The advantage that the EU has is in fact ASML. No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet. [0]

The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with TSMC to build a foundry in the EU that produces at the node they want to intercept (2 nm?). Then, make a business arrangement that puts European scientists and engineers into high-value roles. That would enable the EU to develop the technical skills and keep China from locking it up.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25361028

From my experience with gov trying to do tech investment it’s going to go into the pockets of late career overpaid ‘executives’ with ‘industry experience’ and tons of (also overpaid and underqualified) contractors doing the same thing. Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to run it.

I mean I hope it goes to the engineers and smart dudes (who doesn’t want another successful semi competitor and 2nm?) and not the ones who know how to play the political game the best but I’m highly highly skeptical.

We’ll see in a few years I guess.

And I say that fully understanding ASML and the value they currently provide. But let’s hope who ever doles this out understands it as well as (maybe) half the people in this thread.

But even ignoring that giant elephant in the room, it adds the critical question why should ASML care to give special treatment to this one project? They are already killing it globally. Just because they operate in EU and this offers shit loads of money to potentially fleece?

I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going to work on the hard problems of shipping a next gen chip process and design... In America!

What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries. Of course they won't: that would reduce the piece of the pie of all the non-technical managers and bureaucrats!

I mean, that's exactly what they do. Any company with good finances can apply for support for R&D to develop new features or tech that they would otherwise not develop or invest in. This comes in the form of direct contributions to employees' salaries listed in the grant application.

I've written and defended these grants for multiple companies and I have been on the receiving end of them, too.

This isn't even specific to this deal, this is just something you can always do, along with literally hundreds of EU and state level support programs.

Exactly. The salaries in EU are pitiful.

The number and quality of available jobs in the SV region was a much bigger factor to everyone I've spoken to that moved from the EU.

In the UK the problem seems to be the company owner/manager class see software people roughly the same as any other office worker, rather than as skilled producers of products. As a result they pay peanuts, and then are surprised when they get less than stellar results. Not sure what the reason might be elsewhere, but across the rest of the continent the pay seems even worse.

At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/), where "disposable income" (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46) accounts for healthcare and government benefits.

You have to specifically want to live in a European city for the culture/walkability/etc or else there is just no reason to take tech jobs there.

Notionally, yes, but in reality it will be the same blighted hellscape of insurance denials, out-of-network complexity, and lack of consistency as everyone else's healthcare in America. You can hire someone to help you navigate it, which is a remarkable economic construct.

Culture is the issue here. EU tries to live, USA tries to earn. If the only thing that interests you is money then yes, probably USA is the right direction. Of all the people that I know that went working outside of their country, they were mostly going to EU companies (or USA companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None left for USA. On the other side I know a CTO that left USA for Europe and bought a small property in France where he lives with whole family.

This shows very well in environmental laws, gdpr, protection of workers, actually having friends, nature, having hill-climbing organizations that aren't only lobist groups to be actually allowed to climb the mountains, public transport, able to drink spring water in center of capital city, most people working 40h/week max, actually do use their vacations in one piece, free education, maternity leave measured in years not months (yes under a year too but not month or two),...

So it depends on the personal cultural preference. Some people just love the money and things they can buy with it, maybe even power that it brings and surely a lot of such people are also in EU. The difference is in the percentage of population although Hollywood did great job at exporting the view of world trough money glasses.

---

Regarding the topic. EU was quite satisfied with buying processors from the States, it was also happy with using Windows, Android, Apple thing. The problem is, as in every other thing, USA corporations became vampires that wants to eat you alive from pure greed and systemic addiction to blood (endless growth).

It has become imperative to produce our own processors as you can no longer trust USA or China to not shovel inside some spying equipment. Well the times have changed and it is no longer an option to buy it from USA/China, so EU has moved forward and dont worry, we will have our own chips our own phones and operating system (linux, sailfish or something else...).

EU is an elephant and it needs a lot of coordination of muscles to move its legs but once it starts moving...

I am sorry, I would love to just use the USA/China products and not re-develop hardware (based on what we know now, maybe not dragging 40 years old anchor of previous development with me), not having a need for GDPR, but they have both just screwed everything up from pure greed. Now we need to fix it and a lot of time and resources will have to go that way. But we will eventually fix it.

Now let me give you actual statistics.

In a survey of scientists from 16 countries (http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...), the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two.

By comparison, only 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada.

