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.
No, Europe is not a factor in cutting-edge chip assembly. That is a tiny fraction of the overall supply chain to manufacture a finished, compute-ready semiconductor. There is sense in not trying to compete with the "sexy" part of chip manufacturing, and instead concentrating on the steps of the supply chain you are already good at.
I'd say being able to compete instead of trying. I bet a lot of euro companies would love to compete against nvidia, amd, intel or tsmc, globalfoundries, etc. They just can't.
If banana production was such an important cornerstone of world economy, a competent team of engineers would be able to create the perfect indoor plantations to raise bananas.
The plantation described above is less complex than the ultra-cleanrooms used by semiconductor producers like TSMC.
Yeah, but it's not for lack of talent in tech, investemnt money and support from lawmakers. Just a climate that doesn't help bananas grow, unlike chip design and manufacturing in europe.
I dont think there is any hard fact behind your statement. EU has a number of semiconductor companies and fabs, though they tend to focus on embedded/industrial applications. Some went bankrupt (e.g. a big German RAM manufacturer) and the number dwindled, but it's not like there's nothing.
Like in anything high tech you need either massive subsidies or network effects, this is why things have built up in Taiwan, Shenzhen and South Korea, with remnants in the US, EU and a bit more Japan as all three thought they can let the market play out, fell a bit behind, and then the network effects won out.
Similarly the car industry - Germany (and Japan) rose due to massive investment and network effects, then the shareholders put in CEOs with a clear mission just to milk the cows and get wealth out of the system; this gave China a chance to go all in on investments and overtake them on innovation and price. This has nothing to do with regulation, just with short-termism and the inherent diseases of a "pure" capitalism.
That there are few new innovative companies coming up is probably more due to regulations (need to figure out how to make the product work and be legal in various regimes). In turn that they don't scale is due to less financing options and a much more fragmented market (to sell in France and Spain and Poland you need to translate everything and adapt it to local expectations and payment standards.. to sell in Florida, Minnesota and Texas you just need to throw a single English version up.
A shame that the national governments keep blocking any real integration of the financial and regulatory regimes at EU level, this would solve the startup and scale up issues to a large degree. The EU just proposed "EU Inc" as a solution, not sure this will not be ground up in 27 regimes...
To give a idea of fun regulations. This is one regarding imports that my partner is dealing with recently.
A new regulation when importing into Europe, is that you need to show that import materials do not have toxic substances, ... on ... shipping labels (meaning the physical labels are free from harmful chemicals like BPA, PFAS, or PVC).
You need from every company that ships from China, they need to provide certificates that their shipping labels are toxic free.
Pulled from AI because i hate summarizing this...
* EU Ecolabel: The gold standard in Europe. It officially guarantees that a product has low aquatic toxicity, a reduced environmental footprint, and strictly limited hazardous substances throughout its life cycle.
* EN 13432 Certification: If using compostable labels (like those from Better Packaging Co.), this mandatory European standard ensures the label, liner, and adhesive break down safely in industrial composting without leaving toxic chemical residues.
* FSC (Forest Stewardship Council): Certifies that the paper backing and label face stock are sourced from sustainably managed, non-destructive forests.
* Phenol-Free / BPA-Free Declarations: Thermal printing labels must formally declare compliance with EU Regulation 2016/2235, which legally restricts bisphenols in thermal paper across the European Economic Area.
Its a mess of paperwork ... We have not talked about a ton of others, and those are on the import side.
We had some fun discussions about vitamine pill manufacturing, where importing materials made it "made in China".
But if we imported the raw material, and the capsules are made in Europe, and its mixed / bottled here. Well, made in Europe. But the prime materials that goes into your body is from China ... Does not matter.
But wait, if the capsules are made in China and mixed / bottled here in Europe, then its still made in China. Because the capsule somehow made the difference?! I do not remember the details but the amount of easy customer cheating that can be done with "Made in EU / Germany / France"..
I can go on with some of the insanities i get told about ... There are good rules but a lot are like this mix that make no sense, and you can almost hear that somebody pushed for exceptions when the rule was designed. So you get this odd crap that half the time makes no sense.
Hard to do business when the rules are often a issue.
The fact that the issue as described is such a small problem, that pales into the other issues.
One of the issues mentioned is PFAS, ... ignoring the fact that we have tons of PFAS pollutions already in our soils and not a darn thing is done.
We live very close to one of those sites, but its always excuses after excuse to solve. But PFAS on labels, panic, panic, ... The whole label issue can easily be solved by random sampling at import and a fine system. That automatically puts backpressure to fix it. No need for certificates left and right.
My point is that we keep making bureaucratic rules, that make every step more difficult for entrepreneurs here in Europe, instead of having a proper compliance setup. There is a entire industry around yearly audits (that cost 10.000's), like people who do it non-stop suddenly forget how to do it.
That is the issue ... Its not about rules but about barriers that make often setup in such a way to be barriers of entry/working, then compliance.
Tell me, how many times do you go to have your car checked. Yearly or every two years? That is one of those example where in some countries its yearly, other twice. Do the countries with two years have issues with their car park. No ... The result is the same but some people get to be inconvenienced twice (and pay twice). Do you understand it a bit more now?
There are rules and there are rules that add little beyond making everything difficult, when it can be solved in a better way.
Maybe don't dump some AI Bullshit about many things that don't apply to shipping labels or are mandatory at all.
Like 3 out of the 4 are completely irrevelant at all.
FWIW I view Japan as still a player, just more specialized (although yes, TSMC is often still involved.)
Specifically, imaging sensors. Canon still makes their own sensors in Japan, and Sony makes all sorts of sensors that are used both by competitors in the camera space as well as Phones, (e.x. Apple after over a decade is only now starting to diversify with Samsung US Fabbed sensors,) Dashcams and Security Cams(Even a lot of the Chinese built ones, if you see STARVIS it's a Sony sensor)
That said, Imaging sensors do hit a curious level of 'needing bleeding edge but is not necessarily as complex as a cpu'. i.e. you're striving for precision and quality but the part itself is a lot more 'repetitive' across the silicon area compared to a CPU.
They're making the point that you're wrong. The CHIPS act under Biden is a big subsidy to bring modern fabs to the US and without it there wouldn't be any orders in the US either (which has less regulation). The EU came up with a competitor to that subsidy but it wasn't generous enough to compete (neither regulation nor bureaucracy at play here).
On a side note, none of the TSMC fabs in the US are cutting edge. They're all at least a generation behind.
> none of the TSMC fabs in the US are cutting edge. They're all at least a generation behind.
TSMC Arizona is a "gigafab" built in phases. The 4nm fab is already built and in volume production of chips for Apple and Nvidia. The 3nm fab construction is complete, and the 2nm (current SOTA) is under construction slated to start chip production in 2028.
TSMC is starting A16 mass production this year. Its 2nm process entered mass production in their domestic fabs in 2025.
In other words: TSMC Arizona isn't SOTA - it is lagging 3 years (~1.5 nodes) behind.
Taiwan isn't stupid. It knows that keeping SOTA domestically is the only way it can rely on the US for protection. The second their fabs aren't absolutely crucial for cutting-edge chips anymore, the US will drop them like a brick - and China will happily devour the country.
For example, the Netherlands are currently pouring cement down their oil derricks to try and prevent a future government from re opening them, over absurdly minor earthquakes, despite the energy crisis.
Europe is the only continent where some countries are close to fully nuclear and they aren't close to being the industrial powerhouses HN commenters would make you believe. Tell my why are the US (gas) and China (coal) are beating France (nuclear)?
The whole world essentially stopped building nuclear power plants at the end of the 1970s and there's one obvious answer which you guys just can't accept, so you keep inventing one stab-in-the-back narrative after another for why nuclear energy failed.
