What do Europeans think of the European economy? From my American perspective it looks like they are trying to lose, trying to fall backwards, trying to become a less prosperous society. No one seems to be building anything, and the governments seem to be preventing anyone who tries to advance from doing so. What am I missing?
If you focus only on tech the discrepancy is larger than if you include the wider economy. Even though USA is ahead economically, the EU is still the second largest player globally and the gap is probably not as wide the HN bubble makes it seem.
Happy to hear India got mentioned by the same executive during that conversation. We are just started buying from them. I went to Semicon India 2026, held in delhi last week. The energy was amazing. Really pleasant. all big names including ASML.
It's is heartening looking at a country like India and thinking that it only seems to be a little behind China on the same trajectory. The little flashes of news as they start settling in to more interesting and high tech industries. Whatever good or evil comes out of their growing geopolitical power at least that is another billion people with a clear enough path to wealth and prosperity.
In my opinion, India is around 30 years behind China. This is unlikely to change for several reasons. However, the primary reason is that no Indian government ever had a manufacturing policy that comes close to China's. The service economy is strong but employs a tiny percentage of the population.
Most of Indian government spending is on welfare followed by endemic corruption. It leaves very little money for nation building.
Thirty? Try more like 10, and that’s only for the advanced nodes. Everything else, we will have capacity coming online soon enough.
Design, the gap is nonexistent in terms of talent deployed (though we have some way to go to have homegrown product companies). Which puts us roughly where Europe is.
Also consider, a tiny percentage of the Indian population is a ridiculous number of people. Dwarfing pretty much any other country except China.
Your last point on welfare and corruption is also false; 35% of government spend is on interest payments (which is kind of normal for most countries?) and 30% is on infrastructure and other capex. Defence is 8% and central welfare schemes plus co-sponsored schemes with the states are only 26%. The point being, while corruption is definitely a problem, it doesn’t significantly come out of the central budget. And welfare is smaller than infrastructure spending even if it’s quite significant (and it better be, in a country like this).
If India is 10 years behind China, that would mean in 2036 India will be where China is today. What's the chance of that happening?
Only an estimated 6 million Indians work in IT and tech services where the money is. India's working age population is approximately 950 million. India had the golden opportunity to bring manufacturing to India when Western companies wanted to reduce their dependence on China. But it wasted it.
I don't know where you are getting that 30% spending on infrastructue.
The infrastructure spending is where and how the corruption happen. The cases of bridge collapses in bihar gujarat, the mp 90 degree bridge etc should be obvious cases of corruption.
The opposite, all historical clear paths i.e. manufacturing/export led model is closed/closing (geopolitics + being automated away). Less clear service export also closing. The growth path that employs 100s of millions and 10s of millions are not available to Indian.
Reality is even PRC with most favorable conditions still left behind ~400m people because there's only so many opportunities. It's one thing to have ~1B who made it supporting ~400m who didn't vs India trending towards 1.7 B... and if they end up with 500m that makes it, and 1.2B that doesn't, then things may get very ugly in terms of governance. Now that 500m middle/upper class is large enough that India will in aggregate "make it" as geopolitical power, as in climb the tech tree, but due to sheer population and opportunities that looks now foreclosed, most of Indian's statistically, simply, won't. And when numerator/denominator of haves/have not too skewed, there's nothing haves can do (redistribute) even if they wanted to, which lbh, they won't. IMO this pretty much baked in dynamic for India for next few generations, unless we discover abundance.
with generations of parents forcing thier children to either be doctors or engineers, I would have expected India to lead the world in both of those categories.
I remember when China was poor and everyone was talking about how their communal society guarenteed poverty. Then they started getting wealthy and the story became their communal society was what allowed them to be wealthy. The US is similarly either propelled by or crippled by their individualism depending on whether they've had a good year or not. India will no doubt be similar.
IMO the evidence suggests it is mostly tax policy and whether people are allowed to start and run businesses. Culture is important insofar as it affects those areas of policy. Getting wealthy is literally as simple as being able to create new wealth and keep it, plus lots of time. People don't choose to stay poor unless someone with a gun forces them to be poor.
> Getting wealthy is literally as simple as being able to create new wealth and keep it, plus lots of time. People don't choose to stay poor unless someone with a gun forces them to be poor.
Yes, that sums it up. The biggest problem is government officials who get in the way of starting or running a business, ask for bribes, and generally make it impossible to do any non-software non-backoffice business work. Plus taxes.
You could say the same of the aristocracy of Europe over the last few hundred years, but that has effedtively crumbled. There's remnants of "old money" families that were upper-class, but for the most part the merchant class took control of the system that held them down. It took many generations, but the blue blooded dynasties are a dying breed.
Arguably India has the class system tied to the prevailing religion, but religion too has faded with modernity. Systems have a habit of breaking under strain and time.
I am a critic of Indias caste system but China has a state sanctioned caste system while the caste system is condensed by the Indian state and the state takes explicit (many think it over does it) steps to try to mitigate the effects of the caste system
China on the other hand defined your government benefits and the jobs you may get based on where you were born. People born rurally have to fake documents to work illegally in cities.
India has a ton of problems, but china is much worse when it comes to human rights. It's not even right to compare the two countries. India is a flawed somewhat liberal democracy (especially for the region of the world, India is a shining beacon on a hill surrounded by repressive regimes), while China is essentially a dictatorship
The hukou system is nothing like that. It's an internal migration thing that works like moving to another country, you can gain "citizenship" of a different area and live there with full benefits.
It was also designed for a clear purpose (slowing down migration into cities that weren't ready to accept it) and was pretty successful, it just outlived its usefulness and became corrupt. Not the same as something based on ancient class divisions that was probably never that useful in the first place.
People work illegally because getting a stamp legally is hard if you don't have money or contacts in the local administration. Same reason as illegal immigrants anywhere else. The central government has been pushing to raise registration quotas and make the process easier but it's clearly not enough.
Well.. caste based discrimination is illegal. But caste based handouts are legal. So a reverse discrimination based on caste is legal and state supported. The only reason caste exists in 2026 is because there are state sponsored incentives if you belong to certain castes.
It can be complicated to draw a line between cultural elements worth preserving and crazy religious fantasy that needs to go. Indian caste system, IIUC, is deeply intertwined with their identity and ethics that it cannot be just cut out and removed. It is also partly coming from practical needs just like food related taboos of Middle Eastern religions that would need to be explained for its removal to be justified following the Chesterton's Fence principle.
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absolute OT trivia that I needed a place to drop: the Indian karma system do not consider beings outside of animal kingdom, e.g. a roadside tree, to be alive and directly involved in the karma and reincarnation and all that, and apparently so did not the original Indian Buddhism. It was originally Chinese, and more prominently Japanese, exposition and localization of Buddhism that changed it up to be the current Studio Ghibli form of it that yes mountains and rivers and 100 year old Italian combat biplanes can all be alive and sentient and that you just ate a carrot is a sort of your original sin and even strictest of vegetarianism is not guilt-free. Your LLM can elaborate on this if necessary...
The USA has historically had a two tier system enshrined in law: one for "whites" and one for "coloreds". (There are two sets of bathrooms in the Whitehouse!) Just because the laws were technically repealed, doesn't mean that the system evaporated overnight.
Coloreds are still hugely overrepresented in the criminal "justice" system, they're still much poorer on average, are still disenfranchised en-masse through gerrymandering and voter ID requirements that accept shooters' club membership cards but not ID cards poorer blacks might possess, etc.
For all intents and purposes, the USA has a caste system that has evolved from an earlier system that was apartheid in all but name.
Nobody is defending caste system. Its bad, and its already illegal as it should be. People are just calling out the hypocrisy when its implied that this kind of stratification is unique to India and unheard of elsewhere. I mean, the west had literal human slaves ffs.
I'm from what would have been considered a low caste in India. The moment people mention India, people bring up the caste system as if it's the cause of every issue there or as if other countries don't have similar problems. Unequal wealth distributions are common. While it makes sense for Indian nationals to want their government to do better than other countries and eliminate social inequality (a feat no other country has ever accomplished), outside observers comparing ought to benchmark countries against one another fairly. All countries have social inequality. If India were to eliminate social inequality it would become superior to most countries on the planet. That seems to me a utopian dream, but I understand why someone living there might want that.
For the rest of us, I think we need to be reasonable in our assessments, especially when the other country under discussion is China.
I guess the difference is social mobility in the US exists, a lot of successful founders in the US come from poor beginnings. In India you cannot legally change your caste for your entire life, if I’m not mistaken.
Seems like it isn’t a system worth defending. China has so many issues, it also blows my mind that people around here defend and praise China like they’re doing good things. They aren’t.
Caste is mostly irrelevant in India outside of liberal arts department of so-called elite universities.
There are some pockets where this is not true, but they are exceptions.
And those comments aren't defending it.
Upward mobility is available in India, too. But remember that to have "upward mobility", there needs to be place at the top. For a country which has been under hundreds of years of regressive colonial rulers, there is not much place at the top.
Global wealth is much more in the US than in India right now, so it is not wise to compare rags-to-riches of the US with those of India.
India's government jobs, elite engineering and medical seats have a legal 50%+ quota for "lower" castes people. Did you know that? So, I am saying, 50%+ students graduating ALL elite engineering and law and medical and nursing schools, etc. are from these "lower" castes. Did you know that?
An yet legally, you are born and die in a bucket you have no say in whatsoever. From the outside looking in, seems wrong. Not dissimilar to Brave New World in some aspects.
Actually, legally, caste doesn’t exist. It’s been abolished, except for schemes for socially eradicating it (which are controversial but conceptually no different from any other affirmative action).
Not to say it isn’t a problem. But race is still a problem elsewhere too.
There is no bucket. There is affirmative action. If you can prove you're a part of a group for which affirmative action has been granted they'll give you a certificate saying you're part of that group. This is in no way tying you to that group. It's just a scheme to give affirmative action.
This is like saying America's racial quotas (or former ones) put you in a 'bucket'. Caste is essentially race / genetics. You are not bucketed, it is simply a reality of your ancestry. Of course you can't change it.. you cannot change your genetics. This is a ridiculous goal post.
Caste is very much alive in India and this sort of blanket denialism reeks of upper caste privilege.
If caste is all that irrelevant, please go ahead with changing your surname to an obviously lower caste one. We will see how quickly you come crawling back to your so called “irrelevant” caste privilege.
Why do you assume I am so called higher caste? My caste is under a bucket in India called "Other Backward Classes".
Honestly the caste never comes up. In almost any conversation. And I also grew up far away from megacities.
I only heard a couple of priests blabber about the glory of their caste, but they were piss poor and had nothing else to be proud of. And they were bad as priests as well. That is, you wouldn't call them if you care about pure Sanskrit pronunciation, carefulness and seriousness during rituals, etc.
Reservation in education institutions and government job which is used to solve caste system are just doing Eugenics in disguise. Only gene pool of rich lower caste people benefit.
The people who suffered are dead. The people who committed discrimination are dead. Yet the whole nation has to accomodate. Reservation must be done on Pro-Rata basis. If one state like Kerela is advanced, doesn't do caste discrimination and another like Bihar is very much into it. Then only Bihar state should reservation, not whole of India.
Reservation is one of the easiest way to play vote bank politics. It does not benefit anyone other than the politicians and the rich lower caste people.
If Indians could change their caste officially, everybody would be lower caste. In fact there are often protests and agitations by members of certain upper castes to label them lower caste. See this for an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_reservation_agitation
It's a catch 22. India tracks caste because they're trying to get rid of it. America doesn't track race or social status or whatever. Legal status means nothing really. Especially in urban India, it's becoming very irrelevant what your background is. Are there bigoted regressive people? Yeah of course, but I mean... Those are everywhere. Are there more in India than elsewhere? Probably, compared to urban western nations. But India is like a century behind on social progress id estimate. Still ahead of China where your status is literally tied to your place of birth though.
As for changing caste... You only need to reference it if you're seeking government benefit. If you don't care about it, stop keeping track, and don't share it with your kids... They'll never know and just get assigned general or whatever they call it. Of course, since caste is literally genetic, anyone doing a genetic test will quickly figure it out. However a gene test is not enough for seeking caste benefit status if I understand correctly, so this is as erased as you can get
TBH India going to sanctioned if they ever make meaningful inroad. Outsourcing some IV design to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, prune is not the same as if India wants to start stepping on leading edge fabrication money printing toes. But short/medium term, western semi projected to have 100,000s talent shortage so India probably best hope for western semi to stay staffed. VS PRC who is brrrting out enough talent for entire indigenous vertical semis supply chain.
Semiconductor fabs involve a lot of hazardous chemicals, process changes and high energy consumption. Exactly the kind of thing European regulations tend to deter or slow down. Which is somewhat fine if there is nowhere else to build it, but if other places are easier, well...
What is so energy consuming around fabs? The light source? I always thought of these as high-precision, not-too-high-volume processes and would have expected energy requirements to be lower than e.g. a car factory (or similar to e.g. a mall) and completely negligible on a national grid scale or compared to something like a smelter or lignite mine.
Edit: AI claims HVAC and air filtering/handling can be 40-50% of energy usage. Plus a megawatt per EUV scanner (ok, the latter matches what I would have guessed, but compared to the 16 MW of a single large bucket wheel excavator or estimates I've seen for large shopping malls, that's not that insane either).
Life cycle of the fab is 3-5 years, an opimistic estimate of slow down in europe due to all the paper work is 2-3 years, so then you would rather not build the plant.
Just to address this separately: there is effectively energy rationing in several European countries, where the government intervenes to prioritize who should receive energy first (e.g., the Netherlands and Denmark).
AFAIK the problem in NL is due to chronic underinvestment in the grid infrastructure since the big privatisation wave. Combined with the heavy subsidy of industry causing the issues.
Solvable but we need to be much smarter and redirect the fossil subsidies to reducing risk for grid-scale batteries and adding more grid capacity.
And Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are also energy poor states that have been able to maintain capacity.
The energy excuse is true for some manufacturing processes like automotive in CEE which were pants that were built in the 1990s to 2000s and leveraged Russian ONG, but is a red herring for a lot of other manufacturing processes in Europe.
European states have a coordination problem as Draghi pointed out 2 years ago.
I mean Ireland has some of the most strenuous regulations in this regard, with dozens of data centres blocked over planning and environmental impact assessments. Despite this Intel still put €30 billion in turning a 360-acre former stud farm in Kildare into a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility, powered entirely by green energy, and acting a key location for production of Intel’s 14nm process technology. They currently pull 1,677,197 MWh/year from our grid.
More to the point, from 2019 they built €17 billion new fab development which doubled the manufacturing capacity available in Ireland and enabled the production of Intel 4, the company’s most advanced process technology.
For better or worse, Ireland’s extremely lax tax rules resulted in a ton of multinational corporate cash ‘stuck’ there with companies having the option of spending there roughly tax free or repatriating back to the US at some rate higher than that. It also really helps sell the ‘of course an Irish subsidiary owns all of our IP’ tax claims if there is actual spending there, hence you got all the pharma investment and the capital projects from others like Intel and Apple.
Rather the US lax rules regarding their own enforcement.
The Double Irish (& Dutch Sandwich) where Companies routed profits through two Irish-registered subsidiaries, attributing intellectual property royalties to a management seat in a tax haven like Bermuda, is closed since 2015.