Meanwhile (since 2012) Trump happened, race unrest's, police brutality, corona handling fiasco, Google/FB/Amazon public image is going down, USA public depth has roughly doubled [1] and general perception of USA has changed (to the worse[2]), China is hiring, student depth is going trough the roof (and immigrants want to have children someday), no one believes in "war on terror" any more (talking about EU), Snowden, war on privacy,...

This graph is outdated, did you find some that is up to date? Also interesting one would be how many of those in 2012 survey stayed and where.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-th...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-image-plumm...

But since you did bring up Germany with the deleted mention of Operation Paperclip, I suggest you read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25367731 , in which @bildung and I discuss German migration to the US over the past 30 years (including 2019 data).

I provided statistics in response to your anecdotes. The onus is on you, not me, to prove that a) your anecdotes are actually representative of broader trends, and b) my statistics are, in fact, outdated.

You know not all IT people are senior engineers nor they share vision of the world exported by the Hollywood

There's a catch, though: You have to live in the borderline failed state that is the USA. That's quite the drawback and just not worth it no matter the salary increase, imo.

1. "Disposable income per capita" is irrelevant to normal people, as it does not account for how equally that wealth is actually spread. If the top 1% double their income and the rest halves it, that's still a net increase in "disposable income".

2. "Disposable income" does not at all account for the varying amount of cost required to sustain a given standard of living in different regions, even within a country.

3. "Disposable income" is a purely economic measure. As such, it does not measure a large amount things that impact your quality of life, like time off, stress, job satisfaction, etc. A quick look at those non-economic measures will show those high economic measures don't come for free.

Well, probably the same is true for the "pitiful" salaries in the EU. Just to a lesser degree.

I'd argue that if you got a CS degree from an American college you're probably just forced to work in the US simply because the other prospective employees can accept a lower salary due to a lower debt load. Maybe the best of the best can find a way to earn American salaries overseas but I really don't think that's as common as the HN crowd might assume.

Seattle has a much healthier market both for devs and real estate and is only three hours away.

Only difference in healthcare is while american top devs get it on top of their compensation packages, canadians pay for it with their prohibitive income tax rates. It's pretty easy to take the total spending percentage that goes to healthcare and multiply it by your income tax to see how much a dev is really paying for healthcare.

I'm also not quite sure what you mean with your point about healthcare. MSP premiums were eliminated last year [0], there is now no charge to access medical care. Prescriptions, dental and eye care are all still chargeable, though prescriptions at least are essentially capped through BC Fair Pharmacare [1].

Compared to the US, Canada is much easier for immigration as a tech worker. One can get PR (equivalent of a green card) before landing if they have a sufficient points score, in BC that's fairly easy through the tech PNP [2] and a willing employer.

Additionally Vancouver consistently ranks among the top 10 most liveable cities [3].

[0] - https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera...

[1] - https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera...

[2] - https://www.welcomebc.ca/Immigrate-to-B-C/B-C-Provincial-Nom...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Liveability_Ranking

This is what China's doing: offering double salaries to Japanese and Taiwanese engineers to lure them away, because tech salaries in Japan and Taiwan are quite low by global standards (even lower than China's).

It is not necessarily a bad thing either in my opinion. A lot of americans seem so focussed on making money, instead of caring for others around them.

I can understand your concerns. But if you look at mid-range airplanes the European monster Airbus did respectably catch up with incumbent Boeing.

In with the Jumbos they clearly surpassed it engineering-wise but failed in their commercial predictions that such planes would be needed.

So EU is neither a guarantee for failure nor for success.

I do wonder how many people will be involved; it could be like ITER where everyone builds one fab that's truly the best in the world. Or it could be that they want to spread it out amongst the existing incumbents they can find who I am sure will do nothing with it.

Concentrate the funding and I imagine it could do pretty well. Distribute to (more than one) commercial entity (preferably zero to retain public access) and I doubt it will go anywhere.

Boeing should have a clear advantage because they have no such political interference. But it doesn't seem to have prevented Airbus from being a serious competitor. Whether the political interference is older than the EU or from the EU of today should not make a significant difference here.

What often ends up happening is that because it's so "strategically important" and so much money has been directed towards it, you are obligated to have expensive ("experienced") people hired based on past reputation -- which may not be applicable to new technology, roadmaps get laid out which everyone has to say they're meeting successfully, and then at the end you find out somehow that it didn't produce what you wanted.

