There are plenty of industrial parks available near transportation, water, and electricity in Europe to build this out. This also aligns with how the modern chip ecosystem works where the fab components are coming from Europe, the advanced chips are coming from Taiwan, other chips are coming from across SEA, and final assembly is happening in China. What I suspect will happen is that Europe will start printing advanced chips and most of them will be shipped to China for integration. If a conflict/dispute breaks out, switching to European assemblers will be expensive but totally doable with a short-term investment (2-3 years??)
Semiconductor manufacturing is dirty business. I live in the EU next to one such fab and whenever local environmental concerns are raised about the fab, since nasty chemicals are sometimes found in the river the plant uses, the official response is always "the exact process is confidential, we cannot allow external inspectors inside, but we can pinky swear we conform to all regulations via self audits" and the government rolls with that as the unofficial response is "stop bothering us about the environment or we relocate production to Asia and you're left with a bunch of unemployed engineers and tax hole in your city coffers".
Yeah, about that:
"STMicroelectronics N.V. commonly referred as ST or STMicro is a Dutch multinational corporation and technology company of French-Italian origin headquartered in Plan-les-Ouates near Geneva, Switzerland"
The lengths French and Italian corporations will go to to avoid taxes and red tape in their home countries lol.
Without the skilled workforce or infrastructure the company will for sure not be competitive.
What most big companies are now doing to get insanely wealthy is have most governments foot the bill for the infrastructure, protection, and education of their workforce, while all the profits from the fruit of their labor go directly to shareholders and the governments don't see a dime in taxes so stuff like education, healthcare and infrastructure is falling apart while corporate profits have never been higher.
You are mixing chicken and eggs here. We had education and skilled people before huge governments stealing massive amounts of taxes from people existed. The disposable income from the population gave rise to bureaucrats who love to tax everything under and pretend that they world cannot run without them. That's pure twisted logic.
It makes sense. ASML are in the Netherlands, as are NXP. ST are in France. Germany has quite a bit of semiconductor production for the automotive industry.
It'll be slow and expensive to get there though. There's not many places in the EU where you could simply drop a Shenzen in, demolishing historic buildings and natural environment along the way.