not mature enough to allow for delegating to someone to solve the problem for everyone and to balance the beneficiaries in the long term.
They'd more likely split themselves laughing.
The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration. It's not to cannibalise our own full-employment high value economies, by diverting enormous capital and labour into duplicating vast swathes of lower value jobs we don't actually have the work force for anyway, just so we can pay unaffordable prices for the resulting goods.
We probably both agree it's an absurd fantasy, and the people trying to make stuff like this happen are implementing policies that ensure that it won't, such as putting tariffs on the inputs they need to build out this domestic manufacturing capacity in the first place.