Versus, a more bottoms-up approach where you hopefully create the conditions that incentivize or make possible some technologies and technologists to succeed -- without knowing fully who exactly or what exactly.

I'm sure that both have some inefficiencies, but the 1st method is sure to pay the people who have already been successful. But then again, maybe for a relatively incremental advance in some technology, there are fewer unknowns and method #1 works ok.

In other words, very different model from what the EU is currently trying.

    In 1985 Morris Chang was recruited by 
    the Taiwanese government to help develop 
    the emerging semiconductor industry. In 
    1986 Morris joined the Hsinchu based non 
    profit research institute ITRI as Chairman 
    and President and launched what would be 
    TSMC’s first semiconductor wafer 
    fabrication plant on the ITRI campus. 
    Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company 
    Ltd. was officially formed in 1987 as a 
    joint venture between the Taiwan government 
    (21%), Dutch multinational electronics 
    giant Philips (28%), and other private investors.

In the context of the EU developing the ability to fabricate state-of-the-art chips, ASML would sell them the TwinScan tools they needed, which are just one species of about 40 that are used for chip fabrication.

Lithography machines are a functioning market that is interfered with for geo-strategic reasons.

All of the world's most profitable companies depend dearly on chips. If they are literally the only company that can provide this critical part of the chip production, why aren't they taking a larger portion of the profit?

I'm sure there is a lot of stuff where 7nm is necessary to get certain outcomes, but it is a small market compared to what could be reasonably done with older process technologies.

I completely agree that consortium-based organizations are less able to respond and react to changes or issues. That's why it needs to be treated as a strategic (defense) matter rather than a government/industry partnership, a-la Sematech in the US.

I'm still so fascinated by our minds' ability to interpolate and extrapolate to the platonic ideal of any ungrounded and unconstrained idea so readily. Yes big bureaucratic mass of brain trust experts going at it nonstop, how can you not yield great returns? I'm starting to awaken more and more to how messy and data dependent this world is. Ideals and declaration and promises just don't go far enough. But it's all so complicated and situational to figure out in advance why they don't go as far as we'd expect.

In practical terms, over 50% of that large (many thousands) organization should not exist. Another 50% of what is left is only needed because EU bureaucracy requires them to cover work that can be avoided. That qualifies for "too much bureaucracy".

Andy Grove, High Output Management, about Intel (at the time when they were successful)

I think there are many, many (not directly) productive functions that successful business needs to have and engineers often underestimate those (I certainly know I often do).

Are we talking about VC and large corporate investment or government investment here.

The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the major players in the industry. Being the leader is not necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.

Some manufacturers that produced basic sellable goods survived (steel foundries, fertilizer makers)

I mean, sure, many factories were not competitive since they were highly subsidized and faced no competition on internal market. But USSR had an immense R&D potential and engineering education was top-notch.

When the price of a corporation falls below their paper assets it tends to attract A certain kind of investor disinterested in long term value. I’d venture a good number of soviet parts suppliers saw their revenues dry up when their clients were dismantled, it wouldn’t have taken more than a few such links in the supply chain being dismantled to break the entire supply chain given the level of centralization.

One country took the radical/liberalist path, another chose the one that doesn’t tarnish the economy.

As much as I hate libertarians today, in 1990s they did an awesome job.

Don't forget that prior the collapse of the USSR, ukraine was not an independant country from russia, while poland has always been "independant" during socialist times.

The true reason for those who wonder was the fact that ALFA was making electronics for MiG, Su, Tu and for missiles. I had family and friends working there btw.

This was quite a classic move during the "privatisation" in '89-90.

I know this first-hand because it has happened to my country each and every time an US backed president was elect. It's happening right now, they're attempting to sell our only semiconductor company.

The Soviet Union was destroyed from within much the same way the 2010s arab springs/ukraine and more recently also tried with HK.

The Soviet Union collapsed because of massively broken economy. That's just basic science. They exported oil and imported grain. Russia imported GRAIN for gods sake. Then oil prices collapsed. Next? They did nothing and just ate through the resources until they were no more.

And then 'evil liberals/evil west destroying the great country' happened, when finally USSR had no money to pay for the social obligations and for massive military.

This are the undisputed facts, supported by a vast trove of internal documents from the late USSR and first years of the Russian Federations.

A monograph by Egor Gaidar [1] is an excellent source referencing tons of the original documents.

Sorry for Russian, not sure this is available in English anywhere.