Subsequent sequential mismatch structures (the "Single Malt" tool) that replaced the Double Irish for certain firms using non-EU residency loops were also banned. Finally there's a 12.5% charge on unrealized capital gains when a company moves its assets or tax residency out of Ireland.
The headline tax rate and the effective tax rate are also very different things. France's effective corporate tax rate was actually lower than Irelands - but France is an absolutely brutal place to do business in for employers and they've comparatively no english-language tech FDI to speak of.
While I agree completely with you regarding how we handle FDI, the role of Enterprise Ireland, and that our ability to act as an educated, stable and culturally compatible western european base for US industry is not to be understated, the Intel situation in particular has its own special nuance.
This is where the 'Inside Tennis' knowledge of the Irish Tech industry from someone working within it comes in handy. Enter the 21st Century Luddite, Thomas Reid, from stage left.
Thomas is an eccentric, independent bachelor farmer whose family has owned a 72-acre farm next to Intel's Leixlip manufacturing campus for generations.
Ireland’s State Industrial Development Agency (IDA) attempted to use a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) to buy Reid's land so that Intel could proceed with a multi-billion euro expansion of its microchip production plant. The land was valued at €5 million. During the negotiations that followed, the farmer was reportedly offered in the region of €10 million. He turned it down. Reid had no interest in being a millionaire. Instead, he continued to live on-site without a telephone or modern amenities while taking on Intel and the state alone.
The battle culminated in a landmark legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Ireland, where Reid ultimately won a historic victory against corporate overreach and protected his property rights
I mixed up a tense or two there. It was done in 4 years, even accounting for Covid. The timeline looks like this
2019: Kick-off
2020: Construction in Ireland basically halted due to Lockdown for 18 months
Q3'2023: Fab 34 begins running a ‘First Full Loop’ of silicon
Q4'2023: Fab 34 completed. Doubles the manufacturing capacity available in Ireland, enabling the production of Intel 4 and Intel 3, some of the company’s most advanced process technologies, and the first to incorporate EUV lithography
2024: Intel sold 49% stake to Apollo GM for $11.2bn
2026: Intel buys back stake for $14.2bn
Q2'2026: Intel announce a further $5.7bn investment to upgrade existing capacity for server chips, slated for completion by late 2027
If something needs to be done, then these rules are a bit pointless if corporation can just do it in another country. It means the EU simply assists in poisoning poorer countries. If they were serious, then they would have banned chips made using those processes altogether. If they cannot do that, then that regulation is pointless virtue signalling.
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the US all share comparable living standards to Western European states yet are able to maintain and expand semiconductor manufacturing.
The issue is with policymaking - coordination between the EU, national, and local governments is weak so high capex projects become risky.
Edit: can't reply
> Your first 3 countries are also incredibly poor comparisons for living standards as they have horrendous work/life balance.
Their hours worked are comparable to most Western European states as well now [0]. Germany is unique in Europe based on hours worked, and is why German industry is pushing to bring back the 40 hour work week.
I don't think it's that vague. I've lived in both Europe and the US, in several places, and both have a wide range. What I will say is that I don't think Europe is better off for the times that it has thrown up roadblocks.
Also, slow moving, stable regulation can be better than arbitrary flippancy, but that doesn't mean it directly incentivizes investment, it just means the investment already incentivized by demand can proceed with more confidence that it won't have the rug pulled out from under it, assuming the regulations didn't discourage a tentative proposal in the first place.
This is some ridiculous speculation, we do plenty of such critical manufacturing in EU. Regulations is not why we don't make highly-integrated chips here.
Lately specifically because of Intel having financial issues, they already started building their fabs in Dresden and Wrocław when they cancelled last minute.
This was strategically planned with EU as part of bringing back production locally, similar to CHIPS Act in the US.
The Dutch govt is slowly nationalising the chip industry, by making taxes so high no company can survive international competition, and then using this tax money to buy stock in all deep tech companies calling it investing.
Get out of Belgium, then - if it was you and your people.
There are clear ideological, decadent faults in the eu administration. They are responsible for the destruction of one of the main continental industries, transferring (even reduced) pollution to Africa, where decent old cars go (with again no effect on global warming), and transferring the enterprise to China.
If it comes down to European vs Russian manufacturing capacity for missiles and hi-tech weaponry, etc, I'd put my money on Europe. Europe also has the advantage of seeing 5 years of Russia throwing their best at Ukraine, having their air defenses repeatedly breached by Ukraine, even deep into Russia using slow low-tech drones - they know many of Russia's weaknesses.
The US GBP is 100x large than Iranian one and yet the US cannot open the Strait of Hormuz and even defend own bases in the region from cheap drones (52 aircraft lost, most on the ground). GDP is not the only factor when it comes to military capabilities.
>The US GBP is 100x large than Iranian one and yet the US cannot open the Strait of Hormuz
The US regime has no support from its voters and taxpayers to get deeper into the IRan war because the US is the one who started it, it's not an existential threat for Americans in the US to spend more of their money or die intervening in the middle east.
But for EU what happens in Ukraine is an existential threat and they also didn't provoke the war there, so Europeans are more motivated to support the war against Russia than AMericans are to support military intervention in Iran.
The brainless policies continue as we speak: traditional parties keep you exposed to financial masters because money talks, and extremists keep you exposed to their masters because, again, money talks. So: money talks and Europe is still a good milking cow.
Not really much of a consolation, but it's pretty obvious that the standing committee is perfectly happy to sit back and chuckle while watching the rest of the world burn from that nice safe distance. So at least there won't be any china-taiwan issues.
But that's little consolation I understand. I get that when there are two elephants sitting on you, someone telling you how fortunate you are to not have a third one on top of you as well, is a little annoying.
It more due to the fact that the politicians are on a moral kow-it-all high horse than being pragmatic and putting national interest first. As an example all EU leaders absolutely refused to talk with Russia/Putin on putting an end to the war and they were hell bent on militarily defeating Russia. I remember the previous German Chancellor had a phone call with Putin to discuss it and everyone was shitting on him for doing that.
But now Trump is inviting Putin to G20 and I'm sure sure all those EU politician would be all smily and act like no war is going on and gladly talk with Putin. If you think about it the war could have ended years ago and all the Ukranian/Russian lives lost could have been avoided if EU leaders were not so arrogant.
> If you think about it the war could have ended years ago and all the Ukranian/Russian lives lost could have been avoided if EU leaders were not so arrogant.
How exactly is Europe to blame for Russia continuing its war in Ukraine? Russia has clearly demonstrated a lack of interest in peace on any terms that could be acceptable to Ukraine.
> But now Trump is inviting Putin to G20 and I'm sure sure all those EU politician would be all smily and act like no war is going on and gladly talk with Putin
Putin is deathly afraid of being assassinated and is avoiding air travel in favor of trains, and has identical offices to film in at multiple locations to hide his location. There is no chance he is getting on a plane to Florida.
> If you think about it the war could have ended years ago and all the Ukranian/Russian lives lost could have been avoided if EU leaders were not so arrogant.
How so? By Europe rolling over and not supporting Ukraine?
Europe has 15x the GDP of Russia. If they were "hell bent" on militarily defeating Russia, they could have made even tiny sacrifices to the social welfare system, diverted industrial production to military aid, and drowned Ukraine in help. That was a very achievable goal, and they didn't do it.
Instead, the vacillated on importing US natural gas, continued shutting down nuclear power plants, and paid Russia MORE CASH FOR OIL than they ended up giving Ukraine in military aid! They did not in fact, dedicate themselves to this war in any way shape or form.
> they could have made even tiny sacrifices to the social welfare system, diverted industrial production to military aid, and drowned Ukraine in help. That was a very achievable goal, and they didn't do it.
We already did that. Welfare and funding to social services, elderly care, etc is significantly reduced and with higher bar to get than before 2022 where I live. Plus we're also paying the price in higher housing costs thanks to housing millions of Ukrainians.
It's easy to want a higher reduction on welfare services when you're not the one needing them. It's easy to write cheques that other people have to cash.
That was always going to happen. The war just makes that worse. The demographics and lack of economic growth were always going to break those welfare systems. How much they break and who loses out were the only real questions.
> Welfare and funding to social services, elderly care, etc is significantly reduced and with higher bar to get than before 2022 where I live.
Same here! I'd actually say it's basically shut down to new people.
I have spoken to 5 different health/government departments just trying to get some care for my elderly family member who lives alone and has badly hurt both legs, but I have been denied, denied and denied and lied to at every single stage. "We have no money", "Go private", "We are at capacity", "There is a 16 week wait for an assessment", "You can only access us via your GP" [lie]
All because they aren't retirement age yet - then they get more red carpet treatment.
The Government is also busy trying to figure out how to cut welfare for those who don't vote in sufficient numbers to matter
Have you told them to jump on a small inflatable boat, throw away their passports and enter the EU via the Mediterranean? They'll get first class treatment for all their needs on the taxpayers' dime. Because if they don't get it, there's a dozen NGOs paid from your taxes that will sue their government for breaking their human rights for not providing them with the housing and care they need.
Mhmm it's hard not to feel aggrieved with people who get certain basic care no-questions-asked when there are so many reports of questionable claims of what they're fleeing from/age/origin etc and given the numbers (~220k asylum seekers in the system as of 2024, and conveniently a 'transition to a new caseworking system' has prevented any newer figures being published)
But I think we have bigger taxation/spending and economic issues in the UK. Nobody really cares about asylum seekers/immigrants when the economy is booming, jobs are plentiful and inflation is low.
We do seem have a defective system in which people who suddenly need help after having a job and paying lots of tax are more-or-less ignored, but life-long welfare claimants are already so entrenched in the system, it's just a continuation.
Job Seeker's benefit is £408/mo for a maximum of 6 months and only if you had paid sufficient tax in the 2 years prior – basically just a small tax refund but only if you follow the rules imposed upon you by your 'job coach'. And that benefit doesn't then entitle you to any other discount/benefits unlike certain other benefits. It's designed to make you to take any job that turns up – indeed your work 'coach' will likely force you to do that.
Are you for real? Look into France's pension situation. The median pensioner has HIGHER INCOME than the median working adult. And retirement was at 62!
No, there have been absolutely no real cuts to elderly care, the UK's triple lock ensures that the situation gets monotonically worse until the system collapses.
>No, there have been absolutely no real cuts to elderly care
Yeah they have. My city is short 30 million Euros on disability care this year despite increases in taxes. I (non retiree) now need to wait 6+ months for a surgery when it used to be 2, and pay from my taxes for money and weapons to Ukraine and housing to Ukrainian refugees in my city while they have nicer cars than me and don't pay the back breaking car taxes because they leave them on UA plates. I don't necessarily mind that per se, but I do mind being berated as if I'm not sacrificing enough. Please set an example and sacrifice yourself and your family for Ukraine before lecturing us.
> If they were "hell bent" on militarily defeating Russia, they could have made even tiny sacrifices to the social welfare system, diverted industrial production to military aid, and drowned Ukraine in help
Why do you think an entire continent with multiple and (sometimes even conflicting with each other) culture, priorities, national interest would do that? EU is an economic union. Not a federation like US
European support started out slow, but has ramped up as the US has backed away.
Germany will spend 20% of it's federal budget on military in 2027, planning to increase that to 30% by 2030. "We cannot defend ourselves against Putin with a balanced budget".
> What would come next after Ukraine may be the Baltic states or Poland.
According to your YouTube sources? NATO has nothing to do with Ukraine. NATO countries can defend themselves if one of those countries actually are being attacked. That happened in 9/11 and NATO countries supporting militarily the US wars that preceded.
There is no such thing as moral obligation when it comes to politics and national interest. If it’s your country, then it’s your job to defend it or whatever. So far it doesn’t seem to be serving their self interest supporting an endless war.
Their self-interest is in keeping Putin at arms length and avoiding WW III. Putin is already threatening Lithuania, sending drones into Poland. If Putin wasn't prevented from taking Ukraine, do you really think it would end there?
Europe has been stepping up a lot recently, given Trump's reluctance to push back against Putin - looks at UK/France supply of missile and anti-missile systems and IP to Ukraine, stepped up air defense based out of Lithuania (anticipating Kaliningrad as the first front of the war), etc.
No, they have not been "stepping up" relative to the existential threat at their door. They are still doing 10% of the minimum you'd expect from someone whose literal lives and civilization are at risk from a barbarian threat literally murdering their neighbors (and playing games with their own sovereignty more recently, with drone incursions).
> Europe is of course well aware that war with Russia seems increasingly inevitable, and have been preparing for it
What is the source for this? I have seen some news articles with this narrative, it was more on the line of fear-mongering rather than providing evidence.
Ukraine is only Putin's first step, and Europe is well aware of that, so look at all the advanced weapons systems Europe is now giving to Ukraine (Storm Shadow, SCALP, SAMP/T etc), as well as the statements they are making. They are well aware this has made them a target for Putin, with UK missiles having been used against Black Sea targets etc, but are doing it all the same.
Europe is not tolerating Russian drone incursions, and has been shooting them down, have been on air combat footing patrolling the finish border and Kalinograd region (operating out of Lithuania), boosting defense of the Suwałki Gap, etc.
YouTube is perhaps one of the best sources of information, since US MSM is not interested.
That's a weird stance to take. If someone invaded a other territory next to yours and some of your unions members fear they're next, business as usual is the wrong strategy, imo
That's why diplomacy is important. There is no scenario that Europe, let alone Ukraine can militarily defeat Russia (a country with nuclear weapons). I understand defending the territory. But what is the end game? fight forever? or mutual destruction?
Kick them out so they gain nothing and have a credible enough deterrent they don't try again. This is also well below the stated threshold for Russia escalating to nukes but well above the threshold of military defeat.
Then that is a loss, yes. It is an attritional war: whoever runs out of resources or will first loses. I don't think most of Europe has internalised how big of a loss that would be.
It seems to be "dump on Europe" day which I'm sure is popular but lets just stop for a second and ask what the sales of ASML machinery to the US would be without the CHIPS act .... a massive subsidy. Aren't subsidies supposed to be a bad European thing??? I'm confused. Are we free market proponents or planned economy proponents?
I don't think this is the main point (subsidies). ASML sold nothing in Europe because Europe is not a factor in semi manufacturing, primarily due to regulations and bureaucracy.
With all the regulations nobody in their right mind would build a fab in Europe.
Europe is increasingly relying on the rest of the world to supply it with critical things. It’s FAFOed with regulations that have driven these things elsewhere and now is heading into a “FO” world of hurt as the tables are turned and they desperately need things and have to pay the price. This will likely define the next 20 years in Europe.
The fab itself can still be "state of the art" even when the product isn't (Germany needs chips for its industry, not for gaming PCs or AI data centers).
We both know that feature sizes became marketing names over a decade ago. The "12 nm" for that fab are of course the marketing name. In any case, it's a seriously old process at this point.
You probably mixed it up with the Infineon Smart Power Fab.
The Infineon Smart Power Fab was opened some months ago and builds power ICs for the energy market. Probably something like ACDC and DCAC converter ICs. This is also needed in AI data centers.
https://www.infineon.com/de/regional/dresden/smart-power-fab
European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC), the TSMC fab in Dresden is still under construction and will produce logic chips in 28nm or 16nm. Bosch, Infineon, and NXP each have 10% share in this fab. I assume that it will mostly produce products which will be sold by these 3 companies, probably just the next generations from what they already sell. This fab was 50% subsidized by the German government.