>The whole world essentially stopped building nuclear power plants at the end of the 1970s
China has over 30 nuclear power plants currently in development, the only way nuclear "failed" is the industry's failure to convince dumb boomers not to regulate it out of existence in the west.
Nuclear failed in terms of price/megawatt and will fail because it economically doesn't pay off requiring large government subsidies for everything from large scale power purchase agreements, to security and long term waste management. Its also centralized, and more difficult to defend in a world that is threatening to descend into regional conflicts and climate driven disasters. If one were take a serious long term view about industrial progress, one would avoid nuclear, avoid fossil fuels, and install and develop decentralized renewables and battery techs
which regulations and bureaucracy are you talking about specifically?
there are several nuclear plants operation in Europe, some countries also just announced to restart some of their old power plants. There are no regulations that prevent any of the countries from doing it, each country makes that decision for themselves and has their own reasons to do it or not to do it
Energy prices are up in Europe because Europe was too dependent on Russia for gas (and now the US) and the Middle East for oil, not regulation. We are too dependent on fossil fuels because (mostly right wing) politicians tried to block/underinvest in wind/solar/geothermal for too long.
Almost correct, except it's the green/left that forced a shutdown of nuclear and sold the gas as "green". At least in Germany/Scandinavia, might be different in the rest of Europe.
> During the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder, the social democratic-green government decreed Germany's final retreat from using nuclear power by 2022.[1]
The Gerhard Schröder that
> Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom.[2]
> Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies
People often cite this fact as if there were a problem to it. (Not sure it is your case though.) Is it that Germany is not allowed to have national interests? Who is the judge on this? Our "friend", the remaining exceptional occupation power?
By the way, chancellor Merz, before taking office, had worked for (and owes his personal wealth to) Usanian financial company Blackrock, thus creating a (rarely cited) allegiance problem at the highest level of the state apparatus.
The same regulations and bureaucracy that doesn't stop ASML from producing these machines? Makes sense. Also it's funny how in the US/China/EU threads, you'd never guess that China is state-run. You'd think they are a capitalist heaven like the US.
Could the "EU has too much bureaucracy" users even say how much more bureaucracy EU is producing compared to the US and China? I doubt it. The US Congress has produced some insane behemoths of laws where the glossary is bigger than your average EU directive, so please put some numbers behind your claims.
Lastly, I think the average HN user just doesn't understand that the EU streamlines regulation across 28 countries, which is almost the opposite of coming up with new regulations. It makes things easier. But that would already require an iota of knowledge past the HN kneejerk worldview.
ASML is selling $300 million dollar machines that are fairly small for it's price point. Regulation is going to have very little impact on producing something like that vs mass produced widgets, cars, or chips.
All nations have tariffs and subsidies, we need to move beyond restating these basic facts like "Governments exist to impose taxes and provide subsidies" but move to analyzing how effective they are at promoting industrial policy.
With Europe, I have no idea what they aim to achieve. They are losing their auto industry. Energy is so expensive they are losing their chemical and metallurgy industries. They are not moving to tech. They are not, as far as I know, investing heavily in any area at all other than spending money on stuff made elsewhere.
It's rhetorical because I see that complaint about the EU too often and I just want to point out what you have said but in my case I'm ridiculing the moralising lecture about the dire consequences of anti-free-market behaviour.
Hopefully for RAM and RISC-V ultra-performant µarchitectures.
Yeah, I am advocating for I would like to happen (hopefully INTEL and AMD will put a RISC-V decodecs on their µarchitecture out of good will... yeah since they hold the x86 and x86_64 IP then excluding all alternatives de-facto... the incentive is.. negative.
If I am not mistaken, EU is currently pouring money in defence. For defence needs, one state-of-art chip build line is enough... the EU armies could even share it.
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).
Large shopping malls would fail the air purity requirements for semiconductor manufacturing.
EUV lithography and etching rooms require ISO class 1 clean rooms. Those can have a maximum of 10 particles of size 0.1 microns per cubic meter.
While a shopping mall can get away with 2 - 4 air changes per hour, an ISO class 1 clean room requires 400-600 an hour, or about 10 a minute. Airflow needs to also be controlled: vertical and laminar. Every human entering the cleanroom needs to undergo an air shower with speeds of 60-90 mph to shear off loose skin flakes, hair and lint. This area needs to maintain constant positive air pressure to repel outside dust as humans move in and out.
In the EUV lithography systems, temperature control is measured in milliKelvins (0.001 C). If a wafer stage has a temperature variation of 0.05 C, the silicon expands by a few nanometers and the multimillion dollar batch is toast. Meanwhile in the same room, the EUV machine is generating extreme ultraviolet light using a plasma light source that gets to above 200,000 C. That's 40x hotter than the surface of the sun.
> I always thought of these as high-precision, not-too-high-volume processes
EUV rooms are churning out about 150 wafers an hour, 24/7. That sounds like not too high of a volume, but each wafer is about 500 cpus. So 75,000 cpus an hour.
Exactly this. The process is super complex and expensive. The result, a cpu, is sold for a few dollars. To be profitable, the scale / volume has to be absolutely massive!
Vacuum does not dissipate heat well (extra engineering in that department)
Vacuum is never 100% vacuum. If you have some dust in the air, it will mostly flow to the direction of the airflow, but in vacuum dust particles will do random walk thing and settle on surfaces.
Plus the fact that then you need the everything to be structurally strong to be able to support 1atm of pressure differential, keep the vacuum sealed, and keep material degassing under control, so you end up with some heavy duty, expensive stuff. Pretty sure a lot of steps in the chip fab are done under very very high vaccums tho!
In general it's easier to control the air you're blowing into a room than what you're extracting, so I'd expect it would be more economical to keep the fabrication rooms under high pressure than low pressure. Also, in case of a leak, air and contaminants will flow out of the room instead of into it.
I worked a lot with and built up ultra-high vacuum systems during my PhD. At least for that level of vacuum, you introduce a lot of headache.
You can't use normal plastic or any kind of lubricant anymore because it starts degasing inside the vacuum, pump down after opening to air is a multi-day process that involves heating everything up to 150°C to get rid of the water that will settle on basically every surface when you pull the vacuum, every electricity feedthrough is a potential point of failure, transfering objects between different stages is a huge hassle etc. pp.
I'm sure there's still lots of UHV and HV systems in a chip fab, but there's no way that's easier on a full factory scale than clean room operation.
And what's so special about 200 MW? Many factories in Europe use these amounts and they run their own power plants. The only edge here is that the US has cheaper fossil fuels, which it amounts to.
> Finally, and here is where Europe really really suffers, generally you need these things to be planned, approved and built within a year.
Like the offshore wind farms in the US? I think Europe and China are building these things much faster. ;)
Why suffer worse bureaucracy than you absolutely have to? As long as there are no trade barriers companies will go where circumstances are the most favorable. What's the argument in favor of settling in Europe?
There are plenty of locations with redundant power supply, and even building a new power line from another substation would generally not be too expensive given the short distances (unless NIMBYs block it, which they do).
They have hundreds of machines that use microwaves, turbo molecular pumps like cvd, ion implantation, plasma etching, idk what else? I'd say it's just the sheer density of equipment within. An average fab has 2000 tools aka machines for wafers alone
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).
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.
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.
There's a possibility that the postal and telecoms systems did but I can't give you a counter. For everything else it has not been particularly effective; but a lot depends on what is privatised and how it's actually ran.
Water. Energy. Public transport (which is partially privatised). Healthcare has been a disaster.
Same thing for the UK but the results there were much much worse, especially the water (Brexit made it 10x worse). It was driven by the actions of the Unions in the 1970s (where they were taking the mickey) but of course went way way way too far. What was needed was to tweak the system such that the unions couldn't blackmail the Labour governments. Not to break it all up and sell it off for pennies on the dollar.
In most areas it made things worse. One could argue that the only exception are ISPs/cellular operators. But for public transport, healthcare, energy, etc. I can't say it was an improvement.