I get that it's easier to think that source of our problems is some evil mastermind and conspiracy. But think of the Occam's razor — this is explained much easier by sheer incompetency and stupidity and no checks and balances to mitigate them.

1. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Гибель_империи_(монография)

Let's remind that full-on opening of the market was not what the west promised, but it's what they pushed for once the reforms passed a point of no return and they wouldn't take "no" for an answer. Propaganda is what won the cold war.

But let’s look at other ex-Soviet countries. Territorial quarrels and dumb nationalism were unthinkable back then. Look at Azerbaijani and Armenians, ethnic Ukrainians and Russians in Ukraine, Georgia...

USSR could've easily continued its existence if it went full "North Korean." Union's army had no problem to force populace to eat grass in case of a complete economic collapse.

I attribute the single most important contribution to Union's collapse to US funding exchange visits for hundreds of USSR's senior officials, and completely nullifying their will to struggle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728237

The very same thing has happened to China, and Xi is trying hard to undo it.

His message of absolute committment to, and inreversability of "opening up" don't mean anything to 99% of ordinary citizens.

Whom he addresses these messages to are not ordinary Chines, but elites whom he tries to convince to the best of his abilities to not to drop the ball on him, and the system.

Which was a direct consequence of surreal levels of corruption, incompetence, and double digit percentages of country's GDP coming, and going out of existence annually as a result.

If anybody are to call names, those would've been the most hardcore brezhneviks themselves.

Those resources they ate through -- when were they accumulated? I find it hard to believe that they became a superpower by just coasting on the wealth that existed in 1917.

in 1940 they went toe to toe with the worlds greatest industrial super power (or second greatest - depending how you count) in war and won.

The economic development achieved by the Soviet Union in the first half of its reign was incredible.

They made the best rockets, fighter planes, super computers.... But they never made a TV with a remote control.

That's a regurgitation of a great lie. Krusev indicated in his memoire that economic data of Stalin's years was defying kindergarden level arithmetics, was utter garbage, and he gave few convincing examples of that, and here, I would believe him.

Union's economy saw few ups, and downs during its existence, and those under Stalin, and Breznev were not ups by any extend of imagination.

Do not rely on state propaganda, look at the results

Some facts from Wikipedia: At the opening of operation Barbarosa the Red Army had four to one advantage over the Nazis in tank numbers.

By 1941 lend lease tanks were 6.5% of Soviet tanks, about a quarter of medium and heavy tanks.

Where do you get "up to 40%" from?

Even if true my point still stands.

According t Alex Nove in 1900 there was not a metal lathe in all of Russia. They could de clinker locomotives, but not make a gear box. By 1941 they were out stripping the Germans.

That is the greatest economic achievement of the twentieth century.

(IMO the Bolsheviks were sadistic psychopaths, but credit where credit is due)

Again, you are regurgitating a myth.

I would not doubt the 4 to 1 outgunning of USSR vs. Germany. Indeed Union's army was incomparably materially superior due to decades long total dedication to military buildup, but that does not preclude the fact the industry was still barely going, and that this material advantage melted like butter within first months of war.

"probably" does not cut it.

The lie is the Soviets were bad economic managers. They pulled off the most incredible feat in industrialising their economy in less than fifty years, more liek twenty five useful years.

The millions of starved peasants, slaughtered "class enemies", exiled dissidents.... They were there too. Not pretty, not moral, not desirable, but incredible achievement nonetheless.

I am not sure, how in the context of such a system "efficiency" can be measured. But in raw capacity there has never been anything like it until the Chinese in the nineties and naughties with their own millions of starved peasants, slaughtered "class enemies", exiled dissidents....

The "massive industrial advantage" was nothing not to be expected from the most resource rich country on the planet.

Yet, the country was, by all accounts, from both most staunch communist party sources, and contemporary anticommunists, completely incapable of running during the crisis, and "all in" strategy of manufacturing one gun, one tank, one shell, one plane in massive amounts was a result of desperation, not industrial might.

How is making more tanks, guns, and aeroplanes done on desperation and not industrial might?

I think ideology has gotten in the way of reason!

Yes, by throwing ten million of their own citizens at the problem.

They won because Hitler ran out of bullets before Stalin ran out of targets.

It. was. not at all.

But never could make consumer goods. When the economy had to pivot to a consumer lead one, they found that all the economists with different ideas had been shot....