GlobalFoundries also has a big 20nm Fab in Dresden.
The most advanced logic fab in the EU is the Intel fab in Ireland.
Bosch never said that though, the "AI" stuff was about the production methods used in the fab (along with a couple other buzzwords), it was never claimed that the fab produces chips "for AI". Instead these are fairly simple controllers for the automotive industry.
Can you share any official communication where somebody claimed this fab was for AI?
It was pretty clear that this fab - much like the other Bosch facilities - is going to be for automotive and industry ICs, not for high end node sizes in CPUs or GPUs.
I think I've read "power management chips for AI" somewhere. Probably technically correct, but also a somewhat gratuitous reference to the current thing for silly PR reasons.
I don't think this is merely a gratuitous reference given the fact that AI demand is probably - among EVs - a key driver for the sales of power related ICs.
since when are executives statements meant to produce more investment into them trustable?
even more so it is reasonable to assume their (executive) statement was a simplification ignoring small for the overall statement irrelevant exceptions
like ignoring there being a factory build which is small and only meant for older nodes producing embedded chips and is for the car industry only
because honestly while the factory does matter for Bosh, it doesn't really make much difference for the larger picture of chip production in the EU
1. They provided evidence (construction of a fab in Dresden).
2. Executives lie all of the time.
Aside: after all of the denunciations of AI companies claims of danger, I expected comments here to be denouncing this as a “ASML shill article trying to get the government to buy more of their product”. Not that I believe, but the contrast is striking.
The claim in OP is that "ASML currently sells no chipmaking machines in Europe". A single chipmaking machine purchase into a fab in Europe would be enough to prove that claim wrong. The number of fabs in Taiwan is irrelevant to this claim.
You know people love rUsSiA iS nOt ThE sAmE aS uSsR.
But having read "Stalin" by Stephen Kotkin I've concluded that the USSR was nothing more than a legal construction to increase Russian control over its neighbors.
Gerhard Schröder, chancellor 1998-2005, is well known to be best buddies with Putin and later (three weeks after leaving office!) worked for Gazprom. He is nicknamed "Gas-Gerd".
Schröder also famously called Putin a "true democrat".
> Another concern is that even advanced silicon produced in Ireland or at ESMC is then shipped to other regions for packaging, meaning that European companies have largely lost their ability to produce sophisticated chips entirely in Europe. In turn, this means that, for now, there is hardly any strategic point for European authorities to create demand for chips that are 'Made in Europe' because they are either not assembled in Europe, not produced in Europe, or not developed in Europe. We have no idea whether this is eventually going to change, but there are currently no signs that it will.
This is just such a dire situation to be in. Even USA has seen the writing on the wall regarding China-Taiwan which is why it has been strategically re-homing all the most advanced chip fab technology to Arizona [1].
They can create demand for "Made in Europe" semiconductors that aren't packaged there, and then they can create demand for "Made in Europe" semiconductors that are packaged there and try to get a packaging plant to open up.
If you have a two step problem, the strategy of "I can't do two things at the same time so I'll just give up", is not a good one.
This was a major flaw that I and others brought up a couple years ago when the EU was consulting industry about making its own CHIPS Act.
While bleeding edge backend processes got the bulk of reporting, the major push for the American CHIPS Act was the rebuild packaging capacity in the US (Samsung is working on this in Texas).
This was also the same approach Taiwan, Malaysia, and China used to climb up the semiconductor value chain.
The EU also failed to tie design capacity together as well, as semiconductor design capacity is almost nonexistent in Europe.
There's certainly semiconductor design capacity in Europe, but it's mostly geared towards low-end semiconductors, like the ones used in automotive and industrial. NXP and ST are designing ICs in Europe but relatively commodity stuff like low-end MCUs and motor controllers.
what's wild about this(not coming at you :), just in general wanted to post ) .... folks pick various details but i think sometimes miss the big picture. If they can make current/next gen HBM with similarish PUE... idk that DUV vs EUV vs 5nm vs 3nm matters?
How well have you thought this through? I have a lot of questions if they went this route.
Why are there no buyers as it is? Doing this would force lower margins for ASML, effectively knee-capping a Crown Jewel of European technology and business. Do you think the EU should subsidize those losses?
> So far, however, the law has done little to spur the construction of new semiconductor factories in Europe. The European Court of Auditors concluded last year that the EU is unlikely to achieve its goal of doubling Europe’s share of the global chip market by 2030.
They should make another law and probably a few more commissions of auditors.
I get the sarcasm, but its not like e.g. TSMC popped up in a environment of pure libertarian free market capitalism. It was, from the beginning, a project of the Taiwanese state, and without significant public influence there is no way it would have become what it is. Are the EU laws what's needed? IDK. But without a proper public industrial policy besides "low taxes and few regulations" there is no way Europe will be able to get significant semiconductor-production up, the rich-get-richer phenomenon is just to strong.
I think the point is that laws alone mean nothing. As you note, Taiwan was more active than just having commissions and signing papers.
Airbus proves the EU can do this. It remains to be seen if they still have the ability to take constructive action, or if “add more bureaucracy” is the only tool remaining in the toolbox.
Airbus has been grandfathered into the current legal situation. Today a future Airbus would not be able to even start collecting data for its initial Environmental Impact Study.
I’ve seen someone explaining why it’s not as easy with semiconductors: Airbus can spread several different factories for different components around the EU. For semiconductors that’s not as feasible.
Thus countries would fight which one would have the semiconductors factory.
I think it was more or less this argument, which seems to make sense.
And Boeing's rampant carelessness proves European laws can be beneficial. "Hurr durr, how about them European laws" is a low-effort comment that adds nothing to the discussions.
The argument that a slack regulatory environment is sufficient was disproven when the US government subsidized new fabs via the CHIPS Act (a new law!), and then went further and partially nationalized a failing Intel to prop it up.
Another interesting fact is that Che-Chia Wei (the man who made TSMC what it is) received zero equity. Everything he has he bought himself at the market rate.
Misleading article, they are selling to corporations already who in turn have plans to create a few fabs in Europe. So it is maybe more about European companies who are not buying, but that rests on difficult capital availability and fragmented nature of the continent. Europe is not one country after all, someone wants a fab in Germany, but the why is it not in France or Sweeden.
Europe is continually complaining about its dependency on Chinese steel, cars, electronics and semiconductors yet their carmakers are buying cheap Chinese steel instead of European steel and European semiconductor manufacturers are preferring cheap Chinese semiconductor equipment over ASML gear.
The European Commission wanted to put hefty tariffs on dumped Chinese steel but the carmakers sought an exemption. They don't care about European sovereignty, only about their profits. Penny wise and pound foolish. I doubt there will still be a European car industry in two decades or so.
> Europe is continually complaining about its dependency on Chinese steel, cars, electronics and semiconductors yet their carmakers are buying cheap Chinese steel instead of European steel and European semiconductor manufacturers are preferring cheap Chinese semiconductor equipment over ASML gear.
You clearly have no idea about the value creation chain. Steel is a commodity, why shoot yourself into the foot by buying expensive one. And semiconductors are not commodities.
But I guess this logic only makes sense to a country that insists on using its own overpriced steel to save a couple jobs.
How are you gonna fight a war when you can't make the steel for your bullets and artillery grenades? Yes, that's the scary logic we need to take into account these days.
Steel is not a commodity, it's a basic ingredient in any industrial base.
They are not cracking EUV, they are finding ways that actually scale. Chips can be much cheaper than they are currently. I mean yes, obviously we cannot be confident ntil it happens, but they are already making 5nm with DUV.
When China leads chip making the rest of the world is just vasal states.
Going to higher densities with DUV needs high multi patterning which is very inefficient and ends up costing more than if they could do EUV with fewer patterns.
It's well known tech that is used globally, just not to that degree as yield and throughput goes way down
they'd just tell all their export ships to turn around and stop all exports
US would collapse in 30 days
it would be like the blockade US is doing to Cuba except 90% of every product we use and they wouldn't have to fire a single shot
they could also sell off the billions in US bonds and other assets
US economy would be utterly destroyed, we'd never recover because even the middle-class would be living out of their cars (now dead because all the parts for them are made in China)
What is perhaps more important from ASML's standpoint is that none of the ongoing fab projects in Europe are leading-edge fabs set to use EUV and eventually High-NA EUV lithography scanners. The tools that European fabs use today and that new facilities are set to use in the future are mature tools that cost considerably less than advanced EUV or immersion DUV scanners. This is perhaps a concern for ASML, as the company is naturally interested in selling its more sophisticated and expensive equipment.
Missing from article is where they are selling which I assume is mostly Taiwan and America.
Bloomberg[1] has a breakdown based on ASML filings. For Q2, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan made up 77% of ASML's orders, with China representing another 14%. Given China is on the list, I imagine this includes non-EUV tech as well given the sanctions.
The fact that Europe has incredibly limited frontier chip making capability is the issue, though. Even if they can produce other chips, its position is not at all resilient.
The US isn't in a whole lot better position. We've got Intel and Micron, but otherwise dependent on TSMC (and ASML).
I guess the US chip designers could switch to Intel as a fab if they had to, but there are not even any US-made DUV machines, so far from self-sufficient.
Europe is mostly interested in supporting its car industry. But soon they won't have to worry about that either.
There are no companies in Europe designing high-end semiconductors because the wages are much lower than in the U.S. The best European talent is moving Stateside and raking in ten times what they can get at home without having to build up seniority first.
Philosophy, theory, and arts are so intertwined with technology that a nation which does not build cannot be expected to remain at the forefront of those three.
In thermodynamics, through cycles of expansion and compression, useful work can be extracted. Similarly through economic cycles, America is able to extract wealth from rest of globe.
I can't imagine it is cheap to get EUV machines these days. Maybe they don't want to get into a bidding war with America and Taiwan and are waiting for things to cool down?
I'm fed up with the regular euro bashing. People are underestimating what EU countries can do. The whole history was similar. France, for example, was neither the first to build high-end luxury products nor was it the first to embrace the Industrial Revolution. It managed to catch up in any case.
EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.
I wish that the EU did the same as China did years ago, and that is to block any non-EU tech company from entering the market. We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.
> I'm fed up with the regular euro bashing. People are underestimating what EU countries can do.
I'm from the EU and glad to be a part of it. I just wish it was easier to do multi-national projects (I think anything aerospace or military related shows how little the countries want to collaborate) or even just tackle large projects and undertakings better.
Hell, in regards to chips I'd be happy with at least 2020 level performance chips for servers, desktops and laptops, even ARM ones. Okay maybe that is aiming too high cause my current Ryzen 7 5800X is from 2020 and so is my M1 MacBook Air and I don't see the need to upgrade, even 2016 would be good enough. Just more domestic production, CPUs, GPUs, memory, storage, everything else.
China still does not have many companies on the level of American technology firms. Just restricting foreign competition in the domestic market is not enough for most places to compete; their domestic markets and investment levels are too underdeveloped to produce globally competitive companies.
The thing that produces competitive industries is requiring them to compete globally. That's how Chinese cars got good (Tesla joint venture -> independent Chinese Tesla -> competitive domestic companies).
There are two main reasons why the EU struggles to produce strong text companies are, IMO:
1. EU laws and regulations are very burdensome and cover everything from employees to packaging waste.
2. There is not enough capital that gets invested in EU tech companies to pay high tech salaries, again largely driven by more restrictive financial rules.
The result of these two is that European engineers tend to leave for the US, and European companies struggle to grow to American size.
Around 70% of American billionaires made their money themselves, while in the EU a similar share inherited it. Despite all the talk about social mobility in Europe being better than in the US, the truth is that the ultrawealthy in Europe have created a regulatory environment which makes it nearly impossible for real competition to exist.
> Just restricting foreign competition in the domestic market is not enough ...
Yes, It is not sufficient but I would argue it was necessary. In case of China it allowed them to have a set of domestic copycat companies like Baid, Alibaba and Tencent, that enabled high demand for local engineers to serve their needs and that allowed to have a large pool of competent domestic engineers which now can benefit other emerging sectors too. It keeps surprising how many top contributors to large OSS projects are from China.
Interesting! I would split regulation in two different types though. The fist one is merely the output of bureaucracy and good intentions and a second that is targeting US tech companies as EU can't compete.
>Around 70% of American billionaires made their money themselves, while in the EU a similar share inherited it.
The top 100 wealthiest Austrian families own two thirds of the country's wealth <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755835>, and none of the wealth came from tech companies. The same is likely true of Germany with one exception: SAP.
Put another way, the two wealthiest German-born tech people (except the founders of SAP) are Peter Thiel and Andy Bechtolsheim, both of whom earned their billions in the US.
Yes definitely, this is why I see the shift with AI as an opportunity to push forward new companies. EU needs to put the focus on hardware where it did have a competitive advantage few years ago (still have on B2B hardware)
>EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.
I guess you mean EEC in 1958, because EU was officially formed in 1993. And normally people would count the period of the two World War and starting to count by the end of it. Either way it is a lot more than 30 years.
Yes indeed ! What is important is that the same people/generation who witnessed the atrocities of war and resented each other decided to create a union
> EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.
Was that the halcyon period where they were too broken to fight back and got the continent split between the Americans and the Communists? Or the modern period where it turns out the security situation in Europe was so totally mishandled that we ended up with the Ukraine war?
The spectre of nukes getting used isn't dropping over time and this sort of grinding destructive war is probably raising the risk of a big conflagration. Everyone seems to be rearming.
> I wish that the EU did the same as China did years ago, and that is to block any non-EU tech company from entering the market. We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.
You can do it even today. But you can't bring back manufacturing from China. You gave them your techology and the market.
times change. past greatness is not a reliable predictor for the future. Mongolia is rather unlikely to be the largest empire ever again, don't you think?
its political stability and relative prosperity makes it an important consumer market, sure, but it's increasingly clear that Europe is no longer "great" great. its wealth was a product of being ahead of the rest of the world for a long time technologically and militarily, but the colonial era is over, so many others had caught up and are now eating their lunch. even the big three -- Germany, France, and Britain -- are in cultural, economic, and demographic decline. the alliance that binds them is loose and incoherent, promoting stagnation rather than innovation. the US brain drains its brightest while Europe itself frantically replaces its aging natives with whoever is willing to cross its undefended borders.
if the US or China had disappeared tomorrow, it would affect the rest of the world. what does an average person outside of Europe own that was made in Europe or couldn't be made in China instead? even ASML, its crown jewel, is built upon American tech and would be rebuilt in the US within a decade if there was necessity to do so.
Totally aligned ! As a European, I was never into this US bashing. I looked up to the Americans in the same way the french did back in the 19th century when they gifted them statue of liberty
This is not remotely racist. It's simply a fact, and the result of a lack of nationalist ideology.
Turns out if it's more economically efficient to simply import skilled workers, or outsource, then that's what will happen. Breeding and educating your own citizens in a first world country is very expensive. So you don't do it.
The only reason not to do this is national preference. Economically it makes sense, on a national level it makes sense, individually it's genocide.
Individually, you have to accept migrants if your personal demographic is below the replacement rate. Otherwise you will never retire, and your kids (if any) will work in a nursing economy at minimum wage.
It's petty and anti-nationalist to demand that your nation destroy it's own economy to fit your arbitrary political mold.
