Phones and laptops from a few years ago are not suddenly unusable.

Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person. Even gpu inference on older process nodes is perfectly doable. The HPC space absolutely prefers newer chips but hasn't ripped out their 2018 chips in their clusters because they still deliver value.

And sure, the latest best things sells for higher margins for now, but with the way consumer prices are going, people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less.

The greater danger to a working economy is not absence of the absolute must cutting edge chips but lack of independence which this initiative seems to seek to curtail. Good for Germany.

A drone will work with 30nm chips just fine, but it won't work with no chips at all

Europe's economy has a higher share in the industrial and agricultural sector. The US isn't the sole "western" benchmark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_secto...

You do not need a 2nm processor to run an engine, perform an ultrasound, drop a missile on someone's head, make 10 million parts in a factory, or fly a plane. The vast majority of the increased processing power we've developed since the mid-2010s gets pissed away rendering 30MB websites or generating AI cheating fruit husband videos. Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago.

We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year at never-before-seen speed, but every single day, hundreds or thousands of times a day, you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so.

> So basically all major industrial powers

ASEAN doesn't have the capacity yet, but this is changing in 3-5 years as Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam have gotten IP transfers from European, Korean and Japanese technology partners.

Neither does the rest of the Europe excluding an Ireland-UK-UAE JV called ChipX (but the team is largely located in the US, UAE, Malaysia, and Japan) and the portion of STMicro in France that was part of state-owned Thomson Semiconducteurs before it was privatized.

Neither do any of the major industrial states in the Americas like Canada, Mexico, or Brazil.

> that's standard practice that the EU and US also do

My point is that states need to build domestic capacity where possible. And the EU is not a state. France continued to protect their GaN fabrication IP closely (not even sharing it with Italy despite STMicro being a French-Italian JV), and same with Germany to a certain extent.