This is published in English as [1] Yegor Gaidar, "Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia".

TLDR is maybe this [2] write-up of a talk, 8 pages, very interesting.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Empire-Lessons-Modern-Russia...

[1] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/20070419_Gaid...

This can't happen in EU today.

   aerospace, energy, semiconductors, 
   telecom, drugs/biotech

Airbus is absolutely crushing Boeing in terms of quality. Granted, we are woefully behind on the 'space' part of aerospace.

> energy

CERN is anchored to the EU. ITER is anchored to the EU. We are world leaders in wind energy.

> telecom

Except for everyone in the West scrambling to replace Huawei with Ericsson tech.

> drugs / biotech

BioNtech made the first breakthrough on a COVID vaccine.

The EU has many issues, but losing leadership in the sectors you mentioned is not one of them.

Such a hyperbole statement.

Airbus has the edge in the narrowbody aircraft market, especially A321, while Boeing is plagued by 737 MAX problem.

OTOH Airbus is well behind Boeing in the widebody segment. Boeing had 1,464 787 orders as of Aug 2019, 882 of those had been delivered. Airbus had only sold 913 A350. A380 has been discontinued while Boeing can still count on B748 freighter.

Of course 2020 threw a wrench to the airline industry and it remains to be seen how well it will recover post pandemic. Both Airbus and Boeing are affected deeply.

You are right that for now, Boeing is better in widebodies. But let's see Boeing new aircraft program, because currently Airbus is better prepared for the future.

Well, SpaceX caught with the pants down to everyone. Before the revolution of the reusable Falcon 9, the Ariane 5 was a fine reliable rocket.

Sadly, the Ariane 6 design predates the reusable revolution of SpaceX, how ever they are working on reusable Arianes that are similar to the Falcon 9 and Spaceship (https://www.techforspace.com/european-space-sector/european-...).

That's entirely political and nothing to do with the tech. Huawei's tech is arguably better, cheaper (and available now).

If you knew that important people would use your phones you could as well give them for free - easier to spy on them.

Anchored, yeah sure. So you're listing something that isn't in the EU, which is revealing. ITER is entirely irrelevant. It's a pork project that won't result in much. The biggest breakthroughs in fusion will derive from smaller projects, not giant slow-moving projects like ITER. The next 20-30 years of energy generation is wind, natural gas, oil, solar, some hydrogen and nuclear (and primarily only China is brave enough to build that). Fusion will make zero contribution in that time.

> BioNtech made the first breakthrough on a COVID vaccine.

Moderna was just as well positioned as BioNtech, you're more than reaching. Russia and China also have apparently successful vaccines being deployed.

> The EU has many issues, but losing leadership in the sectors you mentioned is not one of them.

That's true in the sense that the EU never had leadership in most fields to begin with.

It is surrounded by EU countries, in a country that is a pseudo-EU member. You're reaching.

> ITER is entirely irrelevant. It's a pork project that won't result in much.

Unless you have a seer's eye, these kinds of claims are baseless.

> The next 20-30 years of energy generation is wind, natural gas, oil, solar, some hydrogen and nuclear (and primarily only China is brave enough to build that)

Agreed and a sad state of affairs

> Moderna was just as well positioned as BioNtech

Which makes Moderna a leader too? It doesn't diminish BioNtech's work.

> That's true in the sense that the EU never had leadership in most fields to begin with.

You literally had to ignore multiple points in my parent comment to even be able to make this claim. Revealing..

Edit: not to mention we are commenting under an article that partly concerns ASML..

Generalising from 40 years of EU history, I have little confidence. The top US and East Asian processor and semiconductor companies all are extremely successful in the marketplace, in addition to consuming government subsidies. Fostering a competitive market has not been the EU's forte. Indeed the EU narrates this funding as a need to address a "market failure" [1]. I feel that this is one-dimensional, bur entirely predictable from the structure of EU decision making.

Just today, at midnight, the EU lost ARM and DeepMind as domestic industries.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...

It raises to prominence after becoming a Google wholly owned subdiary. I have repeated multiple times in other comments that DeepMind's success is at least built on top of Google's tech and capital.

Interesringly, Google's tech infrastructure were blueprinted by a lot of pioneers and two of the most well known are Urs Hozle and Luiz André Barroso both are of Eu descentdent.