But yeah, we have one party that is most often in government that just loves privatisation, taxing workers more and the rich less, etc. and engages in a lot of short-term thinking. Apropos short-term thinking, one of them was a prime minister for 14 years and cut defense spending and did not even consider increasing spending when Russia invaded Crimea. And now he is the secretary general of NATO. Talking about failing upwards. Though he is probably primarily chosen for being able to communicate with Trump.
I get the feeling you're suggesting it's due to government regulation or 'socialist' policies.
But no, this failure is due a mixture or privatisation and politicians looking no further than the next election, leading to structural underinvestment.
Oh, and the energy transition going faster than even the most forward looking scenarios anticipated.
Going faster... until now. It's screetching to a halt. And they want us to get off gas in a few years while also being unable to handle the electrical load. I'm gonna buy a gas boiler thank you very much.
We can’t let industry be built, because the power infrastructure is so shabby, because the state can’t afford to improve it, because the economy is in tatters, because there is no industry, because we can’t let industry be built
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.
The problem is that constructing a cutting-edge fab is stupidly expensive, and you can only pay for it by selling chips at quite a premium - and nobody is paying a premium for 5-year-old CPUs.
So that brand-new fab has to pay for itself within the first 3-5 years, or it'll simply never pay for itself. But indeed, once it has paid off its initial construction costs it'll happily keep running for another 10+ years, churning out pure profit.
An additional problem here is that the costs have been rapidly increasing as the nodes have gotten more advanced. The tech for something like, say, the 40nm node is now mature enough that building new fabs isn't too expensive, so there's a decent market for building new ancient fabs for cheap mass production. But with EUV everything has gotten so complicated that there's no reasonable way to make it cheaper as it matures, and scale-wise you're well into the diminishing returns for everything which isn't logic. It is very much doubtful whether building brand-new 7nm-and-smaller fabs for mass production will ever make economic sense.
CPUs and GPUs a node or two old aren't really cheap compared to the cutting edge, though. If the fab's selling price has dropped a ton, are Intel and Amd and nVidia all making an extra big profit on the older models they're still selling?
There is a whole niche in semiconductor called abatement which usually involves burning fluorine based gases used for etching, in order to make them less hazardous before releasing them into the environment. They use natural gas for combustion. The chemicals are not liquids anymore just gases because they are easier to control and manipulate with plasma via e.g. dry etching, CVD, ion implant
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.
I understand your frustration, but it's not literally nothing - just less than it should be. The US still has Medicaid/Medicare, public schools, welfare services, emergency services, etc (even if you don't use them yourself you benefit from a reduction in the number of desparate people around you if they were cut back even further than they already have).
If you are completely broke and go/are brought to a hospital in the US with an immediate life threatening medical issue, they will still try to save your life.
I am too young for M&M, public schools are the worst and I pay ridiculous amount of money for private education. welfare services? depending on where you live (I live in urban area) welfare services would make sure I am just as homeless as if I didn’t get any welfare service…
and yes, the ER will take me to save my life but that about as low of a bar as one could come up with.
Just to be clear, the employer first pays ~40-45% of the original salary, then the employee pays ~32-38% of the original salary.
i.e. a 100,000 EUR annual salary, the employer pays ~40,000 EUR to the government, then the employee gets their wage slips with additional deductions of ~38,000 EUR.
= total of ~78,000 EUR tax on a 100,000 EUR salary.
I don't think anything like that level of taxation exists in the US?
The tax loading in the US on the equivalent of a 100,000 EUR salary is much lower than this.
At 100,000 USD (a bit lower than EUR) the combined tax load on income for both employee and employer is typically ~30-35% depending on locale. In the US, $100k is pretty close to the median household income.
If you have extremely high incomes (e.g. 1,000,000+ USD) the gap closes a bit but even in the highest tax locales the marginal tax loading maxes out at ~60% of top-line income.
US Federal tax rates are some of the most progressive in the world. Only ~20% of households are net taxpayers after transfer payments and subsidies. Ironically, this is why it is so difficult to significantly increase income tax revenue in the US. It would require the middle-class majority to vote to raise their own taxes.
Which jurisdiction? I highly doubt your effective tax rate is anywhere close to that. Especially considering the myriad deductions and exemptions one should be able to take with a high income (401k, Roth IRA, HSA, 529, etc).
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
Overreach? Annoying one guy and making him rich in exchange for such a huge buildout isn't overreach in my book. When I think of the overreach of eminent domain the examples have a lot more people and a lot less free millions of dollars.
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
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.
> HDI is a good metric for gauging living standards
A country with living standards at Bill Gates levels with perfect good health until 200 where everyone is illiterate has a lower HDI than South Sudan. Even if we fix it by setting the minimum education value at 0.1 billionaires with perfect health land would have a HDI lower than 180 countries. HDI has a 90%+ correlation with GDP. It’s not a worthwhile measure.
We have a politician putting up very obviously hand drawn (because we need to be fucking certain that AI didn't do it right?) posters for an anti-datacenter meeting. I'm pretty sure that if you were to talk to the actual humans in our society they'd talk about housing, employment, public transport. Not datacenters. If datacenters even feature in their real world outcomes it's 3rd hand, but the usual lefty crowd will turn up to any vaguely lefty protests with their bizarre mix of rainbow flags and keffiyehs.
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.
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.
No, humanity needs to actively (actively) rediscover human Values, to correct the proportion in the run towards technological growth vs Human growth - condition that has been noted for centuries and it substantially amounts to giving power to monkeys.
This does not counter that an idle, decadent mentality will have curbed growth everywhere.
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.
They kinda did that to themselves, but it's slowly changing. My partner's iPhone 16 is made in India. They really do lack waste management infrastructure though, and it's pretty crucial for this type of manufacturing. They should also borrow the regional concentration of industries that China has done, it really does make things more efficient.
“Made in” has no clean and clear meaning, because our world is so interconnected that everything of sufficient complexity is made from parts that are made from parts that are made in other places.
The iPhones that are “made in india” contain sub-assemblies that are made in china, that contain chips that are made in taiwan, made of metals that were mined in africa, wrapped in plastics derived from middle east oil.
In this case, the motivation to finish a product in India is mostly about tariff bypassing; with the final assembly being pretty minimal. Not quite putting the badge on, but close.
A good metric is the difference in value between the precursor and the final product; for most Indian phone production, it's less than 1%.
This is also a big reason why Indian export headlines are a bit silly; they never account for the increased import associated with the high value components.
Unclear if this will change going forward; there are some companies doing a higher proportion of the value chain in India, and some big incentives... But to me it's unlikely.
> the motivation to finish a product in India is mostly about tariff bypassing
I don’t think that’s the whole story. Apple started making phones in india in 2017, back when the tariff situation was merely a twinkle in epstein’s best friend’s eye. I think back then it was about general supply chain diversity, more than tariffs specifically. Useful in cases of natural disasters, or trade embargo, and leverage in business negotiations.
By 2024 they were making 36 million iPhones in India, you don’t get to that capacity if you start in november, after the election. Way I see it india was the backup system, and tariffs are the reason they are using the backup system - not the reason they built the backup system in the first place.
> A good metric is the difference in value between the precursor and the final product;
I agree, that’s a useful metric, especially in this case. But it’s also not perfect. E.g. it’s easy to have a >50% “made in USA” product if all the parts are made in china but the last assembly step takes time. Labour in the US is more expensive, so 5-10min of clicking parts together can easily cost more than the parts themselves. You could increase the capacity of that type of manufacturing indefinitely without ever gaining any real independence.
You can't just "borrow" some of the things from China without China politics. Regional concentration there is directly tied with their hukou system. No democratic government is able to implement that system without collapsing.
Most of China development is sui generis and not replicable elsewhere.