Yes, you do. The frontlines of Ukraine are being prepared for literal demographic replacement as we speak. Kidnapped Ukrainian children are attending Russian schools, fortifications and bases are being dug out for them to fight against their own kin.
Are you enlisted? Do you want to be? Europe needed to figure out it's defense plan yesterday, not in 20 years. If Europe won't ally with migrants, then maintaining European sovereignty is nearly impossible.
This is an absurd set of assumptions that have forced you into a nonsensical position.
No, you don't need to accept migrants. You need money. You can get money in many many ways.
The best way for this to happen for the general prosperity of citizens is for the state to enrich themselves from the work of others, non citizens, and give that money to citizens. This is what Norway has done through its sovereign wealth fund.
It's absolutely not an absurd set of assumptions. The majority of the demographics you're worried about are beneath the replacement rate. They are going to necessarily reach a point where the youth workforce cannot sustain the outsized elderly population or protect them in a war scenario.
If you do not want to defend Europe's front lines with teenage conscripts and geriatric riflemen, you need a way to bring warm bodies into the fold. Refusing lawful immigration will undermine domestic security, doom the elderly and ruin pension funds for future retirees. No sovereign wealth fund is worth losing your sovereignty over.
I told you what the requirement was. Money. You have simply arbitrarily decided instead it's just people for no reason at all. As though magically people will spawn resources from their finger tips. According to you the richest countries in the world must be the most populous.
Obviously this is idiotic to even a cursory examination.
The next assumption you've made is that birth rate is completely random, a roll of the dice, an unchangeable fact of the universe. The reality is of course it's a result of policy and economics. This can be solved extremely easily.
I'm sorry. You cannot accuse me of setting absurd assumptions and then outline "the requirement" as if reality is Go Fish and I misplayed my card. Macropolitics are multidimensional, the babies born tomorrow are eighteen years away from reaching the workforce. There are no policy or economic changes that make your children grow faster.
Europe's troop deficit is just as immediate and pressing as the economic and policy problems. It would be nice if we could ignore it, but you can only expand your domestic middle class if you don't condemn them to the conscription lines first.
It's very funny you try to make that argument when your requirement was literally just MIGRANTS, because MIGRANTS = PENSIONS. Which is hilariously a subset of my own requirement, more specific. Absolutely absurd.
No. What I said is just a fact. There's no assumption, the requirement is a fact. You need money to pay for goods and services for the people no longer working.
There's no assumption there? What's the assumption, that goods and services need to be paid for?
So stop bringing up migrants for no reason at all. The actual issue is money, and there are many ways to obtain money.
The nonsense about troops is of course ridiculous. Just a fantastical statement divorced from reality. Who is this enemy Europe is facing that will require a ww1 style meat grinder of 10s of millions of troops, which of course took place when the european population was half the size.
The EU needs to stop acting as if all is fine. The EU commission is totally useless, from A to Z. There is zero strategy in play here. They need to take a much more pro-active stance - fining US companies that work against europeans is fine, but you also need to have viable alternatives. And that simply is not happening right now.
The average salary (not including RSUs/Bonus) in Dublin's Silcon Docklands is north of €130k+, with sick pay, 23 days leave, and the sort of employee protections which would be an utter fantasy in the US (defined redundancy payments, mandated collective bargaining, governance processes around mass redundancy handling at state level).
This was hugely evident during the recent spate of tech layoffs - employers planning collective dismissals are obliged to hold a mandatory 30-day consultation with employee representatives and notify the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment beforehand. Issuing premature "done deal" announcements before meaningful consultation breaches Irish law.
Even at the micro level, non-collective or individual restructuring must still rely on objective selection criteria and fair procedures. Failing to do so exposes employers to Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) claims for unfair or constructive dismissal.
There's also very very strict regulations around work/life issues. A famous case this year in 2023 where a Customer Care Team Lead at the Dublin office of Israeli software company Wix was dismissed after posting comments on LinkedIn. In her posts, she described Israel as a "terrorist state" and referred to Zionism as "the root of violence" while expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people. In July 2024, the WRC ordered Wix to pay Carey €35,000 in compensation after Wix acknowledged that the dismissal was "procedurally unfair" under Irish employment law.
In short, we're not that poor and have significant societal safety-nets that make up the delta in direct wages.
> employee protections which would be an utter fantasy in the US (defined redundancy payments, mandated collective bargaining, governance processes around mass redundancy handling at state level).
This can be compared to protectionist policies such as tariffs.
If employees are hard to fire, then companies hesitate to hire them.
If employees on-shore are protected, then un-protected employees overseas are more competitive, eventually gutting local industries.
Etc.
This came up in Australia recently where a liberal government proposed loosening some employee protection laws with the idea that it would encourage hiring.
It did. It worked.
Then the policy was swiftly reversed by a more left-wing party, and a lot of those newly employed people lost their jobs because they turned from an asset to a liability.
Emigrating is super easy when you have a lot of money and a strong passport. Money solves most problems that are not related to the soul.
By comparison, try emigrating as a poor person from a poor country with a weak passport. Americans are playing life on easy mode but they complain the most.
That well-paid Americans like to WFH on Malaga beaches is not a testament to the Spanish economy, but to its weather and (more importantly) low cost of living.
This is… a mathematically correct but practically useless way to compare migration flows. Using this approach, Singaporeans are more likely to move to China than Chinese to move to Singapore. Mathematically true, and tells us much about the relative sizes of these two countries, but very, very little about relative attractiveness as a place of living.
>Using this approach, Singaporeans are more likely to move to China than Chinese to move to Singapore.
Using the Our World in Data figures, a Singapore-born person is about four times more likely to move to China than a China-born person is to move to Singapore.
That does not seem like an unreasonable ratio, given that a) Chinese are not nearly as free, whether economically or politically, to emigrate, b) those Chinese who have the money and connections to leave are likely going to be in the large cities that offer good living standards, and c) China is going to have, from sheer size, aspects that will appeal to Singaporeans regardless of per-capita economic disparity. Put another way, if Chinese were as free to move around the world as Singaporeans, there would surely be many more China-born people in Singapore ... perhaps four times as the current 530K.
By contrast, the US and Spain are fairly comparable in terms of their citizens' freedom to move about, so that factor can be eliminated from the comparison.
Absolutely also a testament to escaping Trump too. I have met many all over Europe, all ages – UK, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Ireland etc who mentioned it. Including many previously living in California, Florida, Colorado etc with a decent climate, who were earning very good money.
Definitely a testament to each country too - presumably they have a fairly wide choice. They wouldn't go somewhere they disliked the culture that much. We know how discerning US folk are.
If we were to take all preceding arguments seriously, couldn't that be explained by americans going to live in a low-cost-of-living country once they've earned their living?
(Don't know your country to know if that's true or not, but it's a possibility)
You know English is defined by its usage right? If people start using a new term such as USAian, or American to refer to everyone from the continent...that's what will be. There is no central authority to tell us how to use English correctly.
Anyway. New world order. USA hegemony is going way.
I guess USAians are beginning to find out how we in the UK felt about the loss of our empire.
It's actually the other way around. All we have is money that we stole from the colonies.
If the car companies actually go down the drain I have no clue what products of note we would still be producing that would continue to bring money in. So, I think our goose is cooked here in Europe.
* Orthopaedic Knee Implants (75% of Global Supply)
* Acute Hospital Ventilators (50% of Global Supply)
* Contact Lenses (World Leader)
19 of the world's top 20 pharmaceutical companies operate manufacturing, R&D, or biopharma facilities in Ireland; this compromises over 50% of all physical goods exported from Ireland, totaling well over €100 billion annually. Needless to say it's also the pivotal manufacturing hub for high-demand GLP-1 weight-loss and diabetes treatments (like Mounjaro).
Ireland is among the top global exporters of antisera, blood fractions, and complex cell cultures, making it indispensable to global healthcare infrastructure.
Ireland is the absolute world leader in dairy science per capita, and produces roughly 10% to 15% of the entire world's infant milk formula, with estimates indicating that roughly one in ten to one in seven babies globally consume formula manufactured in the country.
That's an Island of less than 5 million people, 1/8th the size of Texas, that was basically bypassed by the Industrial Revolution and had no colonial benefit. Now extrapolate for a second and imagine what Germany is manufacturing.
What do Europeans think of the European economy? From my American perspective it looks like they are trying to lose, trying to fall backwards, trying to become a less prosperous society. No one seems to be building anything, and the governments seem to be preventing anyone who tries to advance from doing so. What am I missing?
Yes, the situation in Europe is bad. But at least we're not being destroyed in a war by a bunch of guys driving toyotas.
They think the same of you…
https://statisticstimes.com/economy/united-states-vs-eu-econ...
If you focus only on tech the discrepancy is larger than if you include the wider economy. Even though USA is ahead economically, the EU is still the second largest player globally and the gap is probably not as wide the HN bubble makes it seem.
This ignores the population differences between the two. When you look at GDP per capita, things are quite stark.
Just for context, because I was curious: the when they say no orders, that's following 2 known orders in 2024 and 3 in 2025.
Happy to hear India got mentioned by the same executive during that conversation. We are just started buying from them. I went to Semicon India 2026, held in delhi last week. The energy was amazing. Really pleasant. all big names including ASML.
It's is heartening looking at a country like India and thinking that it only seems to be a little behind China on the same trajectory. The little flashes of news as they start settling in to more interesting and high tech industries. Whatever good or evil comes out of their growing geopolitical power at least that is another billion people with a clear enough path to wealth and prosperity.
India is more than a little behind China. Which is depressing, considering that the two countries were equal in GDP per capita as recently as 1990: https://m.thewire.in/article/economy/from-1960-to-1990-india...
> a little behind China on the same trajectory
In my opinion, India is around 30 years behind China. This is unlikely to change for several reasons. However, the primary reason is that no Indian government ever had a manufacturing policy that comes close to China's. The service economy is strong but employs a tiny percentage of the population.
Most of Indian government spending is on welfare followed by endemic corruption. It leaves very little money for nation building.
Thirty? Try more like 10, and that’s only for the advanced nodes. Everything else, we will have capacity coming online soon enough.
Design, the gap is nonexistent in terms of talent deployed (though we have some way to go to have homegrown product companies). Which puts us roughly where Europe is.
Also consider, a tiny percentage of the Indian population is a ridiculous number of people. Dwarfing pretty much any other country except China.
Your last point on welfare and corruption is also false; 35% of government spend is on interest payments (which is kind of normal for most countries?) and 30% is on infrastructure and other capex. Defence is 8% and central welfare schemes plus co-sponsored schemes with the states are only 26%. The point being, while corruption is definitely a problem, it doesn’t significantly come out of the central budget. And welfare is smaller than infrastructure spending even if it’s quite significant (and it better be, in a country like this).
If India is 10 years behind China, that would mean in 2036 India will be where China is today. What's the chance of that happening?
Only an estimated 6 million Indians work in IT and tech services where the money is. India's working age population is approximately 950 million. India had the golden opportunity to bring manufacturing to India when Western companies wanted to reduce their dependence on China. But it wasted it.
I don't know where you are getting that 30% spending on infrastructue.
Indeed look at manufacturing and realize that it takes more than 10 years to change a culture.
The infrastructure spending is where and how the corruption happen. The cases of bridge collapses in bihar gujarat, the mp 90 degree bridge etc should be obvious cases of corruption.
it's not like bridges don't collapse in china. There were two major ones last year.
The point is to learn good practices from China.
> another billion people with a clear enough path
The opposite, all historical clear paths i.e. manufacturing/export led model is closed/closing (geopolitics + being automated away). Less clear service export also closing. The growth path that employs 100s of millions and 10s of millions are not available to Indian.
Reality is even PRC with most favorable conditions still left behind ~400m people because there's only so many opportunities. It's one thing to have ~1B who made it supporting ~400m who didn't vs India trending towards 1.7 B... and if they end up with 500m that makes it, and 1.2B that doesn't, then things may get very ugly in terms of governance. Now that 500m middle/upper class is large enough that India will in aggregate "make it" as geopolitical power, as in climb the tech tree, but due to sheer population and opportunities that looks now foreclosed, most of Indian's statistically, simply, won't. And when numerator/denominator of haves/have not too skewed, there's nothing haves can do (redistribute) even if they wanted to, which lbh, they won't. IMO this pretty much baked in dynamic for India for next few generations, unless we discover abundance.
Hope they can solve the whole littering problem somehow.
> It's is heartening looking at a country like India and thinking that it only seems to be a little behind China on the same trajectory.
Depends on what you mean by "a little behind". Reading Patrick McGee's "Apple in China" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China) made me think otherwise.
with generations of parents forcing thier children to either be doctors or engineers, I would have expected India to lead the world in both of those categories.
> a little behind China on the same trajectory
I'm hoping for India development but that is quite far from the truth yet.
India's caste system ensures by design that wealth and prosperity will not be evenly distributed.
I remember when China was poor and everyone was talking about how their communal society guarenteed poverty. Then they started getting wealthy and the story became their communal society was what allowed them to be wealthy. The US is similarly either propelled by or crippled by their individualism depending on whether they've had a good year or not. India will no doubt be similar.
IMO the evidence suggests it is mostly tax policy and whether people are allowed to start and run businesses. Culture is important insofar as it affects those areas of policy. Getting wealthy is literally as simple as being able to create new wealth and keep it, plus lots of time. People don't choose to stay poor unless someone with a gun forces them to be poor.
> Getting wealthy is literally as simple as being able to create new wealth and keep it, plus lots of time. People don't choose to stay poor unless someone with a gun forces them to be poor.
Yes, that sums it up. The biggest problem is government officials who get in the way of starting or running a business, ask for bribes, and generally make it impossible to do any non-software non-backoffice business work. Plus taxes.
China has a legal caste system in the form of birthplace registration and limits on internal migration.
You could say the same of the aristocracy of Europe over the last few hundred years, but that has effedtively crumbled. There's remnants of "old money" families that were upper-class, but for the most part the merchant class took control of the system that held them down. It took many generations, but the blue blooded dynasties are a dying breed.
Arguably India has the class system tied to the prevailing religion, but religion too has faded with modernity. Systems have a habit of breaking under strain and time.
I think you mean all systems by design do not distribute wealth and prosperity evenly. Thats actually not a thing.
I am a critic of Indias caste system but China has a state sanctioned caste system while the caste system is condensed by the Indian state and the state takes explicit (many think it over does it) steps to try to mitigate the effects of the caste system
China on the other hand defined your government benefits and the jobs you may get based on where you were born. People born rurally have to fake documents to work illegally in cities.
India has a ton of problems, but china is much worse when it comes to human rights. It's not even right to compare the two countries. India is a flawed somewhat liberal democracy (especially for the region of the world, India is a shining beacon on a hill surrounded by repressive regimes), while China is essentially a dictatorship
The hukou system is nothing like that. It's an internal migration thing that works like moving to another country, you can gain "citizenship" of a different area and live there with full benefits.
It was also designed for a clear purpose (slowing down migration into cities that weren't ready to accept it) and was pretty successful, it just outlived its usefulness and became corrupt. Not the same as something based on ancient class divisions that was probably never that useful in the first place.
People work illegally because getting a stamp legally is hard if you don't have money or contacts in the local administration. Same reason as illegal immigrants anywhere else. The central government has been pushing to raise registration quotas and make the process easier but it's clearly not enough.
