How important is technological industry? Pretty damn important I'd say if you're interested in economic growth and hence supporting your social safety net.

The technological industry is indeed very important, the mistake is thinking VR goggles and chatbots are somehow the only or even particularly relevant form of technology. Europe is of course full of high technology firms, (the awkwardly named https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana) contains a non trivial amount of high value added industry in the world.

What we need more of these days is 155 mm shells, chip fabs, nuclear power plants, solar cells and rail, not Facebook and Apple equivalents complaining about regulations.

You have a good point, I'll give you that.

We get so focused on big tech being social media/ad companies that we ignore the rest of it, which is actually huge.

Big tech is not inherent in the concept of a tech industry. Big tech is like 6 companies that want to swallow the world. Not being able to separate these two concepts is grade school level literacy and critical thinking. It’s not acceptable to conflate them. It’s completely ridiculous.

how many other large eu based tech companies can we name? like 3 total?

Accenture, Siemens, Nokia, Ericsson, Capgemini, Atos, Dassault Systems, Bosch, Ahold Delhaize, Dassault Systèmes? maybe little known outside the EU, but the EU has something like 20% of the world's software developers.

GP will have to explain to me, at a grade school level, how they want to differentiate big tech and BIG tech.

You're mixing up many things here:

1. Accenture, Capgemini and Atos are consulting companies that don't produce anything, they just rent out their code monkeys to the customers. And you know what those code monkeys are trained in? Software stacks that were created mostly in the US.

2. The rest of the companies you mention do not employ that many software developers.

3. They also do not deliver terribly popular, or important products. I mean, Bosch produces commodities like dishwashers, vaccuum cleaners and power tools, hard to call it "tech company".

Is Tech only Software?

If so, Apple and Nvidia won‘t qualify. They‘re more of a hardware company.

BTW Bosch‘s main business is automotive supplies. They‘re doing everything down to having their own fabs for automotive chips. It‘s just completely invisible to us as consumers that‘s why you consider it a dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and power tools company.

Nvidia’s moat is almost entirely software though, not just cuda but all the other bits of drivers required to bitbang a gpu into showing stuff on a screen (see: intel arc for how important this is)