I don't think the important part is actually one for one replication of the system in China. I think the key parts to deliver progress are diversity of investment decisions, competitiveness in markets, and stable long term goals & fiscal support.
It's too easy to get tied up in political labels, when any hybrid of public and private support for those helps growth. None of political ideas has an exclusive lock on providing the factors. At this point, I really don't think any political system guarantees the development outcomes, there are examples of all labels which fail one to all of those progress factors.
China is very much repeating the history of Japan, and while we can argue how democratic Japan was in the second half of the XX century it definitely wasn't totalitarian.
I've seen (at least in prior decades) a similar phenomenon where certain more laissez-faire US folks talked up Hong Kong's reputation for business-friendly taxation. Yet the other necessary parts of the system were glossed over, like the massive sovereign-wealth fund, or how half of all housing was government-run or subsidized.
It sounds like you're saw Singapore Fun Facts once, and in your mind it permanently excluded any other place from having similar features.
* Like I said, Hong Kong does have a significant sovereign wealth fund that ranks in the top 10. [0]. It doesn't stop mattering just because Singapore runs a bigger one.
* Here's a article from 2021 with a nice stacked-graph showing 45% public housing [1], close to the half I mentioned.
> They should also borrow the regional concentration of industries that China has done, it really does make things more efficient.
That is actually something of a natural phenomenon (see [0] it is a large topic). Historically when a centre of excellence forms it tends to be a tight geographical region learning how to do work well.
Government policy should be cluster-friendly but as long as policy doesn't get in the way it happens naturally. The incentives on businesses are to form a cluster independently because the cluster in-group outcompetes businesses outside the cluster.
This happens ‘naturally’ but in China’s case I would say the majority is planned, see Shenzhen were 90%(?) of the worlds electronics are coming from. The basically send the engineering corps there, flattened the land with explosives and build a special economic zone.
"One example we use is the No.3 Memory of Lenin Tractor Repair Factory in Zhuhai, which already in 1973 had started repairing tractors outside the plan. It would take tractors that needed to be repaired from other units, repair them on the side of the plan, and then get payment in kind. That payment in kind was then either bartered further within Guangdong, or smuggled downriver to Hong Kong. By 1973 this unit had a Hong Kong bank account. If this had been discovered at the central level, these people would have been shot."
Turning Shenzhen from an off-limits border area into a special economic zone made it easy for those businesses to go legit and grow, but they were already waiting in the shadows to seize that opportunity.
Nice reference, thanks! And yeas, for sure proximity to Hong Kong was a big part of this! It is a financial hub, was a production hub, smuggling, triads, international hub, tax haven, the list goes on.
Given the success of Shenzhen I'm always a little confused that no-one ever seems to talk about what actually makes it a SEZ. Those policies (mainly local governance & tax exemptions AFAIK) should probably be more widely applied.
If the government plans to try free-market capitalism then I'm in favour of the plan.
Its a pretty complex topic. There are some hints in the book Extrastatecraft by
Keller Easterling, also the Great Leap Forward by Rem Koolhaas and a dozen more urbanism books. But these only highlight specific aspects, of which there are still many to be talked about.
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.
> India's lead in pharma manufacturing is because of their willingness to ignore US patents
US patents are only valid in the US. India is not "ignoring" anything by not following foreign laws. Can someone with an Indian patent enforce it in the US?
"A PCT application does not itself result in the grant of a patent, since there is no such thing as an "international patent", and the grant of patent is a prerogative of each national or regional authority."
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 30% spending is from government numbers in the last budget, so let’s get that out of the way.
How many people do you think could conceivably work in manufacturing? And who buys all those manufactured goods? The social problem isn’t solved by quotas.
India's data collection is much worse than China's but we can also look at other metrics like exports. India exports less in total value than a resource-starved, tiny nation like South Korea.
Thus, India could at least add another 100 million manufacturing jobs, along with an additional 100 million service jobs to support manufacturing in logistics, trade, maintenance, customer support, insurance, and food service.
Given the structure of Indian constitution which gives very little power to local governments to raise revenue and build infrastructure, India is structurally limited as of now from ever becoming as developed as China, let alone western countries.
I see India becoming more like Brazil than China. That's not necessarily a bad thing since even Brazil is 4-5x richer in per capita than India.
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.
Their communal system hasn't been relevant since the mid 80s when Deng Xiaoping got inspired by Thatcher and opened up the economy. The name remained, though.
> 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 nothing to do with India's cast system, so this is a straw man that attempts to replace the argument with something you're more ready to defend; however, I was talking about India and it's caste system, not China. China also has extreme issues and their people live under oppression, just like in India and the US.
- As another commenter has noted, modern China is Communist only in name.
- Your analysis of how simple creating new wealth is, or how people only stay poor when a "gun forces them to" makes it painfully obvious that you and I grew up in different wealth classes. It's not that simple to acquire wealth, and poverty is a massive feedback loop. Wealth compounds, and so does poverty. This is the nature of capitalism.
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.
Yes. You implied that the caste system was somehow unique to India. Reality is that every country has its own way of sorting wealth to the most favored.
I did not imply that, you misinterpreted what I said, presumably due to preconceived bias.
> Reality is that every country has its own way of sorting wealth to the most favored.
No shit!
However, when I discuss the issues with wealth distribution here in America, no one goes, "But India has a caste system!"
Yet apparently pointing out issues with India's wealth distribution, I'm met with deflection, blame games and a horde of people patronizingly assuming without cause that I live under a rock and have no grasp of global economics, politics or history.
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...
I grew up in the racist, religious Deep South and believe me when I say these toxic ideals are built into the culture. I was literally raised by a hyper-abusive "Obama is the Anti-Christ" type Catholic deacon who force-fed the Bible down my throat on a daily basis. I wasn't allowed to consume media which went against the teachings of the Church.
I educated myself and didn't participate. I resisted. I have little sympathy for those who cannot do the same in their own lives. It's a choice to adapt toxic culture into your life due to social pressures. We all have the internet now.
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?
That doesn't make it any less arbitrary and ostracizing to those who do not benefit from it. This is the same argument people make in favor of focusing on middle class politics in the US and leaving the poor to kick rocks and die of homelessness, disease or drug addiction. It's an anti-human system rooted in archaic practice and colonial reinforcement.
> 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.
I agree and will go further to point out that the "rags to riches" story of the US is mostly a fairytale propped up by a few exceptions. I grew up impoverished and have seen over and over how it affects the trajectory of my life in ways out of my control. Any remarkable success on my part would be in spite of the American economic system, not because of it.
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.
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.
Actually you can change it, by getting rid of it. No one here thinks reparations are a bad thing. But the ongoing discrimination is unacceptable. Conflating the two does not help.
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.
The caste system has matter-of-fact not been abolished. The only thing that has been "abolished" is discrimination regarding caste.
Yet, we also outlawed slavery and Jim Crow laws in the US and yet my local prison in the Deep South is filled with 90%+ Black people. We outlawed redlining and yet the modern credit score system does an excellent job of continuing the purpose of preventing Black people from getting loans and leveraging their wealth.
All this to say, my understanding is the sentiment and infrastructure are still in place regarding India's caste system.
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
> 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
This is a straw man; The US is a shit show. China has major problems. The topic is wealth distribution in India.
> While it makes sense for Indian nationals to want their government to do better ... outside observers comparing ought to benchmark countries against one another fairly
I am allowed to study and comment on the state of any government I please. Being from the US doesn't change my ability to think critically and again, the topic of my comment is not "a benchmark of all countries fairly", it's a discussion on future wealth distribution in India.
> All countries have social inequality
Sure! Doesn't change a thing.
> If India were to eliminate social inequality it would become superior to most countries on the planet.
Besides the point. No one here is arguing about where India fits into some arbitrary ranking of countries.
> For the rest of us, I think we need to be reasonable in our assessments, especially when the other country under discussion is China.