Well.. caste based discrimination is illegal. But caste based handouts are legal. So a reverse discrimination based on caste is legal and state supported. The only reason caste exists in 2026 is because there are state sponsored incentives if you belong to certain castes.
Sorry I mean condemned*
Is it evenly distributed in China or the US?
Isn't every country like that?
I don’t understand why people replying to you are defending a caste system like it’s an ok thing. This site blows my mind sometimes.
It can be complicated to draw a line between cultural elements worth preserving and crazy religious fantasy that needs to go. Indian caste system, IIUC, is deeply intertwined with their identity and ethics that it cannot be just cut out and removed. It is also partly coming from practical needs just like food related taboos of Middle Eastern religions that would need to be explained for its removal to be justified following the Chesterton's Fence principle.
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absolute OT trivia that I needed a place to drop: the Indian karma system do not consider beings outside of animal kingdom, e.g. a roadside tree, to be alive and directly involved in the karma and reincarnation and all that, and apparently so did not the original Indian Buddhism. It was originally Chinese, and more prominently Japanese, exposition and localization of Buddhism that changed it up to be the current Studio Ghibli form of it that yes mountains and rivers and 100 year old Italian combat biplanes can all be alive and sentient and that you just ate a carrot is a sort of your original sin and even strictest of vegetarianism is not guilt-free. Your LLM can elaborate on this if necessary...
Could be because they're used to it. Every country has a caste system of some sort.
“Of some sort” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. How many countries have a legal caste system?
Comparing the lack of a legal caste system because “of some sort” to a legal framework is quite the leap.
The USA, for example, has one based on money and connections.
It's a civil hierarchy, but I doubt that's what GP meant by "caste system".
The USA has historically had a two tier system enshrined in law: one for "whites" and one for "coloreds". (There are two sets of bathrooms in the Whitehouse!) Just because the laws were technically repealed, doesn't mean that the system evaporated overnight.
Coloreds are still hugely overrepresented in the criminal "justice" system, they're still much poorer on average, are still disenfranchised en-masse through gerrymandering and voter ID requirements that accept shooters' club membership cards but not ID cards poorer blacks might possess, etc.
For all intents and purposes, the USA has a caste system that has evolved from an earlier system that was apartheid in all but name.
Nobody is defending caste system. Its bad, and its already illegal as it should be. People are just calling out the hypocrisy when its implied that this kind of stratification is unique to India and unheard of elsewhere. I mean, the west had literal human slaves ffs.
I'm from what would have been considered a low caste in India. The moment people mention India, people bring up the caste system as if it's the cause of every issue there or as if other countries don't have similar problems. Unequal wealth distributions are common. While it makes sense for Indian nationals to want their government to do better than other countries and eliminate social inequality (a feat no other country has ever accomplished), outside observers comparing ought to benchmark countries against one another fairly. All countries have social inequality. If India were to eliminate social inequality it would become superior to most countries on the planet. That seems to me a utopian dream, but I understand why someone living there might want that.
For the rest of us, I think we need to be reasonable in our assessments, especially when the other country under discussion is China.
I guess the difference is social mobility in the US exists, a lot of successful founders in the US come from poor beginnings. In India you cannot legally change your caste for your entire life, if I’m not mistaken.
Seems like it isn’t a system worth defending. China has so many issues, it also blows my mind that people around here defend and praise China like they’re doing good things. They aren’t.
Caste is mostly irrelevant in India outside of liberal arts department of so-called elite universities.
There are some pockets where this is not true, but they are exceptions.
And those comments aren't defending it.
Upward mobility is available in India, too. But remember that to have "upward mobility", there needs to be place at the top. For a country which has been under hundreds of years of regressive colonial rulers, there is not much place at the top.
Global wealth is much more in the US than in India right now, so it is not wise to compare rags-to-riches of the US with those of India.
India's government jobs, elite engineering and medical seats have a legal 50%+ quota for "lower" castes people. Did you know that? So, I am saying, 50%+ students graduating ALL elite engineering and law and medical and nursing schools, etc. are from these "lower" castes. Did you know that?
An yet legally, you are born and die in a bucket you have no say in whatsoever. From the outside looking in, seems wrong. Not dissimilar to Brave New World in some aspects.
What if it becomes irrelevant?
I have always been taught that greatness is in work (karma), and not in birth (janma), and honestly I have seen it practiced.
A "lower" caste High School teacher gets visibly much more respect in our society than a random priest from "higher" caste.
Your counterpoint is “what if” ? What if a caste system didn’t exist?
Actually, legally, caste doesn’t exist. It’s been abolished, except for schemes for socially eradicating it (which are controversial but conceptually no different from any other affirmative action).
Not to say it isn’t a problem. But race is still a problem elsewhere too.
Racial discrimination is bad and we should say that out loud, too.
There is no bucket. There is affirmative action. If you can prove you're a part of a group for which affirmative action has been granted they'll give you a certificate saying you're part of that group. This is in no way tying you to that group. It's just a scheme to give affirmative action.
This is like saying America's racial quotas (or former ones) put you in a 'bucket'. Caste is essentially race / genetics. You are not bucketed, it is simply a reality of your ancestry. Of course you can't change it.. you cannot change your genetics. This is a ridiculous goal post.
This is complete and utter horseshit.
Caste is very much alive in India and this sort of blanket denialism reeks of upper caste privilege.
If caste is all that irrelevant, please go ahead with changing your surname to an obviously lower caste one. We will see how quickly you come crawling back to your so called “irrelevant” caste privilege.
Why do you assume I am so called higher caste? My caste is under a bucket in India called "Other Backward Classes".
Honestly the caste never comes up. In almost any conversation. And I also grew up far away from megacities.
I only heard a couple of priests blabber about the glory of their caste, but they were piss poor and had nothing else to be proud of. And they were bad as priests as well. That is, you wouldn't call them if you care about pure Sanskrit pronunciation, carefulness and seriousness during rituals, etc.
Reservation in education institutions and government job which is used to solve caste system are just doing Eugenics in disguise. Only gene pool of rich lower caste people benefit.
The people who suffered are dead. The people who committed discrimination are dead. Yet the whole nation has to accomodate. Reservation must be done on Pro-Rata basis. If one state like Kerela is advanced, doesn't do caste discrimination and another like Bihar is very much into it. Then only Bihar state should reservation, not whole of India.
Reservation is one of the easiest way to play vote bank politics. It does not benefit anyone other than the politicians and the rich lower caste people.
If Indians could change their caste officially, everybody would be lower caste. In fact there are often protests and agitations by members of certain upper castes to label them lower caste. See this for an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_reservation_agitation
It's a catch 22. India tracks caste because they're trying to get rid of it. America doesn't track race or social status or whatever. Legal status means nothing really. Especially in urban India, it's becoming very irrelevant what your background is. Are there bigoted regressive people? Yeah of course, but I mean... Those are everywhere. Are there more in India than elsewhere? Probably, compared to urban western nations. But India is like a century behind on social progress id estimate. Still ahead of China where your status is literally tied to your place of birth though.
As for changing caste... You only need to reference it if you're seeking government benefit. If you don't care about it, stop keeping track, and don't share it with your kids... They'll never know and just get assigned general or whatever they call it. Of course, since caste is literally genetic, anyone doing a genetic test will quickly figure it out. However a gene test is not enough for seeking caste benefit status if I understand correctly, so this is as erased as you can get
TBH India going to sanctioned if they ever make meaningful inroad. Outsourcing some IV design to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, prune is not the same as if India wants to start stepping on leading edge fabrication money printing toes. But short/medium term, western semi projected to have 100,000s talent shortage so India probably best hope for western semi to stay staffed. VS PRC who is brrrting out enough talent for entire indigenous vertical semis supply chain.
Previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49844663
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823628
I'm european and I would buy an ASML t-shirt, will this move the needle enough?
I bought an ASML t-shirt but the logo was so incredibly tiny that nobody could even tell I was wearing designer clothing.
I would buy that Lego set.
Oh man… a whole fan would be good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bReWaZz5Grg but the actual did it already :-)
Best I can do is half a pair of ASML socks.
Very Red Hot chili peppers of you
I would wait for its regulation before the buy :D
Semiconductor fabs involve a lot of hazardous chemicals, process changes and high energy consumption. Exactly the kind of thing European regulations tend to deter or slow down. Which is somewhat fine if there is nowhere else to build it, but if other places are easier, well...
What is so energy consuming around fabs? The light source? I always thought of these as high-precision, not-too-high-volume processes and would have expected energy requirements to be lower than e.g. a car factory (or similar to e.g. a mall) and completely negligible on a national grid scale or compared to something like a smelter or lignite mine.
Edit: AI claims HVAC and air filtering/handling can be 40-50% of energy usage. Plus a megawatt per EUV scanner (ok, the latter matches what I would have guessed, but compared to the 16 MW of a single large bucket wheel excavator or estimates I've seen for large shopping malls, that's not that insane either).
TSMC's Arizona fab needs 200MW of electricity.
But even more importantly, they need 2 separate completely independent substation feeds, since a 15 second interruption can cause 0.1B Euro of losses.
Finally, and here is where Europe really really suffers, generally you need these things to be planned, approved and built within a year.
Check out asianometry on YouTube for deep dives into many parts of semiconductor manufacturing, including the lithography processes ASML uses.
Life cycle of the fab is 3-5 years, an opimistic estimate of slow down in europe due to all the paper work is 2-3 years, so then you would rather not build the plant.
> high energy consumption
Just to address this separately: there is effectively energy rationing in several European countries, where the government intervenes to prioritize who should receive energy first (e.g., the Netherlands and Denmark).
AFAIK the problem in NL is due to chronic underinvestment in the grid infrastructure since the big privatisation wave. Combined with the heavy subsidy of industry causing the issues.
Solvable but we need to be much smarter and redirect the fossil subsidies to reducing risk for grid-scale batteries and adding more grid capacity.
A consequence of a totally self-imposed handicap.
Most fabs build their own separate power grid.
And Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are also energy poor states that have been able to maintain capacity.
The energy excuse is true for some manufacturing processes like automotive in CEE which were pants that were built in the 1990s to 2000s and leveraged Russian ONG, but is a red herring for a lot of other manufacturing processes in Europe.
European states have a coordination problem as Draghi pointed out 2 years ago.
TSMC alone uses 1/8th of Taiwan's electricity (and rising). They make it work.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/taiwan-semiconductor
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/tsmc-could-accoun...
I mean Ireland has some of the most strenuous regulations in this regard, with dozens of data centres blocked over planning and environmental impact assessments. Despite this Intel still put €30 billion in turning a 360-acre former stud farm in Kildare into a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility, powered entirely by green energy, and acting a key location for production of Intel’s 14nm process technology. They currently pull 1,677,197 MWh/year from our grid.
More to the point, from 2019 they built €17 billion new fab development which doubled the manufacturing capacity available in Ireland and enabled the production of Intel 4, the company’s most advanced process technology.
For better or worse, Ireland’s extremely lax tax rules resulted in a ton of multinational corporate cash ‘stuck’ there with companies having the option of spending there roughly tax free or repatriating back to the US at some rate higher than that. It also really helps sell the ‘of course an Irish subsidiary owns all of our IP’ tax claims if there is actual spending there, hence you got all the pharma investment and the capital projects from others like Intel and Apple.
Rather the US lax rules regarding their own enforcement.
The Double Irish (& Dutch Sandwich) where Companies routed profits through two Irish-registered subsidiaries, attributing intellectual property royalties to a management seat in a tax haven like Bermuda, is closed since 2015.
Subsequent sequential mismatch structures (the "Single Malt" tool) that replaced the Double Irish for certain firms using non-EU residency loops were also banned. Finally there's a 12.5% charge on unrealized capital gains when a company moves its assets or tax residency out of Ireland.
The headline tax rate and the effective tax rate are also very different things. France's effective corporate tax rate was actually lower than Irelands - but France is an absolutely brutal place to do business in for employers and they've comparatively no english-language tech FDI to speak of.
"Trapped capital" is not why Intel has doubled down on Ireland.
It's because whenever Intel asks for anything, the Taoiseach, IDA, and Invest Ireland will move mountains to do it.
Ireland is extremely business friendly because their leadership actually listens to industry.
While I agree completely with you regarding how we handle FDI, the role of Enterprise Ireland, and that our ability to act as an educated, stable and culturally compatible western european base for US industry is not to be understated, the Intel situation in particular has its own special nuance.
This is where the 'Inside Tennis' knowledge of the Irish Tech industry from someone working within it comes in handy. Enter the 21st Century Luddite, Thomas Reid, from stage left.
Thomas is an eccentric, independent bachelor farmer whose family has owned a 72-acre farm next to Intel's Leixlip manufacturing campus for generations.
Ireland’s State Industrial Development Agency (IDA) attempted to use a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) to buy Reid's land so that Intel could proceed with a multi-billion euro expansion of its microchip production plant. The land was valued at €5 million. During the negotiations that followed, the farmer was reportedly offered in the region of €10 million. He turned it down. Reid had no interest in being a millionaire. Instead, he continued to live on-site without a telephone or modern amenities while taking on Intel and the state alone.
The battle culminated in a landmark legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Ireland, where Reid ultimately won a historic victory against corporate overreach and protected his property rights
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Battle_of_Thomas_Re...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/3s4bg1/how_a_farme...
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/commercial-property/inte...
https://www.rte.ie/culture/2020/1102/1003311-the-lonely-batt...
They certainly tried!
>construction kicked off in 2019 on a €17 billion new fab development which will double
I think what the OP wanted to highlight is right here: in China or Taiwan etc. this would not have taken 7 years.
I mixed up a tense or two there. It was done in 4 years, even accounting for Covid. The timeline looks like this
2019: Kick-off
2020: Construction in Ireland basically halted due to Lockdown for 18 months
Q3'2023: Fab 34 begins running a ‘First Full Loop’ of silicon
Q4'2023: Fab 34 completed. Doubles the manufacturing capacity available in Ireland, enabling the production of Intel 4 and Intel 3, some of the company’s most advanced process technologies, and the first to incorporate EUV lithography
2024: Intel sold 49% stake to Apollo GM for $11.2bn
2026: Intel buys back stake for $14.2bn
Q2'2026: Intel announce a further $5.7bn investment to upgrade existing capacity for server chips, slated for completion by late 2027
If something needs to be done, then these rules are a bit pointless if corporation can just do it in another country. It means the EU simply assists in poisoning poorer countries. If they were serious, then they would have banned chips made using those processes altogether. If they cannot do that, then that regulation is pointless virtue signalling.
Everyone loves a good race to the bottom with the environment
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the US all share comparable living standards to Western European states yet are able to maintain and expand semiconductor manufacturing.
The issue is with policymaking - coordination between the EU, national, and local governments is weak so high capex projects become risky.
Edit: can't reply
> Your first 3 countries are also incredibly poor comparisons for living standards as they have horrendous work/life balance.
Their hours worked are comparable to most Western European states as well now [0]. Germany is unique in Europe based on hours worked, and is why German industry is pushing to bring back the 40 hour work week.
[0] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html
So now we're suddenly talking about living standards and not environmental regulation?
Your first 3 countries are also incredibly poor comparisons for living standards as they have horrendous work/life balance.
> comparable living standards
So vague as to be utterly meaningless.
And slow moving regulation literally incentivises high capex long-horizon investment.