There is no evidence that whatever DeepMind did can be done with another EU partner. Or even anyone who is not Google, largely thanks to Larry and Sergey's personal tastes and experience. I doubt Msft or Amazon have the right culture for DeepMind.

The whole alphabet thing was engineered to allow independency. So that, among other things, a more pure research org can work without the ever encroaching of the profit driven hands inside Google. Mind you, DeepMind absolutely put itself above Google, or at least firmly distance itself from Google, GCP once proposed to use DeepMind brand in marketing materials, and was sharply rejected citing "conflicting brand images".

I have no idea whether any of the relevant antitrust official could still stop it.

It lacks motivation, there is no SV in Europe because one cannot pay competitively with SV for top talent when you tax to death. It is a lot easier to become a billionaire from real stuff (not manipulating stock markets or other financial trickeries) in US than in EU, so the smart and motivated in EU move to US; what is left is ... what is left: either less motivated or less smart or less both.

There are a variety of ways to cultivate a domestic industry, govt committees directly investing doesn’t seem like the leading candidate can. Trade barriers and state sponsored industrial partnerships.

that's hardly in Taiwan's geopolitical interest. perhaps if the EU made some serious political concessions to Taiwan.

Same with solar or battery tech, we have the tech and the people but economically it isn't feasible to have production in the EU.

Those are some huge claims, which could have previously been said for many currently outdated technologies.

Just as an example, the dimension of the features their tool prints are smaller than the wavelength of light that is actually doing the printing.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1100162/randd-costs-of-a...

The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. And they are moderately confortable in their niches. This is a very high risk endeavour, even with EU money.

And as far as I know, none of them manufacture for other end-user players, so even if there was a new fabless company with a cool project, it's likely that wouldn't be made in the EU bu by Samsumg or TSMC.

The ECB has been buying trillions of euro's worth of dubious government bonds and bank debts for the last couple of years. Also every year the EU pays hundreds of billions worth of subsidies to European farmers so that they are able to sell their goods below global market prices. I would say that this 145 billion is as good an investment if not better than what EU money has been spent on so far.

It's a joke. Might as well just admit, semiconductors or not, the future of the economy is with the politically preselected winners who get the subsidies and the loans. Risk premiums, collateral, macroprudential regulation, insurance and so on is for the peasants.

They don't need to become major players for this program to be a major success. Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor.

Moreover, AMD showed that right now the key factor to develop a product line that dominates all competitors in all categories, from performance to power efficiency and also price, is access to a capable manufacturing hub.

Similarly, no self-respecting country in 2030 will rely entirely on foreign integrated circuits. FPGAs will play an important role for small countries, but large groups like EU can afford to go big.

Post ww2 the US had no reason to be concerned with any of the above in the western world, following the collapse of the USSR this mentality was extended globally with the belief that “we’d reached the end of history”.

As of 2020 I don’t think any major power considers the risk of trade interventions or war to be negligible. The us navy may no longer be capable of ensuring freedom of the seas unilaterally.

I am fairly certain most of the western world relies on a Belgian cipher called Rijndael to encrypt all/the majority of its diplomatic communications.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this comment.

[1] https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sit...

Could you elaborate on these huge successes in these two countries? I do remember hearing that India had produced a SPARC-based chip.

You might have the best car design in world, but if all could use was wood vs someone else who had a crappy design, but had aluminum the crappy designed car might work better.

Not saying this is the case with AMD vs Intel, but right now Intel's manufacturing is hurting them.

As a mediocre analogy, you don't expect to be able to write good novels because you got your hands on a printer.

I think much of the relevant general-purpose chip design knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning. I don't yet see any other chip company (eg NXP etc) suddenly be the next Intel or AMD yet (let alone the next Apple).

Also, the European Union is heavily betting on the RISC-V for its future hyperscale HPC systems[2][3][4].

I would believe that next-gen European CPU budget declaration is part of this dynamic. And I really hope it will work out.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-semiconductors-...

[2] https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/project/epi/

[3] https://www.mdpi.com/2297-8747/25/3/46/pdf (PDF)

[4] https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/06/10/europes-homegrown-hp...

Regarding the EU heavily betting on RISC-V, what gives you confidence that this will work? The history of EU funded projects to catch up with the US in AI, in cloud computing (like GAIA-X), in quantum computing, in the space race? HPC is not a mass-market, how should this niche be economically viable to amortise the huge cost of processor development? HPC in the US (and other countries) is often connected to military spending (although this is not always openly expressed). Processor development is extremely expensive, to the extent that Intel is now struggling to finance catching up with TSMC's fab process. Where is the EU's micro-architecture design capacity? ARM is about to be swallowed by Nvidia, and a lot of Arm's micro-architecture development is done in the US already. Now compare the micro-architecture design capacity with that in China (the world's biggest processor market).