China has massive wealth distribution issues as well. We all remember the recent bank runs. That doesn't mean India doesn't have its own problems, which I have brought up.
What's funny is how many of them jumped to compare India to the US or China... two very corrupt nations each with their own wealth distribution problems... as if that has any bearing at all on India and its caste system. "Hey, I beat my wife, but so does my neighbor! At least I do it with style!"
All I see is cultural and national biases coming out. I simply did not comment on China's own economic and democratic issues, but everyone assumed I either was ignorant or am playing favorites.
But India has a problem. India is one-third size of the United States or China, and they have 1.4 billion people and growing 2 billion or 2.3 billion is not going to work.
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.
So did India until 1843 (legally) and, like the rest of the world, still has many people in forced labor and human trafficking in essentially slave relationships.
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.
ASML doesn’t prove Europe’s economy isnt stagnant and the lack of European chip fabs does demonstrate an inability to produce its own chips which is a critical failure point.
Every material markers indicate the EU economy is in contraction since about 2007. It's the degrowth boogeyman nobody wants to believe in but everyone will get... Cheap and unlimited fossils are not coming back and without them gdp growth is just a mathematical artifact
What's special about fossil fuel? Is a kilowatt-hour from burning carbon magically able to power an economy better than one from a solar panel, a wind turbine, or a nuclear reactor?
I think you could make that argument (at least structurally) as late as the 2000s when batteries and solar were still un-economical. Today it's very possible to power a modern economy without fossil fuels in almost every sector except long haul trucking, a few industrial processes, and aviation, and those together are a small percentage of overall fossil fuel use. Aviation and trucking are less than 10% of oil use.
Europe doesn't have an energy shortage that's not self-inflicted. Becoming dependent on Russian gas combined with anti-nuclear in Germany probably contribute. German greens are basically an advertising arm of Gazprom. (Just like how America's huge inflation is self-inflicted via dumb tariffs and unnecessary wars. We should pay politicians an extra bonus to do nothing.)
The most likely explanation for Europe's stagnation is a mix of stifling bureaucracy, low birth rates, brain drain (mostly to the US), and policies that are explicitly growth-limiting.
All that is historically true, but most new energy being added to the grid is now renewable. Solar and batteries continue to get cheaper and it's already the cheapest source of new power in sunny places.
I have seen this raised as yet another interesting Fermi paradox idea: maybe our planet is unusual in that it stored up a giant store of easily exploitable energy to bootstrap a technological civilization.
It's impossible to run out of fossil fuels. There are always more places to look. But the cost of extraction may continue to rise if there's not another technical breakthrough on the scale of fracking or horizontal drilling.
This specific point sure, the rest not really. Peetrol is like 50x more energy dense than common batteries for example. Peak sun doesn't coincide with peak demand at all, it's a pain in the ass to store long term, it's unreliable when you need it the most, it's not as easy to transform into fertilizers/plastics/medicine
It's cheaper than nuclear. If one is discussing vs. renewables, then Europe is comparatively poorly situated to exploit those, especially solar.
I think Europe's larger problem is a smothering blanket of taxation and regulation. Good for standard of living in the short term (or at least was), but not good for growth and long term competitiveness.
No, but that's beside the point I was making. Europe can't compete with places that aren't imposing Pigouvian taxes or the equivalent. Even if those are added, in a renewable (which will be mostly solar) powered world Europe will be at a disadvantage relative to places closer to the equator.
Fracked gas in the US is remarkably high in ethane, the base feedstock for polyethylene. There's so much that it's become almost free (there's a maximum concentration of ethane allowed in pipeline gas, so it has to be separated, and the surplus is almost being given away.) Liquefied ethane is shipped internationally, much like LNG, but it's still cheaper to use it locally.
In France at least: amount of freight, sqm of new buildings, industrial production, primary energy consumption, etc, basically all the physical things you can actually measure, etc.
Then you add in "services" and "assets growth" to cook the numbers (don't forget to incldue illegal drug trafficking and illegal prostitutions numbers to jack things up even more even though you have no real data about it), and magically everything in the the green, although pensions are decreasing, retirement age is increasing, social benefits are being cut left and right, but don't worry brother, we're in the green!
I don’t think it’s cooking the books to include economic output from the service sector in GDP. If you did this in the US you’d have a very different growth story as well
15% of the french gdp comes from rent, which basically did +30% over the last 10 years, that alone is ~0.4% of annual growth according to the official numbers... 1/3rd of the "growth" is rental inflation...
What value was added here? None, gdp is meaningless in post industrial countries, it wasn't designed to measure anything other than industrial outputs.
Most GDP numbers look at real growth, not nominal, which would filter out the 30% number you’re talking about. Under those numbers about 1/10 of the growth is rent, not 1/3
But if your core take is “GDP is meaningless in post industrial countries”, then you’re at a level of crank not worth engaging with
If you want to measure all economic activity than one has to include also illegal activity. Whether any activity - legal or not - has any "value" in a non-economic sense is a different question. GDP can certainly be criticized. But it seems you point was mainly that industrial production went to down in Europa since 2007, but I can also not see this.
The main issues Europa has are dependency on Energy imports, an unhealthy but fixable dependency on US IT tech, an ongoing war with Russia, and an aging population. Renewables are are really good idea, immigration would also help a lot, but is politically difficult.
Tankers for oil. Lng ships for gas. And for electricity, that comes in the form of high-energy base products like fertilizer and metal ingots. Aluminum is sometimes called "solid electricity" because while the raw material is extreemly common/cheap the energy needed to smelt it is not.
Uranium is energy-dense enough that it could come by private jet and still be cheap.
The technology was developed in national labs in 1980s and 1990s and licensed to Silicon Valley Group, which was bought by ASML in 2001. But I assume the old patents all expired by now and ASML has many new ones. But I don't think with anything so complex one can really assign this to a single country anyway.
Europe is allied with Taiwan and South Korea, and until recently also with the United States. Those countries can't build new chip factories without European lithography. Do you want everyone to innovate and grow by having each country focus on what they are good at, or do you want everyone to burn trillions reinventing the wheel over and over again solely for their own domestic market?
If every chain of the supply chain for state of the art semiconductors except one has left europe already, it's safe to say it. Or do we have to wait for this one to go too in a couple of years?
that's not even remotely true, just because you haven't heard of companies doesn't mean they don't exist. Though it does make sense because tech in Europe is a lot more focused on B2B than B2C, but the latter should definitely be funded more.
Dunno, honestly, most HN people have an extremely narrow view of what constitutes "tech" (= web commerce and adware) and wouldn't survive 5 minutes in an actual engineering company. Europe is all over the supply chain of just about everything that is hard to make.
it's hard to understand the granparent's statement actually.
It seems to me it would make sense if it were:
it would pack more punch if ASML WAS the only go-to example...
Is that what it's supposed to be? And then, since it isn't the only go-to example it must follow that the example packs little punch.
If it is supposed to be that perhaps the person you are responding to misunderstood and thought it actually meant exactly what it said, which after all was that ASML IS the only go-to example. And thinking what it seemed to be saying was actually what was meant they responded to that.
However I think you and I agree that what was actually meant was a sarcastic observation that hey, ASML is not the only go-to example European company thus this carries a reasonable amount of punch, it was just poorly phrased.
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".
> Schröder also famously called Putin a "true democrat".
I do not get why you're mentioning this as an ironic thing. Dictatorship is the culmination of the democratic process. There are tons of historical examples at hand throughout history, just to name a few: Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Trump etc. they all channeled the democratic power of the masses to increase and consolidate their own power.
Just because it has happened in the past doesn't mean it's good for "the masses".
So yes, it's ironic because "the masses" normally want democracy, but the person you're responding to is conflating two things one which is good for "the masses" and the other one is bad.