I don't think it's that vague. I've lived in both Europe and the US, in several places, and both have a wide range. What I will say is that I don't think Europe is better off for the times that it has thrown up roadblocks.
Also, slow moving, stable regulation can be better than arbitrary flippancy, but that doesn't mean it directly incentivizes investment, it just means the investment already incentivized by demand can proceed with more confidence that it won't have the rug pulled out from under it, assuming the regulations didn't discourage a tentative proposal in the first place.
>And slow moving regulation literally incentivises high capex long-horizon investment.
What?
No one wants to invest a lot of money into something that might be illegal tomorrow. (Do you?)
HDI is a good metric for gauging living standards [0]
And slow moving execution and creation of relevant legislation is a hindrance for capex in high risk projects like those in the semiconductor segment.
The Draghi report was published 2 years ago, and remains largely unimplemented.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
This is some ridiculous speculation, we do plenty of such critical manufacturing in EU. Regulations is not why we don't make highly-integrated chips here.
Why then?
Lately specifically because of Intel having financial issues, they already started building their fabs in Dresden and Wrocław when they cancelled last minute.
This was strategically planned with EU as part of bringing back production locally, similar to CHIPS Act in the US.
A probably non negligible weight is that decadence is bearish.
Those alive invest in long term planning, those with a dead drive get conservative in their action.
The Dutch govt is slowly nationalising the chip industry, by making taxes so high no company can survive international competition, and then using this tax money to buy stock in all deep tech companies calling it investing.
So currently europe is exposed to russia-ukraine, us-iran, and shortly china-taiwan. This is not a great place to be in.
Tell me a better place to be in ? Please don't tell me the US.
Our car industry (among others) showed we're quite capable of shooting ourselves in the foot. No need for external "big events".
> We
Get out of Belgium, then - if it was you and your people.
There are clear ideological, decadent faults in the eu administration. They are responsible for the destruction of one of the main continental industries, transferring (even reduced) pollution to Africa, where decent old cars go (with again no effect on global warming), and transferring the enterprise to China.
"The swan's shriek".
Don't forget the airlines taking the longer more expensive route!
It's all because of protectionism. Business got lazy.
Yeah, weakness and appeasement gets that.
What would you do differently? Having to own the consequences, too, remember.
No, but it is in times like this that one needs to look forward and invest in the future.
European defense industry seems pretty strong
Compared to who? The US?
If it comes down to European vs Russian manufacturing capacity for missiles and hi-tech weaponry, etc, I'd put my money on Europe. Europe also has the advantage of seeing 5 years of Russia throwing their best at Ukraine, having their air defenses repeatedly breached by Ukraine, even deep into Russia using slow low-tech drones - they know many of Russia's weaknesses.
>If it comes down to European vs Russian manufacturing capacity for missiles and hi-tech weaponry, etc
Well duh, EU GDP is like 3000x Russian one, Italy alone is richer than Russia, so ofc EU military combined is greater than Russia.
Russia is broke gas station with nukes, not really a benchmark for military supremacy.
The US GBP is 100x large than Iranian one and yet the US cannot open the Strait of Hormuz and even defend own bases in the region from cheap drones (52 aircraft lost, most on the ground). GDP is not the only factor when it comes to military capabilities.
>The US GBP is 100x large than Iranian one and yet the US cannot open the Strait of Hormuz
The US regime has no support from its voters and taxpayers to get deeper into the IRan war because the US is the one who started it, it's not an existential threat for Americans in the US to spend more of their money or die intervening in the middle east.
But for EU what happens in Ukraine is an existential threat and they also didn't provoke the war there, so Europeans are more motivated to support the war against Russia than AMericans are to support military intervention in Iran.
Sure are holding their own against the supposedly much richer Europe at this moment.
Yes. The US defense industry depends on European one. Take a look at F35 and where the components are made.
Where are they made?
Ah yes, the only country that matters /s
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
The brainless policies continue as we speak: traditional parties keep you exposed to financial masters because money talks, and extremists keep you exposed to their masters because, again, money talks. So: money talks and Europe is still a good milking cow.
Not really much of a consolation, but it's pretty obvious that the standing committee is perfectly happy to sit back and chuckle while watching the rest of the world burn from that nice safe distance. So at least there won't be any china-taiwan issues.
But that's little consolation I understand. I get that when there are two elephants sitting on you, someone telling you how fortunate you are to not have a third one on top of you as well, is a little annoying.
It more due to the fact that the politicians are on a moral kow-it-all high horse than being pragmatic and putting national interest first. As an example all EU leaders absolutely refused to talk with Russia/Putin on putting an end to the war and they were hell bent on militarily defeating Russia. I remember the previous German Chancellor had a phone call with Putin to discuss it and everyone was shitting on him for doing that.
But now Trump is inviting Putin to G20 and I'm sure sure all those EU politician would be all smily and act like no war is going on and gladly talk with Putin. If you think about it the war could have ended years ago and all the Ukranian/Russian lives lost could have been avoided if EU leaders were not so arrogant.
> If you think about it the war could have ended years ago and all the Ukranian/Russian lives lost could have been avoided if EU leaders were not so arrogant.
How exactly is Europe to blame for Russia continuing its war in Ukraine? Russia has clearly demonstrated a lack of interest in peace on any terms that could be acceptable to Ukraine.
How do you think the war could have ended? With Ukraine’s surrender?
Not such an easy thing to say if you’re the one facing that threat. Nobody wants their own country to be invaded and conquered.
And Russia would take that as a green light to keep on conquering other former Soviet states. Where do you draw the line?
> But now Trump is inviting Putin to G20 and I'm sure sure all those EU politician would be all smily and act like no war is going on and gladly talk with Putin
Putin is deathly afraid of being assassinated and is avoiding air travel in favor of trains, and has identical offices to film in at multiple locations to hide his location. There is no chance he is getting on a plane to Florida.
> If you think about it the war could have ended years ago and all the Ukranian/Russian lives lost could have been avoided if EU leaders were not so arrogant.
How so? By Europe rolling over and not supporting Ukraine?
Sorry this is a crazy interpretation of events.
Europe has 15x the GDP of Russia. If they were "hell bent" on militarily defeating Russia, they could have made even tiny sacrifices to the social welfare system, diverted industrial production to military aid, and drowned Ukraine in help. That was a very achievable goal, and they didn't do it.
Instead, the vacillated on importing US natural gas, continued shutting down nuclear power plants, and paid Russia MORE CASH FOR OIL than they ended up giving Ukraine in military aid! They did not in fact, dedicate themselves to this war in any way shape or form.
> they could have made even tiny sacrifices to the social welfare system, diverted industrial production to military aid, and drowned Ukraine in help. That was a very achievable goal, and they didn't do it.
We already did that. Welfare and funding to social services, elderly care, etc is significantly reduced and with higher bar to get than before 2022 where I live. Plus we're also paying the price in higher housing costs thanks to housing millions of Ukrainians.
It's easy to want a higher reduction on welfare services when you're not the one needing them. It's easy to write cheques that other people have to cash.
That was always going to happen. The war just makes that worse. The demographics and lack of economic growth were always going to break those welfare systems. How much they break and who loses out were the only real questions.
> Welfare and funding to social services, elderly care, etc is significantly reduced and with higher bar to get than before 2022 where I live.
Same here! I'd actually say it's basically shut down to new people.
I have spoken to 5 different health/government departments just trying to get some care for my elderly family member who lives alone and has badly hurt both legs, but I have been denied, denied and denied and lied to at every single stage. "We have no money", "Go private", "We are at capacity", "There is a 16 week wait for an assessment", "You can only access us via your GP" [lie]
All because they aren't retirement age yet - then they get more red carpet treatment.
The Government is also busy trying to figure out how to cut welfare for those who don't vote in sufficient numbers to matter
>All because they aren't retirement age yet
Have you told them to jump on a small inflatable boat, throw away their passports and enter the EU via the Mediterranean? They'll get first class treatment for all their needs on the taxpayers' dime. Because if they don't get it, there's a dozen NGOs paid from your taxes that will sue their government for breaking their human rights for not providing them with the housing and care they need.
Mhmm it's hard not to feel aggrieved with people who get certain basic care no-questions-asked when there are so many reports of questionable claims of what they're fleeing from/age/origin etc and given the numbers (~220k asylum seekers in the system as of 2024, and conveniently a 'transition to a new caseworking system' has prevented any newer figures being published)
But I think we have bigger taxation/spending and economic issues in the UK. Nobody really cares about asylum seekers/immigrants when the economy is booming, jobs are plentiful and inflation is low.
We do seem have a defective system in which people who suddenly need help after having a job and paying lots of tax are more-or-less ignored, but life-long welfare claimants are already so entrenched in the system, it's just a continuation.
Job Seeker's benefit is £408/mo for a maximum of 6 months and only if you had paid sufficient tax in the 2 years prior – basically just a small tax refund but only if you follow the rules imposed upon you by your 'job coach'. And that benefit doesn't then entitle you to any other discount/benefits unlike certain other benefits. It's designed to make you to take any job that turns up – indeed your work 'coach' will likely force you to do that.
Rant over lol
Are you for real? Look into France's pension situation. The median pensioner has HIGHER INCOME than the median working adult. And retirement was at 62!
No, there have been absolutely no real cuts to elderly care, the UK's triple lock ensures that the situation gets monotonically worse until the system collapses.
>Are you for real?
YES.
I don't live in France or the UK.
>No, there have been absolutely no real cuts to elderly care
Yeah they have. My city is short 30 million Euros on disability care this year despite increases in taxes. I (non retiree) now need to wait 6+ months for a surgery when it used to be 2, and pay from my taxes for money and weapons to Ukraine and housing to Ukrainian refugees in my city while they have nicer cars than me and don't pay the back breaking car taxes because they leave them on UA plates. I don't necessarily mind that per se, but I do mind being berated as if I'm not sacrificing enough. Please set an example and sacrifice yourself and your family for Ukraine before lecturing us.
> If they were "hell bent" on militarily defeating Russia, they could have made even tiny sacrifices to the social welfare system, diverted industrial production to military aid, and drowned Ukraine in help
Why do you think an entire continent with multiple and (sometimes even conflicting with each other) culture, priorities, national interest would do that? EU is an economic union. Not a federation like US
Because NATO article 5 demands it.
European support started out slow, but has ramped up as the US has backed away.
Germany will spend 20% of it's federal budget on military in 2027, planning to increase that to 30% by 2030. "We cannot defend ourselves against Putin with a balanced budget".
What does NATO article 5 have to do with Ukraine?
The parent was talking about the disunity of Europe in standing up to Putin.
What would come next after Ukraine may be the Baltic states or Poland.
> What would come next after Ukraine may be the Baltic states or Poland.
According to your YouTube sources? NATO has nothing to do with Ukraine. NATO countries can defend themselves if one of those countries actually are being attacked. That happened in 9/11 and NATO countries supporting militarily the US wars that preceded.
They have no such obligation towards Ukraine.
They have no NATO obligation towards Ukraine, but I'd say they do have a moral one, and they also have their own self-interest.
There is no such thing as moral obligation when it comes to politics and national interest. If it’s your country, then it’s your job to defend it or whatever. So far it doesn’t seem to be serving their self interest supporting an endless war.
Their self-interest is in keeping Putin at arms length and avoiding WW III. Putin is already threatening Lithuania, sending drones into Poland. If Putin wasn't prevented from taking Ukraine, do you really think it would end there?
Ukraine is not a NATO member
Europe has been stepping up a lot recently, given Trump's reluctance to push back against Putin - looks at UK/France supply of missile and anti-missile systems and IP to Ukraine, stepped up air defense based out of Lithuania (anticipating Kaliningrad as the first front of the war), etc.
No, they have not been "stepping up" relative to the existential threat at their door. They are still doing 10% of the minimum you'd expect from someone whose literal lives and civilization are at risk from a barbarian threat literally murdering their neighbors (and playing games with their own sovereignty more recently, with drone incursions).
The only way to stop Putin is with military force.
Europe is of course well aware that war with Russia seems increasingly inevitable, and have been preparing for it.
> Europe is of course well aware that war with Russia seems increasingly inevitable, and have been preparing for it
What is the source for this? I have seen some news articles with this narrative, it was more on the line of fear-mongering rather than providing evidence.
Ukraine is only Putin's first step, and Europe is well aware of that, so look at all the advanced weapons systems Europe is now giving to Ukraine (Storm Shadow, SCALP, SAMP/T etc), as well as the statements they are making. They are well aware this has made them a target for Putin, with UK missiles having been used against Black Sea targets etc, but are doing it all the same.
Europe is not tolerating Russian drone incursions, and has been shooting them down, have been on air combat footing patrolling the finish border and Kalinograd region (operating out of Lithuania), boosting defense of the Suwałki Gap, etc.
YouTube is perhaps one of the best sources of information, since US MSM is not interested.
> YouTube is perhaps one of the best sources of information, since US MSM is not interested
You lost me at this. If your official source of information is YouTube, then good luck.
Try googling for information and use whichever news sources you prefer - just don't expect to find Fox News talking about it.
That's a weird stance to take. If someone invaded a other territory next to yours and some of your unions members fear they're next, business as usual is the wrong strategy, imo
That's why diplomacy is important. There is no scenario that Europe, let alone Ukraine can militarily defeat Russia (a country with nuclear weapons). I understand defending the territory. But what is the end game? fight forever? or mutual destruction?
Kick them out so they gain nothing and have a credible enough deterrent they don't try again. This is also well below the stated threshold for Russia escalating to nukes but well above the threshold of military defeat.
what if they cannot be kicked out? fight forever till Ukraine runs out of men to send to war?
Then that is a loss, yes. It is an attritional war: whoever runs out of resources or will first loses. I don't think most of Europe has internalised how big of a loss that would be.
It seems to be "dump on Europe" day which I'm sure is popular but lets just stop for a second and ask what the sales of ASML machinery to the US would be without the CHIPS act .... a massive subsidy. Aren't subsidies supposed to be a bad European thing??? I'm confused. Are we free market proponents or planned economy proponents?
I don't think this is the main point (subsidies). ASML sold nothing in Europe because Europe is not a factor in semi manufacturing, primarily due to regulations and bureaucracy.
With all the regulations nobody in their right mind would build a fab in Europe.
Europe is increasingly relying on the rest of the world to supply it with critical things. It’s FAFOed with regulations that have driven these things elsewhere and now is heading into a “FO” world of hurt as the tables are turned and they desperately need things and have to pay the price. This will likely define the next 20 years in Europe.
Untrue. TSMC is just building a state of the art chip factory in Dresden, and they are certainly using ASML.
That fab unfortunately seems to be quite far from state of the art at 12 nm feature size. Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Semiconductor_Manufac...
The fab itself can still be "state of the art" even when the product isn't (Germany needs chips for its industry, not for gaming PCs or AI data centers).
We actually need both. Part of the industry certainly needs “PC chips”
Current state of the art in feature sizes is 20 nm metal pitch / 45 nm gate pitch.
We both know that feature sizes became marketing names over a decade ago. The "12 nm" for that fab are of course the marketing name. In any case, it's a seriously old process at this point.
There will be 2nm in Ireland
Are you talking about Intel? That's the 7nm class and I've never seen anything about plans for the 20A/2nm generation at that fab.
