Plus side, the amount of money seems realistic. TSMC's latest node at 5nm/3nm was like $16B and so 10x doesn't sound outrageous if playing catchup.

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.

Airbus was not related to EU (or EEC). It was basically a France-Germany bipartite cooperation, with tiny bits of Spain and Netherlands, and UK being in/out. UK didn't belong to EEC when they were supposed to take part in the beginning of the project. Spain didn't join EEC until 20 years later. Netherlands were in by accident, in a way.

While Airbus is older than the current EU it was and is a multi-national cooperation in the same spirit, where political and national interests need to be taken into account, even if it reduces economic efficiency. They even needed the Beluga https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_Beluga because they could not concentrate manufacturing of big parts in a single country.

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.