It does not need to be 100% Russia operation. Some people did actually want nuclear shutdown (greens), Russia then just needs to help a little (in completely unrelated Mr. Gerhard S. has comfy chair at Rosneft)
The one where you couldn't safely eat anything from the Bavarian woods for a decade.
And that was during years without major droughts.
People are fast to forget.
Nowadays loosing a harvest to a nuclear plume during a drought would be devastating.
Also, even the nuclear plants near the coast are often shut down during the summer.
E.g. France's Gravelines was running only half it's generators due to jellyfish nearly shutting down the cooling system (at least) the second year in a row.
One uncomfortable position being that opinion is a dangerous beast, and what is popular is not necessarily in the best interest of the people who harbor an opinion.
ChatGPT could be wrong, but according to it Germany has had an unusually strong anti-nuclear movement since the 1970s.
German post-WW2 distrust of anything seen as related to war, plus the fact that Germany has large coal reserves and so less need for nuclear than many other countries, are likely to have contributed to the phenomenon.
Considering that nuclear is expensive and in no scenario part of a minimal-cost power system, it was a rational decision. This is also the reason nuclear isn't build anywhere else without government intervention. This should be entirely obvious to anybody looking at the economics. As a physicist, I am not scared of nuclear, but I am also understand numbers... while the nuclear fans here apparently need to resort to conspiracy theories to make sense of the world.
(Edit: Russian influence is German politics is welle stablished though, but in relation to the right-extremist AFD party)
Market price does not necessarily imply cheap to produce, especially in France where EDF was renationalized. And yes, old nuclear is very cheap, but this does not mean it makes sense to build more nuclear.
I always wonder how western population is so brainwashed that you always explain everything using two mutually exclusive ideas:
1. "Russia is insignificant infinitely small nothing. It's economy is less than economy of Texas!"
2. "Putin and russians are controlling all the world. They bought every world leader, everyone from Trump to Xi is controlled by them! Anything bad that happens in the world from USA to Africa is directly staged by Russia!"
There is nothing contradictory about a country that is a relative shithole having a very effective propaganda machine. Russia puts a lot of their resources into foreign propaganda, and it shows. It is still a shithole when it comes to economy and standard of living.
IMHO, democratic countries should do the same. I want pro-Western, democratic, liberal propaganda bots to flood the internet, just like the Russian ones do. But I guess liberal governments are just too good to use the same weapons. It could be their downfall.
> But I guess liberal governments are just too good to use the same weapons. It could be their downfall.
Western governments are spending billions on propaganda. There's so-called "Russian opposition" - a clique that receives millions from western funds such as NED (CIA proxy fund).
If you open YouTube from a freshly created Russian google account, the whole home page will be filled with videos from Radio Liberty, BBC News Russian, DW Russian, Khodorkovsky Live, and other channels. The theme of all these channels is the same: "You must surrender and bow to the great western overlords".
Even though my google account is ~15 years old, I still get such recommendations on my main YouTube page daily.
There was an interview with a former Russian lady that works for Google in London and her job is to pick such videos to push to Russian audience.
> Western governments are spending billions on propaganda.
Perhaps, but my point is that the money could probably be spent more effectively: instead of funding high-brow videos on YouTube to preach to the choir (such longform videos are watched mostly by liberal intellectuals), just flood social networks with propaganda bots to convert the IQ-bottom of society that is increasingly addicted to social media; just like Russia is doing.
We have a saying here: "Russian propaganda is not making idiots from people. Russian propaganda is targeting the idiots." Perhaps western liberal propaganda should more effectively target the idiots, too.
If you'd be able to speak Russian, you'd already know that there's western propaganda for all levels of IQ. From highbrow to lowbrow in all the media you can find. And it's there for decades already.
Also, you can find in the Snowden's documents lots of evidence that there are entire departments in CIA and MI-6 working on this propaganda and ways to deliver it.
And it's quite effective, too. CIA managed to instigate many coups in the world using their propaganda approaches. Arab Spring, Ukraine coup in 2014. In Russia they had almost succeeded, there was (and partially is) large percent of population that believed propaganda despite that we already succumbed once in the recent history (in 1991) and results were absolutely catastrophic.
> And it's quite effective, too. CIA managed to instigate many coups in the world using their propaganda approaches. Arab Spring, Ukraine coup in 2014
Ah, I see you are one of the IQ bottoms that believes the Russian propaganda which is targeting the idiots... Sure, all those hundreds of thousands of people on Euromaidan were there because of some nebulous CIA manipulation, and not simply because they saw the much higher standard of living in the EU and wanted the same for themselves (which Yanukovich the traitor abruptly refused).
> In Russia they had almost succeeded, there was (and partially is) large percent of population that believed propaganda despite that we already succumbed once in the recent history (in 1991) and results were absolutely catastrophic.
Russia changed its whole economic system from Socialism to Capitalism. What did you expect, immediate improvements? Of course there will be a period of chaos. I am from Slovakia. It took my country almost 10 years to regain the previous standard of living after the same drastic change. But then we finished the needed reforms, joined the EU and witnessed massive economic growth. Now we are better than ever. In the end it was all worth it.
What was catastrophic for Russia is electing autocrats and warmongers. No country thrives as a dictatorship, and comparison of standard of living of our two countries shows that. Enjoy your burning refineries.
> Russia changed its whole economic system from Socialism to Capitalism.
No, it didn't. It tried to change from state capitalism (the system the Soviet Union had, not the ideology it presented) to private capitalism but ended up veering off into kleptocratic corporatism.
Can't open it now myself to confirm. Here Alfred Koch states that his daughter worked for Google in 2014 and her job was to pick so-called "opposition" media that would be pushed to users with Russian ip addresses or probably with Google account language set to Russian.
But actually you don't even have to listen to interview. If you're Russian you already know how aggressively this propaganda is shoveled down our throats on YouTube. You have to ban channels for months to minimize the amount of the recommended propaganda videos.
And you still get it because there're like millions of NED funded channels of all sorts in all languages. E.g. in the last three days YouTube aggressively pushes to my recommendations some video in English about how "Russian missiles are all hitting Ukrainian toilets instead of military targets" which is even from the title sounds like some nonsense propaganda for low IQ watchers.
You just need to use a little brain, that’s all, no brainwashing needed.
> "Russia is insignificant infinitely small nothing. It's economy is less than economy of Texas!"
It is insignificant on a large scale war against united West, short of using nukes. At the same time it doesn’t mean they can’t terrorize Europe for decades or slowly chip it bit by bit.
Think of it as a delinquent, poor neighbor constantly throwing shit to your back porch, and alternating between threatening you with a knife and a grenade (nuke). Constantly trying to bride, and recruit citizens of your home for its goals.
> Putin and russians are controlling all the world. They bought every world leader, everyone from Trump to Xi is controlled by them! Anything bad that happens in the world from USA to Africa is directly staged by Russia!
I don’t think anyone in their right mind thinks that Xi is bought by Russia. On the contrary, it is widely believed that modern Russia is China’s vassal.
You have to remember that people on the left side of the political spectrum fancy themselves as the intellectual elite. They've never been wrong about anything, and if in hindsight it appears that way (like shutting down nuclear plants), well, surely that was because of a highly sophisticated brainwashing operation by Russia.
Yeah, that's exactly when all the semiconductor industry left Germany! And why France - the only country that's close to fully nuclear - is the industrial power house of the world. Stay shallow, HN.
> France has 70%+ nuclear energy in the mix, but isn't the economic miracle that nuclear power is supposed to bring.
Cheap energy is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for "economic miracle". France has relatively cheap energy, but it has other problems. It would be worse off without nuclear, though.
Also they are going to save the world by going carbon neutral next decade or so. According to them the world’s carbon emission would be zero as soon as they become carbon neutral and just going back to Germanic tribes days.
> But luckily Germany saved the world by shutting down their power plants for good
No, the big contribution was the large renewable subsidies that kicked off the subsequent rapid descent of their costs by experience effects, experience effects that nuclear never had.