   I really hope it will work out.

Given 40 years of failure to catch up with the US, and now China, I am sceptical! I expect this to end up like previous EU attempts at catching up: the monies available will be much smaller than originally announced (by at least an order of magnitude), spent over much longer a time-frame, but more importantly, mostly flow to existing EU-based companies that are good ad lobbying, e.g. Siemens, and French conglomerates.

Another prediction: China will soon dominate RISC-V, since they are now forced, by US sanctions, to move away from Arm. I cannot see big Chinese processor companies moving to local ISAs such as Loongson. Alibaba announced a RISC-V processor at ICSA this year [2]. The big US players (Intel, AMD, Nvidia) have much less of a need to move to RISC-V.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

[2] https://conferences.computer.org/isca/pdfs/ISCA2020-4QlDegUf...

Of course. It also removes unnecessary anxiety for the EU that the next ruling power in the US (or elsewhere) may eventually attempt to impose sanctions on the export of the IP. Switzerland, as part of Schengen and Union's single market, fits nearly perfectly into the narrative of European consolidation.

> what gives you confidence that this will work? [...] Where is the EU's micro-architecture design capacity?

I can't see the future, hence I have no confidence. But I express cautious optimism for the following reason: the issue of EU's dependence on some crucial technologies from the third parties is obvious, but there's no direct and quick solution to solve it. The EU can't just turn into venture capital Mecca overnight, the same holds for becoming a low tax heaven. However, the problems/challenges are there, and they must be addressed in the best way under the given circumstances.

The EU has a well-established practice of funding R&D in large areas with non-specific goals or metrics, however this approach is not unique to the EU, it's crucial to the bloc to nourish the interbloc integration and establish logistics between the disparate parts of the market and institutions. It doesn't always lead to unexpected discoveries or breakthrough ventures, but in general it manages the integration task quite well. Which, in turn, contributes to the development of a rich ecosystem. As a tech entrepreneur in the EU, I'm not exactly happy with current affairs, but satisfied with the recognition of my industry's difficulties and proposed attempts to solve them. A failed venture with some new sprouts at worst case, a tangible breakthrough at best.

So far, the EU holds leading position in the lithography systems (ASML). The EU is competitive in radio (Ericsson, Nokia) and embedded (NXP, Infineon, STM) semi manufacturing. There're many blank spaces on the European vertical technology stack, but it's far from a blank slate. This whole commitment is about EU pushing homegrown processor sovereignty across the entire stack. AFAIU, the project puts the focus on HPC as the only specific target platform that needs to be manufactured, but the developments around this project should lay the ecosystem for the boost of the industry as a whole.

Companies such as Apple[1], Microsoft[2], Amazon[3], Google[3], and especially fresh start-ups like Nuvia[4] and Ampere[5] — are working on new ARM-based CPU designs, while SiFive[6] and some others on RISC-V. Also, I'd speculate that AMD and Intel will have to consider switching from the X86 in the foreseeable future. Now is the best possible time for venture into the semiconductor industry in the past few decades. I don't underestimate the complexity of the task. But perhaps a fraction of €145bn would be enough to plant a seed of a viable EU-based CPU semi enterprise; or is it definitely a doomed undertaking, eh? Maybe that French SiPearl[7] or some other company will take chances, we shall see.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Apple_Silico...

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

[3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/google-wants-to-dump...

[4] https://nuviainc.com/

[5] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15575/amperes-altra-80-core-n...

[6] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sifive-tech-idUSKCN2571UL

[7] https://sipearl.com

Changing where the foundation is incorporated doesn’t change where this R&D happens.

Also Switzerland isn’t in the EU.

It's the inability for SMIC to obtain EUV lithography equipment for their sub-7nm process technologies from ASML that prevents China from getting into high-end semiconductors, not the domestic microarchitecture know-how.

Here is an interesting question: how long will it take China to catch up? I predict 10 years! The Chinese government sees a leading position in semi manufacture as being of extreme strategic importance. There are several reasons why I think China will succeed other than government strategy: the size of the Chinese market (already the biggest processor market in the world), the ease with which Taiwanese semi expertise can be brought to China (legally, salaries are just higher in Shanghai than in Taipei).

