I'm not so sure of that. Don't companies often buy a million of a chip and then that's it? Famously the MacBook Neo was created to get rid of some stockpile of old chips Apple was sitting on.

I think this story is the exception. The supply chain time for hardware is so long, designers are picking their chips out months and years in advance. So you really do have to trust that the supplier will be around to support the hardware in a few months or a few years.

numerically, most companies are not in cutting edge rapid product cycle consumer gear like apple, they instead want to buy 1000/year of the same part for a decade (or maybe gradually better, compatible equivalents)

also companies try really hard not to keep huge stockpiles of parts as part of lean manufacturing

It depends on the industry. High-volume consumer electronics is often like this (they're making this year's product, they roughly know the demand, they'll be redesigning it in a year or two), but industrial electronics generally wants to know that they will still be able to buy the parts in 10 years, at least (a design or even a single unit can be in active use for decades).

Separately from my other comment, European companies seem to have a credibility problem no matter what they do or how well they do it, just because they're outside of the good old boy's club that is Silicon Valley. When's the last time you heard some praise for OVH or IONOS Cloud?

I think the EU is making credible attempts to change this.

Not really. It's a capitalist economy, they can only regulate what exists, not bring things into existence. The best they can do is offer grants to those who apply for them.

Umm I would say working physical samples is pretty important.