The hard on some people have for nuclear is incomprehensible. It's a shit loser technology. Get over it.
Europe is still going through the hangover from the last night's party - automobile industry, consumer appliances, heavy machinery, democracy, globalism, tourism, single market, EU policies and so on. They are yet to wake up to whatever happened over the past few decades. To be fair, Europe is not a single country or has strong central control like Anerica does.
The US has papered their problems over largely because of its wildly successful service companies. Who knows what that looks like with the increasing utility of LLMs though.
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.
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?
Just like all these initiatives have been failures.
The problems are pretty fundamental issues of how we set up and developed our economies since around the late 80s.
Unfortunately that also means it will take decades to right the ship (and probably at least one more decade until people are even willing to accept that there's fundamental issues), but we still have lots of money, lots of engineers and lots of scientists. We'll get out of this, but it won't be pretty for quite a while in my opinion.
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.
I think it's still /somewhat/ close to feature size - I think the fin pitch of the "N3" tsmc process was about 5nm, which gives a "minimum feature size" of ~2.5nm to ensure the "gap" between them.
I think one of the big differences is that the "Gate Contact Area" simply isn't the smallest "feature" anymore - but the ITRS that defined those names called it "feature size", not "gate size" from the beginning intentionally.
You probably could make a transitor with a gate size of a similar order to the "feature size", it'll just perform awfully to be completely useless.
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.
It is somewhat disappointing that Global Foundries basically stopped participating in the leading edge process node race around the time of the split with AMD. The world is in a rather precarious place with virtually all eggs in the TSMC basket.
[ Intel has yet to prove that it can sustain itself as a foundry for third parties, and until they do, I have a hard time believing the massive culture shift required across the whole company can be achieved without splitting the company up into separate parts. Samsung has fallen behind, but at least they have diversity across a variety of markets including HBM. Neither have leading edge fabs in Europe, so everything continues falls back on TSMC. ]
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.
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.
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
I think there's potentially confusion around timing; the order for this facility would probably have been a year or so ago, so fits with not selling anything in 2026.
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.
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.
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.
Europe needs chip fabs _owned by the state_. Look at what China is doing with immersion lithography. Europe could be doing the same thing, but with state of the art ASML technology, securing both digital sovereignty for hardware and all the downstream technologies that build on it (such as AI).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't you mean Morris Chang/張忠謀? He was the founder. Also, this near-meme level phrase "received zero equity" is meaningless when you are paying senior executives millions per year. They just buy shares with their earnings. He was one of the highest (if not highest) paid executive in Taiwan for more than a decade.
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.
Fun fact in this context: (Dutch) Philips was a major initial investor in TSMC (both in money and IP):
Only Philips was willing to sign a joint venture contract with Taiwan to put up $58 million, transfer its production technology, and license intellectual property in exchange for a 27.6 percent stake in TSMC.
I get its sarcasm but TSMC has done so much to try to get the Americans getting some decent yields in their new factories and it's failing so hard, there's real questions about whether they can ever meet their targets. They've sent thousands of existing Taiwanese workers to help at this point and from anecdotal things I hear it's not going well. (I live in Taiwan)
This stuff is all blood, sweat and tears to get it done, and to be honest a culture.
You can't just buy it off the shelf. If that was possible everyone would have gone paid for it like an Ikea product years ago.
Investment is risky and uncertain. If you did not do anything because it might fail, you would do nothing at all.
The inability to cope with failure is a culture that is common in Europe. Failure is so personally devastating, so destructive to social and cultural standing that not only must you not take risks but other people must be actively prevented from taking risk.
Maybe the US investment doesn't work, but the US will have tried at least. Taiwan is, ironically, the perfect example of where the initial impetus came from the government because there was no culture of risk-taking. Parts of Europe have a savings culture that is very similar to Taiwan and led to very poor growth and very high inequality.
If the US keeps trying, they will succeed. On here, the view was that China could never build out this capacity, they did. The only way to guarantee failure is to never try.
That's part of the culture OP was referencing. Another part is not having ad tech jobs easily available paying 5-10x as much for easier work. A big part of Asian success at hard tech fields is just not having better options.
The amount of supercars and high end vehicles in Hsinchu is unreal. Probably all anyone needs to know here, until you've seen it firsthand you wouldn't understand.
Great point. I read about this a few times. Here is a juicy quote that I found: "Ferrari sales in Taiwan doubled over a four-year period." Yikes! Hello, new money!
> They've got huge monetary losses, if you're ok with that
USA passed the CHIPS Act and is spending close to a trillion dollars to strategically re-home all of TSMC's most advanced fab technology to Arizona as a matter of national security. Monetary losses don't matter when the point is to not be reliant or China in the event of South China Sea conflict.
I think the point of this article, and the warnings from ASML, is that Europe is not making the same effort.
But that's sorta of hits to the heart of my comment, it's not particularly working well. TSMC has 2 fabs in China and yields+costs are a fraction of whats coming out of Arizona, let alone in Hsinchu.
Like are you really going to buy a chip that costs 70% more out of national pride? Might work on some but think that very few else will sign up for that.
70% extra on top of a trillion or two in investment is a relatively small price to pay when faced with the possibility of that being your only option at some point in the future.
I don't want to speak bad about them but it's just general demand for semiconductors at this point, everyone is just buying it all up because they can. The Arizona plant still doesn't seem to be pumping out and the self-sufficiency target for the US doesn't seem all there. Im sorry to be the bearer of bad news but honestly it's a culture that's hard to replicate and its how it somehow gets done in one country on Earth. The 2030 target for the states surely isn't happening, it's way too ambitious.
People really don't understand how this stuff is borderline magic turning silicon into these things. There's so much that can go wrong at every step, it's the most advanced manufacturing process on Earth.
Once upon a time chips went down in value but I don't think that's happening anymore, lot of other people seem aware of that. Not to mention the semiconductor talent is getting eaten up like pancakes everywhere.
Well, we're stuck between a left-wing party and a left-wing party, both of whom, despite what they say, hate economic growth and try to restrict it at every opportunity.
And that's largely because the average Brit has terrible beliefs that actively make them poorer. A shockingly high percentage of people believe that building more houses won't lower costs.
I live in amerifatland. They're building new houses all the time, everywhere I look, entire complexes of them. "McMansions," we call them.
I make average US wages, have my entire adult life. I cannot afford a house in my city unless I buy a literal ruin in the ghetto. The suburbs are far more expensive, and that's where the McMansion complexes are. I don't know who's buying them, but it isn't me and likely never will be.
Do you want a strip club or a dispensary to open up next door to where you live? Or maybe a glue factory down the street? There are reasons zoning laws exist, and it isn’t to regulate growth in the sense you’re implying.
99.9% of the work done in zoning is about restricting housing. And no, you shouldn't be allowed to stop any of those things, you can regulate any negative impacts directly if you like.
For left-wing governments in Britain, building houses is putting yourself out of a job.
Scotland is a good example: every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences so they attempt to build council houses, it is impossible for the government to build enough council houses to make up for multiple decades of underbuilding (this problem has accelerated significantly whilst they have been promising to build housing, had explicit targets, etc.), but at the next election they make the same promises (and people vote for them because there is no alternative).
The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.
The politics of this topic are very strange. The public is still at the stage where they think in vague terms that the problem is a lack of housing.
I believe the problem is worse in Scotland because the growth in council housing in the 60/70s was organised in order to create this permanent bloc vote. The same has happened in London where you have whole constituencies where 70% of the effective vote is void.
> every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences
This doesn’t add up. Promising to get more housing built is getting these people elected, but they can’t make good on this promise because then they will lose their election?
> The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.
That's a conspiracy theory and a half!
