> The value is not in the literal buildings, the value is in the people

The people are physically in Europe, too. (Adding limits on remote management for national-security reasons might make sense.)

If Korea and Europe get in a war, or, more likely, China pressures them to straight up ditch that capital investment, that lets the EU hold those folks until knowledge transfer can be conducted. Again, this is a strategically different place of leverage from those assets being overseas.

> This is litterlly the logic that collapsed venezuela's oil industry after it was seized by the state.

Wasn't it sanctions? The state seizing ownership should not have meant the loss of:

> the people, the managers,engineers,etc

Ownership of companies change every day across the world without collapse.

>The value is not in the literal buildings, the value is in the people, the managers,engineers,etc and the owners who know how to run it.

Holy shit, finally someone who understands this, this comments needs to be to the top.

Same thing happened in my ex-commie country when the communists kicked out the capitalists, shipped them to UK, US, Switzerland, and took over their factories. Over years and decades, those factories became inefficient and went bust under state control, while those capitalists who got kicked out flourished by making new business in their new homes that were business-friendly countries.

Just because you seize factories doesn't mean anything if you don't know what to do, they're just commodity equipment anyone else can buy within walls and a roof. The people with the secret-sauce know-how and IP are just as if not more valuable.

That's why US had operation Paperclip.

If you go to a TSMC factory, you'll find the same ASML EUV machines every other country and and company on the planet (minus China) has access to buy, but yet only TSMC can extract the smallest nodes and highest yields because only they managed to perfect the entire process.