Intel has committed to bringing "Intel 3" to Leixlip https://www.idaireland.com/latest-news/press-release/intel-a... , so below 12nm or 7nm but still above 20A/2nm IIUC. It does also seem that Intel has already ordered ASML EUV machines for Leixlip, which arrived by 2023 https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate/eu-chipmak... .
Uh, so they are lying to us constantly. First the said the new BOSCH fab in Dresden is for AI, with 28nm - ha!
You probably mixed it up with the Infineon Smart Power Fab.
The Infineon Smart Power Fab was opened some months ago and builds power ICs for the energy market. Probably something like ACDC and DCAC converter ICs. This is also needed in AI data centers. https://www.infineon.com/de/regional/dresden/smart-power-fab
European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC), the TSMC fab in Dresden is still under construction and will produce logic chips in 28nm or 16nm. Bosch, Infineon, and NXP each have 10% share in this fab. I assume that it will mostly produce products which will be sold by these 3 companies, probably just the next generations from what they already sell. This fab was 50% subsidized by the German government.
GlobalFoundries also has a big 20nm Fab in Dresden.
The most advanced logic fab in the EU is the Intel fab in Ireland.
Bosch never said that though, the "AI" stuff was about the production methods used in the fab (along with a couple other buzzwords), it was never claimed that the fab produces chips "for AI". Instead these are fairly simple controllers for the automotive industry.
Can you share any official communication where somebody claimed this fab was for AI?
It was pretty clear that this fab - much like the other Bosch facilities - is going to be for automotive and industry ICs, not for high end node sizes in CPUs or GPUs.
I think I've read "power management chips for AI" somewhere. Probably technically correct, but also a somewhat gratuitous reference to the current thing for silly PR reasons.
Not gratuitous, Infineon's stock price rose because of the AI datacenter demand.
I don't think this is merely a gratuitous reference given the fact that AI demand is probably - among EVs - a key driver for the sales of power related ICs.
Every local Dresden newspaper article and Bosch press release said so.
Since you know the truth, and on what date was that order put in? Why did it have to be in 2026 and not during the planning process in previous years?
> Untrue
So you seem to know more about ASML's business than the ASML executive quoted in this article.
since when are executives statements meant to produce more investment into them trustable?
even more so it is reasonable to assume their (executive) statement was a simplification ignoring small for the overall statement irrelevant exceptions
like ignoring there being a factory build which is small and only meant for older nodes producing embedded chips and is for the car industry only
because honestly while the factory does matter for Bosh, it doesn't really make much difference for the larger picture of chip production in the EU
To be fair:
1. They provided evidence (construction of a fab in Dresden).
2. Executives lie all of the time.
Aside: after all of the denunciations of AI companies claims of danger, I expected comments here to be denouncing this as a “ASML shill article trying to get the government to buy more of their product”. Not that I believe, but the contrast is striking.
Yes, so TSMC is buying the machines, and they are based in Taiwan. This is not about the physical location of the machines.
Most of their fabs are also in Taiwan.
The claim in OP is that "ASML currently sells no chipmaking machines in Europe". A single chipmaking machine purchase into a fab in Europe would be enough to prove that claim wrong. The number of fabs in Taiwan is irrelevant to this claim.
No, ASML is not lying about ASML's business developments.
That would make it the only company in the world not doing that
> We’re not selling anything at all in Europe. That’s because Europe isn’t investing and because no chip factories are being built there
Will Europe accept being a manufacturer only? Or will they finally pick up with a late comer advantage? We need to wait and see.
The automotive industry or, should I say, Volkswagen isn't interested in state-of-the-art chips, so the fabs won't be built - simple.
Europe will keep making manufacturing equipment, but leave the actual production to those who have the grid capacity and capital.
But luckily Germany saved the world by shutting down their power plants for good
Tinfoil hat, I know, but I'm convinced that Germany hating nuclear power was a Russian influence operation.
It was already decided in 1998 to phase out nuclear power under the SPD–Green coalition. They passed the Nuclear Exit Law in 2002.
It’s mostly the Green Party’s fault, as they have been vehemently anti-nuclear since their inception(1970s).
Ok. Soviet influence operation.
You know people love rUsSiA iS nOt ThE sAmE aS uSsR.
But having read "Stalin" by Stephen Kotkin I've concluded that the USSR was nothing more than a legal construction to increase Russian control over its neighbors.
Why do you think that in 1998 Russia was not influencing Germany to use its gas?
Moreover, Russia and its coopting of the German Left and Greens is well documented.
Gerhard Schröder, chancellor 1998-2005, is well known to be best buddies with Putin and later (three weeks after leaving office!) worked for Gazprom. He is nicknamed "Gas-Gerd".
Schröder also famously called Putin a "true democrat".
Maybe... but let's not forget the 1986 event.
And we mustn't compare it with the ecological impact of using gas in a democracy instead of nuclear under a communist regime
Sure, but it had a catastrophic impact on the german opinion.
> Another concern is that even advanced silicon produced in Ireland or at ESMC is then shipped to other regions for packaging, meaning that European companies have largely lost their ability to produce sophisticated chips entirely in Europe. In turn, this means that, for now, there is hardly any strategic point for European authorities to create demand for chips that are 'Made in Europe' because they are either not assembled in Europe, not produced in Europe, or not developed in Europe. We have no idea whether this is eventually going to change, but there are currently no signs that it will.
This is just such a dire situation to be in. Even USA has seen the writing on the wall regarding China-Taiwan which is why it has been strategically re-homing all the most advanced chip fab technology to Arizona [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC_Arizona
They can create demand for "Made in Europe" semiconductors that aren't packaged there, and then they can create demand for "Made in Europe" semiconductors that are packaged there and try to get a packaging plant to open up.
If you have a two step problem, the strategy of "I can't do two things at the same time so I'll just give up", is not a good one.
This was a major flaw that I and others brought up a couple years ago when the EU was consulting industry about making its own CHIPS Act.
While bleeding edge backend processes got the bulk of reporting, the major push for the American CHIPS Act was the rebuild packaging capacity in the US (Samsung is working on this in Texas).
This was also the same approach Taiwan, Malaysia, and China used to climb up the semiconductor value chain.
The EU also failed to tie design capacity together as well, as semiconductor design capacity is almost nonexistent in Europe.
Is EU chips act 2.0 any good?
Semiconductor design capacity is a massive issue almost always overlooked in these conversations. Spot on.
There's certainly semiconductor design capacity in Europe, but it's mostly geared towards low-end semiconductors, like the ones used in automotive and industrial. NXP and ST are designing ICs in Europe but relatively commodity stuff like low-end MCUs and motor controllers.
China's CAS institute charts DUV route to 3nm GAA without EUV - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757999 - September 2026
what's wild about this(not coming at you :), just in general wanted to post ) .... folks pick various details but i think sometimes miss the big picture. If they can make current/next gen HBM with similarish PUE... idk that DUV vs EUV vs 5nm vs 3nm matters?
export of the best machines should be banned before europe builds its own chip manufacturing and supply chain
How well have you thought this through? I have a lot of questions if they went this route.
Why are there no buyers as it is? Doing this would force lower margins for ASML, effectively knee-capping a Crown Jewel of European technology and business. Do you think the EU should subsidize those losses?
Could help put a stop to the AI nonsense for a while, at least.
> So far, however, the law has done little to spur the construction of new semiconductor factories in Europe. The European Court of Auditors concluded last year that the EU is unlikely to achieve its goal of doubling Europe’s share of the global chip market by 2030.
They should make another law and probably a few more commissions of auditors.
I get the sarcasm, but its not like e.g. TSMC popped up in a environment of pure libertarian free market capitalism. It was, from the beginning, a project of the Taiwanese state, and without significant public influence there is no way it would have become what it is. Are the EU laws what's needed? IDK. But without a proper public industrial policy besides "low taxes and few regulations" there is no way Europe will be able to get significant semiconductor-production up, the rich-get-richer phenomenon is just to strong.
I think the point is that laws alone mean nothing. As you note, Taiwan was more active than just having commissions and signing papers.
Airbus proves the EU can do this. It remains to be seen if they still have the ability to take constructive action, or if “add more bureaucracy” is the only tool remaining in the toolbox.
> Airbus proves the EU can do this
*could.
Airbus has been grandfathered into the current legal situation. Today a future Airbus would not be able to even start collecting data for its initial Environmental Impact Study.
I’ve seen someone explaining why it’s not as easy with semiconductors: Airbus can spread several different factories for different components around the EU. For semiconductors that’s not as feasible. Thus countries would fight which one would have the semiconductors factory. I think it was more or less this argument, which seems to make sense.
> Airbus proves the EU can do this
And Boeing's rampant carelessness proves European laws can be beneficial. "Hurr durr, how about them European laws" is a low-effort comment that adds nothing to the discussions.
The argument that a slack regulatory environment is sufficient was disproven when the US government subsidized new fabs via the CHIPS Act (a new law!), and then went further and partially nationalized a failing Intel to prop it up.
Another interesting fact is that Che-Chia Wei (the man who made TSMC what it is) received zero equity. Everything he has he bought himself at the market rate.
> I get the sarcasm, but its not like e.g. TSMC popped up in a environment of pure libertarian free market capitalism.
Nobody said that. That is a strawman
Misleading article, they are selling to corporations already who in turn have plans to create a few fabs in Europe. So it is maybe more about European companies who are not buying, but that rests on difficult capital availability and fragmented nature of the continent. Europe is not one country after all, someone wants a fab in Germany, but the why is it not in France or Sweeden.
Europe is continually complaining about its dependency on Chinese steel, cars, electronics and semiconductors yet their carmakers are buying cheap Chinese steel instead of European steel and European semiconductor manufacturers are preferring cheap Chinese semiconductor equipment over ASML gear.
The European Commission wanted to put hefty tariffs on dumped Chinese steel but the carmakers sought an exemption. They don't care about European sovereignty, only about their profits. Penny wise and pound foolish. I doubt there will still be a European car industry in two decades or so.
Europe is a lost continent.
> Europe is continually complaining about its dependency on Chinese steel, cars, electronics and semiconductors yet their carmakers are buying cheap Chinese steel instead of European steel and European semiconductor manufacturers are preferring cheap Chinese semiconductor equipment over ASML gear.
You clearly have no idea about the value creation chain. Steel is a commodity, why shoot yourself into the foot by buying expensive one. And semiconductors are not commodities.
But I guess this logic only makes sense to a country that insists on using its own overpriced steel to save a couple jobs.
How are you gonna fight a war when you can't make the steel for your bullets and artillery grenades? Yes, that's the scary logic we need to take into account these days.
Steel is not a commodity, it's a basic ingredient in any industrial base.
China is where the demand is. Sell to China and stop being an ass and US's puppet.
when China finally cracks EUV we might be able to afford PC parts again?
oddly cheering for this but I doubt it will end well
* https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manh...
They are not cracking EUV, they are finding ways that actually scale. Chips can be much cheaper than they are currently. I mean yes, obviously we cannot be confident ntil it happens, but they are already making 5nm with DUV.
When China leads chip making the rest of the world is just vasal states.
Going to higher densities with DUV needs high multi patterning which is very inefficient and ends up costing more than if they could do EUV with fewer patterns.
It's well known tech that is used globally, just not to that degree as yield and throughput goes way down
Yes it will not end well because Amurica will put a crater in the middle of the fab if it ever becomes viable.
America will 100% not do that, unless they want matching craters in all of their fabs, or worse, in Taiwan’s.
Of course Amurica will not do it themselves, Amurica will outsource the job to someone else.
lol China wouldn't bother bombing anyone
they'd just tell all their export ships to turn around and stop all exports
US would collapse in 30 days
it would be like the blockade US is doing to Cuba except 90% of every product we use and they wouldn't have to fire a single shot
they could also sell off the billions in US bonds and other assets
US economy would be utterly destroyed, we'd never recover because even the middle-class would be living out of their cars (now dead because all the parts for them are made in China)
The Netherlands has always put its economic chips on America and Asia.
Europe is just a geographic accident as far as the Dutch are concerned.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49804613
What is perhaps more important from ASML's standpoint is that none of the ongoing fab projects in Europe are leading-edge fabs set to use EUV and eventually High-NA EUV lithography scanners. The tools that European fabs use today and that new facilities are set to use in the future are mature tools that cost considerably less than advanced EUV or immersion DUV scanners. This is perhaps a concern for ASML, as the company is naturally interested in selling its more sophisticated and expensive equipment.
Missing from article is where they are selling which I assume is mostly Taiwan and America.
Bloomberg[1] has a breakdown based on ASML filings. For Q2, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan made up 77% of ASML's orders, with China representing another 14%. Given China is on the list, I imagine this includes non-EUV tech as well given the sanctions.
The fact that Europe has incredibly limited frontier chip making capability is the issue, though. Even if they can produce other chips, its position is not at all resilient.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-22/asml-exec...
The US isn't in a whole lot better position. We've got Intel and Micron, but otherwise dependent on TSMC (and ASML).
I guess the US chip designers could switch to Intel as a fab if they had to, but there are not even any US-made DUV machines, so far from self-sufficient.
Europe is mostly interested in supporting its car industry. But soon they won't have to worry about that either.
There are no companies in Europe designing high-end semiconductors because the wages are much lower than in the U.S. The best European talent is moving Stateside and raking in ten times what they can get at home without having to build up seniority first.
US is only 10-15% of ASML's sales
It’s ok we will get cheap chips from Taiwan without having to invest a single dime once the bubble bursts.
We will keep working on philosophy, theory and arts. Let the rest of the world get their hands dirty building things.
Philosophy, theory, and arts are so intertwined with technology that a nation which does not build cannot be expected to remain at the forefront of those three.
In thermodynamics, through cycles of expansion and compression, useful work can be extracted. Similarly through economic cycles, America is able to extract wealth from rest of globe.
The European Commission strikes again!
Amusement Park continent. And yes, I'm European and know what I'm talking about.
You must be living in one of those nicer parts where tourism is present.
High tourism doesn't make a place more livable for teh locals.
Sounds interesting. Now go make me a cappuccino before my next ride.
I can't imagine it is cheap to get EUV machines these days. Maybe they don't want to get into a bidding war with America and Taiwan and are waiting for things to cool down?
"During a gold rush, sell shovels."
I'm fed up with the regular euro bashing. People are underestimating what EU countries can do. The whole history was similar. France, for example, was neither the first to build high-end luxury products nor was it the first to embrace the Industrial Revolution. It managed to catch up in any case.
EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.
I wish that the EU did the same as China did years ago, and that is to block any non-EU tech company from entering the market. We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.
> I'm fed up with the regular euro bashing. People are underestimating what EU countries can do.
I'm from the EU and glad to be a part of it. I just wish it was easier to do multi-national projects (I think anything aerospace or military related shows how little the countries want to collaborate) or even just tackle large projects and undertakings better.
Hell, in regards to chips I'd be happy with at least 2020 level performance chips for servers, desktops and laptops, even ARM ones. Okay maybe that is aiming too high cause my current Ryzen 7 5800X is from 2020 and so is my M1 MacBook Air and I don't see the need to upgrade, even 2016 would be good enough. Just more domestic production, CPUs, GPUs, memory, storage, everything else.
China still does not have many companies on the level of American technology firms. Just restricting foreign competition in the domestic market is not enough for most places to compete; their domestic markets and investment levels are too underdeveloped to produce globally competitive companies.
