No comment on the second part, but the first part is wrong. EU doesn't have a moat in process technology anymore (since 2010s). They have a bunch of legacy fabs, like 350, 180 and 130 nm but Taiwan, US, and China (and others like Israel, or Singapore) have these too. EU is severely lacking behind chip design, production and packaging capabilities for industrial, automotive, and space kind of niche applications since the heavy divestment from semiconductors after 2008 financial crisis and 2015 Euro crisis.

On top of this, once European giants like NXP (formerly Philips semiconductors), Infineon (formerly Siemens semiconductors), and ST are actively reducing their footprint in Europe and moving to India or SE Asia.

In short: No, EU has no future in those markets as designer or producer of chips.

This is actually at the core of our (EU) problem. Instead of thinking, "here is this new technology, how can we build new markets/products out of it", our industry leaders always think, "here is this new technology, how can we apply it to our existing industries".

You can see it a lot in AI, right now. AI4industry is not where the gains are right now. We should be competing on training foundational models. Once the foundational models from US/China are strong enough, they will do AI4industry and we wouldn't have any edge on them anyway because their tech is more vertically integrated and they have better insight in how AI works under the hood.

EU: Perhaps we should also spend a few billion on attracting american glue manufacturers so they open a factory and a half here so we can catch up in this chip making business.

EU Chip industry : ASML, 2nd to only nvidia, 0.5T mkt cap

> US happens to be the place where the managers

And you know.. the actual design for plenty of these chips. By that definition Apple is also an Asian company..

> with EU tooling

That is only a (vital) part of the supply chain, there are plenty of other components.

AFAIK the high end chips are made in Taiwan, that's not the same. Also there was an export control, so ASML couldn't sell the latest equipment to China.

> To be fair, all high end chips are made in China with EU tooling.

Did you mean Taiwan? Because depending on who you ask that is, or is not china.

The Chinese have been cut off from EU tooling for a while now. And their attempts to build out their own lithography setups have been a failure. Their 7nm process is, by all measures, not delivering the yields that one would need to make it really successful.

Even the EU thought the “EU Chips Act” was a failure which is why they are trying to re-invent it after spending billions https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/28/eu-microchi...

I don’t think the goal there was to sit around praising past accomplishments. You always have to keep building.

And that’s about it..

In relative terms there is no innovation happening outside of that and some other smaller companies providing highly specialized components that are a part of the supply chain.

There isn’t just much if anything to brag about. ASML is great but it’s effectively a monopoly (for the time being) due to a large extent some correct historical choices.

ASML doesn't make chips.

Based on the empirical evidence we have ASML succeeded in spite of the EU not because of it (so “they” is bot exactly fair). There is not much EU has going on besides that when it comes to growth and innovation.

It’s a bit like Novo Nordisk, they had a huge win and then just focused on making as much money while it lasted while more innovative companies ate up their market.