As long as the US has the world’s only reserve currency and as long as the EU economy - especially the productive bit in the North - is built on exporting to the all-powerful US consumer, the EU has very little leverage in its affairs with the US.

The final word has not been spoken. Construction of Nord Stream 2 has recently been restarted despite the US threatening with sanctions.

Only a fool would tie themselves to China as things stand right now.

The larger ARM Cortex cores are still designed to a large degree in Southern France.

How does this matter? Do you think ARM won't license their IP to European chip makers?

Worth noting the Sophia Antipolis arm design centre in France continues to exist. It works on some of the big A-class cores (The A75 for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A75).

Though whether arm would get involved in this endeavour is another question. They have a significant physical IP portfolio: https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-physical and associated skillsets (I think at least some of this is UK based, not entirely sure how much) so would be a good partner to have and I suspect arm would like to see arm cores coming out as test designs rather than RISC-V cores. Of course in the wake of brexit potentially not a partnership the EU wants politically! UK government would spin it as UK company plays key part in major EU initiative with significant funding awarded. EU would spin it as EU brings in major global semiconductor company to new semiconductor initiative.

Does that even marginally matter?

Even after Brexit, both EU, and UK will remain open economies, unless you believe a conspiracy theory that Boris is a closet communist.

[1] https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14039015/how-d....

ASML has plans to get into sub 1nm level. 2nm and 1.5 nm is already in the pipeline.

The technology high-NA EUV (high Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet) becomes just insane. Mirror manufacturing process requires atomic scale corrections and the whole metrology is moved into vacuum.

The limit for mass production is measuring and calibration. The measurement accuracy is comparable or exeeding Large Hadron Collideror gravitational-wave astronomy. The speed (wafers per hour) must eventually slow down, requiring more machines and making the process more expensive. Then Moore's law finally dies due to the cost.

A nitpick: You are greatly underestimating the precision in gravitational-wave astronomy.

ASML's atomic scale corrections are approximately one billion times larger than the fraction-of-a-proton's width displacements measured by LIGO.

From https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts:

> At its most sensitive state, LIGO will be able to detect a change in distance between its mirrors 1/10,000th the width of a proton! This is equivalent to measuring the distance to the nearest star (some 4.2 light years away) to an accuracy smaller than the width of a human hair.

Given the size of this commitment it seems clear that there is a lot more to 5nm than the lithography machine.

I mean they can get paid but there’s a ton of other companies not starting from scratch they can also make billions off of so I don’t see why some geographic thing is some huge advantage for EU.

They already operate in a highly lucrative global market with companies who don’t need to figure anything out.

If anything this should be expansion capital or efforts to build more factories locally. Not trying to do it themselves.

But hey what do I know. I don’t have multiple countries with lagging tech interests in mind with lots of money to burn.

Yes there is whole part of equation that has nothing to do with ASML. But the point, to over simplify things a lot was that without ASML there are currently zero chance you could get leading edge node working. But even with it you have barely started.

Look at Intel, Samsung and Global Foundry.

Unfortunately no. A number of pieces of military hardware produced in bigger numbers will leave even that pricetag in the dust.

The declaration essentially said "one oil platform, unpackaged".

There was a suitable tariff code for it, but the value of it was so great the electronic customs declaration system couldn't handle all the digits.

Instead they had to write the value as a free-text comment.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_A_platform

The USS Ford is said to cost around 13 billions. I wouldn't call that "reasonable" :)

https://usadefensenews.com/2020/11/13/meet-the-us-navys-13-b...

I have to say though, from Wikipedia, sounds like there are only a few of them? Sort of one-offs, each of them (so to speak). I kind of think that might disqualify them.

Like calling the ISS the most expensive machine?

https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow

(I know this comment is not exactly in the mood of HN, but this is the one thing I never fail to think of when someone mentions the Bagger family of murderous machines!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBdMRUG69uc

So many disciplines of engineering going into this machine!

And not a small part to gigantic speculative expectations around tech sector in general, which seem to have crossed the Atlantic this year.

So much speculative interest has never been a good thing as we know.

I thought 'gigafactory' was coined by Tesla/Elon?

It was named as such because of the scale and capacity of those Fab as compared to other pure play competitor. It was also one reason how TSMC manage to win by Economy of Scale.