The thing that produces competitive industries is requiring them to compete globally. That's how Chinese cars got good (Tesla joint venture -> independent Chinese Tesla -> competitive domestic companies).
There are two main reasons why the EU struggles to produce strong text companies are, IMO:
1. EU laws and regulations are very burdensome and cover everything from employees to packaging waste.
2. There is not enough capital that gets invested in EU tech companies to pay high tech salaries, again largely driven by more restrictive financial rules.
The result of these two is that European engineers tend to leave for the US, and European companies struggle to grow to American size.
Around 70% of American billionaires made their money themselves, while in the EU a similar share inherited it. Despite all the talk about social mobility in Europe being better than in the US, the truth is that the ultrawealthy in Europe have created a regulatory environment which makes it nearly impossible for real competition to exist.
> Just restricting foreign competition in the domestic market is not enough ...
Yes, It is not sufficient but I would argue it was necessary. In case of China it allowed them to have a set of domestic copycat companies like Baid, Alibaba and Tencent, that enabled high demand for local engineers to serve their needs and that allowed to have a large pool of competent domestic engineers which now can benefit other emerging sectors too. It keeps surprising how many top contributors to large OSS projects are from China.
Interesting! I would split regulation in two different types though. The fist one is merely the output of bureaucracy and good intentions and a second that is targeting US tech companies as EU can't compete.
>Around 70% of American billionaires made their money themselves, while in the EU a similar share inherited it.
The top 100 wealthiest Austrian families own two thirds of the country's wealth <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755835>, and none of the wealth came from tech companies. The same is likely true of Germany with one exception: SAP.
Put another way, the two wealthiest German-born tech people (except the founders of SAP) are Peter Thiel and Andy Bechtolsheim, both of whom earned their billions in the US.
> We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.
Which wouldn't do Europe a lot of good at this point. EU needs a TSMC and an Anthropic/OpenAI.
Yes definitely, this is why I see the shift with AI as an opportunity to push forward new companies. EU needs to put the focus on hardware where it did have a competitive advantage few years ago (still have on B2B hardware)
>EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.
I guess you mean EEC in 1958, because EU was officially formed in 1993. And normally people would count the period of the two World War and starting to count by the end of it. Either way it is a lot more than 30 years.
Yes indeed ! What is important is that the same people/generation who witnessed the atrocities of war and resented each other decided to create a union
Agreed. Someone has to actually do it though. Talk is cheap.
Living in France, trying to do my part here. I love the US as well and their spirit of freedom and innovation should be an example to follow
Cool. What's your semiconductor project? Have you put something in Tiny Tapeout, or made a garage transistor?
> EU countries went from killing each other in two of the most deadly wars to having a union in 30 years.
Was that the halcyon period where they were too broken to fight back and got the continent split between the Americans and the Communists? Or the modern period where it turns out the security situation in Europe was so totally mishandled that we ended up with the Ukraine war?
The spectre of nukes getting used isn't dropping over time and this sort of grinding destructive war is probably raising the risk of a big conflagration. Everyone seems to be rearming.
> Or the modern period where it turns out the security situation in Europe was so totally mishandled that we ended up with the Ukraine war?
What do you mean by this? Ukraine is not part of the EU.
> I wish that the EU did the same as China did years ago, and that is to block any non-EU tech company from entering the market. We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.
You can do it even today. But you can't bring back manufacturing from China. You gave them your techology and the market.
times change. past greatness is not a reliable predictor for the future. Mongolia is rather unlikely to be the largest empire ever again, don't you think?
Europe is still great.
its political stability and relative prosperity makes it an important consumer market, sure, but it's increasingly clear that Europe is no longer "great" great. its wealth was a product of being ahead of the rest of the world for a long time technologically and militarily, but the colonial era is over, so many others had caught up and are now eating their lunch. even the big three -- Germany, France, and Britain -- are in cultural, economic, and demographic decline. the alliance that binds them is loose and incoherent, promoting stagnation rather than innovation. the US brain drains its brightest while Europe itself frantically replaces its aging natives with whoever is willing to cross its undefended borders.
if the US or China had disappeared tomorrow, it would affect the rest of the world. what does an average person outside of Europe own that was made in Europe or couldn't be made in China instead? even ASML, its crown jewel, is built upon American tech and would be rebuilt in the US within a decade if there was necessity to do so.
> We could have had the Google/Meta equivalent years ago.
I don't want the problems those kind of companies bring. The world would be better without Facebook and Instagram in particular.
You remind me of a new research article on how dumb the new social media make us
But Europeans still just use Facebook and Instagram...
The euro bashing will stop when the pointing noses down at USA for being uncultured or unrefined or whatever stops.
Totally aligned ! As a European, I was never into this US bashing. I looked up to the Americans in the same way the french did back in the 19th century when they gifted them statue of liberty
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Least racist European
This is not remotely racist. It's simply a fact, and the result of a lack of nationalist ideology.
Turns out if it's more economically efficient to simply import skilled workers, or outsource, then that's what will happen. Breeding and educating your own citizens in a first world country is very expensive. So you don't do it.
The only reason not to do this is national preference. Economically it makes sense, on a national level it makes sense, individually it's genocide.
Individually, you have to accept migrants if your personal demographic is below the replacement rate. Otherwise you will never retire, and your kids (if any) will work in a nursing economy at minimum wage.
It's petty and anti-nationalist to demand that your nation destroy it's own economy to fit your arbitrary political mold.
> Individually, you have to accept migrants if your personal demographic is below the replacement rate.
No, you don't have to.
Yes, you do. The frontlines of Ukraine are being prepared for literal demographic replacement as we speak. Kidnapped Ukrainian children are attending Russian schools, fortifications and bases are being dug out for them to fight against their own kin.
Are you enlisted? Do you want to be? Europe needed to figure out it's defense plan yesterday, not in 20 years. If Europe won't ally with migrants, then maintaining European sovereignty is nearly impossible.
This is an absurd set of assumptions that have forced you into a nonsensical position.
No, you don't need to accept migrants. You need money. You can get money in many many ways.
The best way for this to happen for the general prosperity of citizens is for the state to enrich themselves from the work of others, non citizens, and give that money to citizens. This is what Norway has done through its sovereign wealth fund.
It's absolutely not an absurd set of assumptions. The majority of the demographics you're worried about are beneath the replacement rate. They are going to necessarily reach a point where the youth workforce cannot sustain the outsized elderly population or protect them in a war scenario.
If you do not want to defend Europe's front lines with teenage conscripts and geriatric riflemen, you need a way to bring warm bodies into the fold. Refusing lawful immigration will undermine domestic security, doom the elderly and ruin pension funds for future retirees. No sovereign wealth fund is worth losing your sovereignty over.
Yes, they are an absurd set of assumptions.
I told you what the requirement was. Money. You have simply arbitrarily decided instead it's just people for no reason at all. As though magically people will spawn resources from their finger tips. According to you the richest countries in the world must be the most populous.
Obviously this is idiotic to even a cursory examination.
The next assumption you've made is that birth rate is completely random, a roll of the dice, an unchangeable fact of the universe. The reality is of course it's a result of policy and economics. This can be solved extremely easily.
I'm sorry. You cannot accuse me of setting absurd assumptions and then outline "the requirement" as if reality is Go Fish and I misplayed my card. Macropolitics are multidimensional, the babies born tomorrow are eighteen years away from reaching the workforce. There are no policy or economic changes that make your children grow faster.
Europe's troop deficit is just as immediate and pressing as the economic and policy problems. It would be nice if we could ignore it, but you can only expand your domestic middle class if you don't condemn them to the conscription lines first.
It's very funny you try to make that argument when your requirement was literally just MIGRANTS, because MIGRANTS = PENSIONS. Which is hilariously a subset of my own requirement, more specific. Absolutely absurd.
No. What I said is just a fact. There's no assumption, the requirement is a fact. You need money to pay for goods and services for the people no longer working.
There's no assumption there? What's the assumption, that goods and services need to be paid for?
So stop bringing up migrants for no reason at all. The actual issue is money, and there are many ways to obtain money.
The nonsense about troops is of course ridiculous. Just a fantastical statement divorced from reality. Who is this enemy Europe is facing that will require a ww1 style meat grinder of 10s of millions of troops, which of course took place when the european population was half the size.
I hope my company (if I have one) can also blame a continent for not buying my product instead of trying to sell better :D
( /s)
They don't call us Europoors for nothing
So true it hurt mate...
The EU needs to stop acting as if all is fine. The EU commission is totally useless, from A to Z. There is zero strategy in play here. They need to take a much more pro-active stance - fining US companies that work against europeans is fine, but you also need to have viable alternatives. And that simply is not happening right now.
Europe has no money.
The average salary (not including RSUs/Bonus) in Dublin's Silcon Docklands is north of €130k+, with sick pay, 23 days leave, and the sort of employee protections which would be an utter fantasy in the US (defined redundancy payments, mandated collective bargaining, governance processes around mass redundancy handling at state level).
This was hugely evident during the recent spate of tech layoffs - employers planning collective dismissals are obliged to hold a mandatory 30-day consultation with employee representatives and notify the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment beforehand. Issuing premature "done deal" announcements before meaningful consultation breaches Irish law.
Even at the micro level, non-collective or individual restructuring must still rely on objective selection criteria and fair procedures. Failing to do so exposes employers to Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) claims for unfair or constructive dismissal.
There's also very very strict regulations around work/life issues. A famous case this year in 2023 where a Customer Care Team Lead at the Dublin office of Israeli software company Wix was dismissed after posting comments on LinkedIn. In her posts, she described Israel as a "terrorist state" and referred to Zionism as "the root of violence" while expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people. In July 2024, the WRC ordered Wix to pay Carey €35,000 in compensation after Wix acknowledged that the dismissal was "procedurally unfair" under Irish employment law.
In short, we're not that poor and have significant societal safety-nets that make up the delta in direct wages.
> employee protections which would be an utter fantasy in the US (defined redundancy payments, mandated collective bargaining, governance processes around mass redundancy handling at state level).
This can be compared to protectionist policies such as tariffs.
If employees are hard to fire, then companies hesitate to hire them.
If employees on-shore are protected, then un-protected employees overseas are more competitive, eventually gutting local industries.
Etc.
This came up in Australia recently where a liberal government proposed loosening some employee protection laws with the idea that it would encourage hiring.
It did. It worked.
Then the policy was swiftly reversed by a more left-wing party, and a lot of those newly employed people lost their jobs because they turned from an asset to a liability.
Protectionism is a double-edged sword.
It’s all invested in American companies
And yet, more USians move to my "poor" country than the other way around. Make of that what you will.
>more USians move to my "poor" country than the other way around.
Retirees and people who already made money to outbid the locals on housing and purchasing power.
Why would they move to a more expensive country where they'd feel poor?
Emigrating is not an easy task (even with money), think why they do it and why the don't want to live on the country they were born.
Think about it... a hint, it's not about money.
Emigrating is super easy when you have a lot of money and a strong passport. Money solves most problems that are not related to the soul.
By comparison, try emigrating as a poor person from a poor country with a weak passport. Americans are playing life on easy mode but they complain the most.
That well-paid Americans like to WFH on Malaga beaches is not a testament to the Spanish economy, but to its weather and (more importantly) low cost of living.
In any case, don't be too sure about your claim. According to <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...>, 170K Spanish-born live in the US. By contrast, 69K US-born live in Spain <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...>. Given that the US (341 million) has 7.25 times Spain's population (47 million), this means that a Spaniard is 17-18 times more likely to move to the US, than an American is to move to Spain.
This is… a mathematically correct but practically useless way to compare migration flows. Using this approach, Singaporeans are more likely to move to China than Chinese to move to Singapore. Mathematically true, and tells us much about the relative sizes of these two countries, but very, very little about relative attractiveness as a place of living.
>Using this approach, Singaporeans are more likely to move to China than Chinese to move to Singapore.
Using the Our World in Data figures, a Singapore-born person is about four times more likely to move to China than a China-born person is to move to Singapore.
That does not seem like an unreasonable ratio, given that a) Chinese are not nearly as free, whether economically or politically, to emigrate, b) those Chinese who have the money and connections to leave are likely going to be in the large cities that offer good living standards, and c) China is going to have, from sheer size, aspects that will appeal to Singaporeans regardless of per-capita economic disparity. Put another way, if Chinese were as free to move around the world as Singaporeans, there would surely be many more China-born people in Singapore ... perhaps four times as the current 530K.
By contrast, the US and Spain are fairly comparable in terms of their citizens' freedom to move about, so that factor can be eliminated from the comparison.
And healthcare, better food, better public transport, security, human relations, lifespan... and above all, happiness.
The american dream is dead, US is a country for working, not for living.
Absolutely also a testament to escaping Trump too. I have met many all over Europe, all ages – UK, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Ireland etc who mentioned it. Including many previously living in California, Florida, Colorado etc with a decent climate, who were earning very good money.
Definitely a testament to each country too - presumably they have a fairly wide choice. They wouldn't go somewhere they disliked the culture that much. We know how discerning US folk are.
If we were to take all preceding arguments seriously, couldn't that be explained by americans going to live in a low-cost-of-living country once they've earned their living?
(Don't know your country to know if that's true or not, but it's a possibility)
Are you looking for money or are you looking for a good life?
My country offers them both, people from lots of countries como here looking for money and also for a better way of living.
The lesson explains itself.
The demonym is American, not whatever you wrote. Unless your poor country is New Zealand, that's not the case.
Being pedantic America is the continent. So a chilean should be as "American" as Donald Trump.
No, it isn't. Everyone knows exactly what "American" means and it's never a Chilean.
You know English is defined by its usage right? If people start using a new term such as USAian, or American to refer to everyone from the continent...that's what will be. There is no central authority to tell us how to use English correctly.
Anyway. New world order. USA hegemony is going way.
I guess USAians are beginning to find out how we in the UK felt about the loss of our empire.
It's actually the other way around. All we have is money that we stole from the colonies.
If the car companies actually go down the drain I have no clue what products of note we would still be producing that would continue to bring money in. So, I think our goose is cooked here in Europe.
I mean this is just such FUD.
In Ireland alone we manufacture:
* Cardiovascular Stents (80% of Global Supply)
* Orthopaedic Knee Implants (75% of Global Supply)
* Acute Hospital Ventilators (50% of Global Supply)
* Contact Lenses (World Leader)
19 of the world's top 20 pharmaceutical companies operate manufacturing, R&D, or biopharma facilities in Ireland; this compromises over 50% of all physical goods exported from Ireland, totaling well over €100 billion annually. Needless to say it's also the pivotal manufacturing hub for high-demand GLP-1 weight-loss and diabetes treatments (like Mounjaro).
Ireland is among the top global exporters of antisera, blood fractions, and complex cell cultures, making it indispensable to global healthcare infrastructure.
Ireland is the absolute world leader in dairy science per capita, and produces roughly 10% to 15% of the entire world's infant milk formula, with estimates indicating that roughly one in ten to one in seven babies globally consume formula manufactured in the country.
That's an Island of less than 5 million people, 1/8th the size of Texas, that was basically bypassed by the Industrial Revolution and had no colonial benefit. Now extrapolate for a second and imagine what Germany is manufacturing.
> That's an Island of less than 5 million people,
The Republic of Ireland has more than 5 million people. The Island has well over 7 million.
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2026/0824/1588997-cso-popul...