We've seen how amazing the EU has been for Europe. One EU company in the Top 50 companies in the world by market cap: ASML.

Big round of applause.

The Chips Act 2.0, for the 1.0 did... Nothing at all?

It's the "If it moves, tax it. If it still moves, tax it more. Tax is until it doesn't move at all anymore. Then subsidize it.".

It's a strategy from losers and by losers.

There's no way the EU shall ever compete again (we at least had some chip industry in the beginning) with the EU or China on CPUs/GPUs. That's never going to happen.

The only thing europeans can hope for is to leech on open-source efforts to diminish their reliance on big US software companies but... The same EU bureaucrats who are making big announcements explaining how the EU shall become relevant again are, in illegal backroom deals, taking bribes from Microsoft (one of the company that has the most to lose if the EU gets serious about embracing open source).

By the early 2010s, the Eu corporations noticed that they could use the consumer protection regulations as a means to sneak protectionist measures to protect their profits, and from then on, it has been a downhill ride. They have taken over the Eu through lobbyists and spammed innumerable regulations to bloat the regulatory space to make it impossible for domestic and external competitors to intrude, and the end result is bloated cars that cost 30,000 Eur a pop and require subscriptions to heat their seats while being inferior to the cheapest Chinese EVs of the last generation.

But hey - Eu investors reaped premium returns from their investment without having to reinvest any of it for a decade and a half, so there's that...

If the EU funds go only towards EU companies, the bureaucrats will have no choice but to say "oh well, we tried but the funds would have been lost otherwise, Bruxelles is to blame". The EU company could still resell US services but the EC could still put in a provision that at least % should be domestic. One thing is absolutely clear: the French will build their own infra and services with their own money, obviously en Français. Wait, they already have done so.