A lot of the new student accommodation being built is privately owned. They're chasing the (pre-Brexit/pandemic) overheating market for student accommodation that resulted from the universities targeting international students for the inflated tuition fees they can charge, and in some cases have features explicitly advertised to international students as positives (e.g. some of the ones in Nottingham have built in rice cookers as standard).
However, some of the properties are at risk of becoming unviable (i.e., lying empty or having to be turned over to housing non students [0]) because of a combination of Brexit and tightened immigration rules reducing international student numbers.
If they're being built as some kind of social engineering it would be a really convoluted way of going about it.
> 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.
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.
Europe, like the US, is rich because it outsources lower-value production and focuses on higher value targets.
Chip production is not nearly as high in value as all the things you can build with those chips.
Local production is about supply chain security, not profit. Europe doesn’t mind one bit paying for chips produced somewhere else, but it does mind a world order where global trade is unreliable.
If we did mind a world were global trade was unreliable we have a military to match that concern, but we don't. The Houthi close the red sea for years and we can't do anything about it. Iran, attacked by the US, retaliates against us by closing the strait of Hormutz and we sit in the monitoring chair.
Don’t buy too much into the propaganda. Back when the US was a reliable partner that still understood how much it was gaining from global trade, it would have been idiotic to focus on building European military capability.
The thing that seems to have changed is that both the US and Russia are determined to destroy their own future.
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?
Europe has been anti-innovation for a long time, completely missing the tech wave in the 2000s. I was hopeful that Europe would learn from its past mistakes, but now it is also completely missing the AI wave and falling behind.
The politics are bad, way too user-centric (see Arthur Mensch complaining about AI regulation), and the European mentality does not help. The social safety net is strong, which is good, but perhaps too generous given the state of the economy. Without sufficient economic growth, it becomes unsustainable, leading to a lower and lower quality of social benefits.
People complain, rightly so, that things were better before, but nobody does anything or even seems to understand that innovation and economic growth are what fuel everything.
I am very bearish on the state of Europe, which, as a European, makes me sad.
It's just the takeover of the continent by an ossified bureaucratic class. Their opinions and actions do not represent the European people's but quite the opposite of it.
Fair point, ASML is a linchpin in the global economy, and very much a European company. But Europe has a population larger than USA, shouldn't they at least be close to us in leading edge companies? They invented the Industrial Revolution.
You sound like someone who is enjoying the retirement benefits and full social safety net. One which does not have the funding to continue on for the youth of today. You have a certain smugness about your current situation but maybe you should look at how things are actually coming along today for young people staring down the barrel of higher inflation and lower wages.
> An economy is there for the people. If that larger number of people have a higher quality of life than in the US, aren't they wealthier?
It's a little unclear how it shakes out there.
I've met a number of young western Europeans while traveling there who are jealous of the ability of Americans to afford cross-ocean/different-continent multi-week trips to tier-1-hotel-cost cities, while feeling like it's more out of reach to them to find a job that would let them. (Phrasing edited here because, as a reply pointed out, "international" travel in Europe is easy and common due to proximity.)
On the flip side, those people also enjoy having much more time off. But hey, at least American isn't as 996'd as China yet?
There's no single linear "better" scale.
(There are, of course, many Americans without the means to travel to Europe or Asia themselves, who could give two shits about an "innovative" company being based in the US vs anywhere else since it doesn't seem to be helping them personally, but the overall mobility is still higher for now. But that's more due to the age of the country than anything else. History suggests that as low-hanging-fruit continues to close the US will also get more and more of that social stagnation too. It's easier to become upper class when you go to a place without an upper class yet.)
> I've met a number of young western Europeans while traveling there who are jealous of the ability of Americans to afford cross-ocean/different-continent multi-week trips to tier-1-hotel-cost cities, while feeling like it's more out of reach to them to find a job that would let them.
Anecdotally, I think it’s out of reach for many young Americans in my cohort (26) but we’re insulated from that in tech
> I've met a number of young western Europeans while traveling there who are jealous of the ability of Americans to afford that travel, while feeling like it's more out of reach to them to find a job that would let them.
The statistics tell a story different from those anecdotes: young Europeans are considerably more internationally traveled than young Americans, probably by something approaching a factor of ~2 in the likelihood of crossing national borders in a given year. But they're not necessarily twice as geographically well-traveled. Much of the difference is due to Europe's small countries, open borders, dense transportation network, and cheap short-haul international travel.
Look up what percentage of Americans between 25 - 34 have never traveled outside their own country, vs. Europeans in western or Northern European countries.
I had this exact conversation with a barber on the UPC campus in Barcelona in 2005 (if my memory is right). My reply to his assertion was to ask if he ever considered how large US states are compared to EU countries. People do travel within the USA alone and with their families all the time. Just this week mine crossed three states for a beach vacation and the returned home. International travel is not unheard of but not the same distance scale. If I recall he said something like he had not thought of it that way. I do not recall if we were talking in Spanish or English anymore after 21 years.
> The statistics tell a story different from those anecdotes: young Europeans are considerably more internationally traveled than young Americans, probably by something approaching a factor of ~2 in the likelihood of crossing national borders in a given year. But they're not necessarily twice as geographically well-traveled. Much of the difference is due to Europe's small countries, open borders, dense transportation network, and cheap short-haul international travel.
Means and using those means for any given particular end are entirely different things. It's hardly surprising that Americans are generally insular and uninterested in non-American things. (This is not a good thing IMO. But it's a thing.)
But more importantly, like you say, "interntional travel" in Europe includes, say, "going to the UK from France" vs the overseas 5-to-10hr+ flights that are required to cross the Atlantic to have these conversations in my anecdotes.
That's my bad for saying "international" instead of "cross-ocean" or such. So let me clarify that the jealousy here is being able to pay for flights and hotels to spend 2+ weeks across an ocean in cities with $100-or-equiv-per-night-to-$300+-per-night hotel costs. They didn't think they'd ever be able to afford a similar trip to SF or NY.
---
The non-anecodotal version of this story would likely be the rise in social-acceptance and popularity of the more right-wing parties in Europe. A lot of people, younger especially, feel like they're getting left behind and aren't interested in mostly-older or born-into-more-money people's generic remarks about how it's still great overall for them.
K-shaped economies + "stay in your lane" are how you get Trumps :(
Well, those Europeans are only encountering the Americans who can afford to travel. There are millions of Americans who have never even left their own state. Tens of millions more who have never left the US.
It's true that most of us in Europe get more time off but we don't really get more to spend on expensive holidays. We don't have the culture of spending thousands upon thousands on holidays. Most of us think it's crazy to spend that much on travel and do it much more frugally which means we get more but at a lower level of luxury.
while there are a lot of people in the US who also can't afford to leave the continent, even if we assume what you say is true (it isn't), I'd still prefer having the time
Missing out on every Revolution after the Industrial Revolution isn't a recipe for long-term success. I think you might be missing the point of the article.
It appears to me that in most of Europe there is an unspoken bargain: society provides you with a reasonably comfortable and secure life where your basic needs are guaranteed at least to some level, and in exchange you are supposed to stay in your lane, make sure your ambitions match and follow one of the approved tracks, and leave things like starting businesses to a hidden aristocracy with family money, who for their part generally accept higher demands on their contributions and avoid "vulgar" displays of their wealth in exchange.
I'm not trying to be inflammatory but just thought it was kind of funny that one could say the same about your own comment but just swap the placement of the words Europe and American. I think unless someone pulls up actual stats on quality of life and all that just saying what people feel is kind of meaningless.
> one could say the same about your own comment but just swap the placement of the words Europe and American
Maybe. I have citizenship in Switzerland and America. I aim politically active in both. That doesn’t give me authority—but it does afford me perspective.
And no. Europe is poorer than America. Comparable measures show the effect one would expect.
> unless someone pulls up actual stats on quality of life
These exist. Individual numbers slope as one would expect.
If you’re poor, Europe is better. If you’re middle class, it’s debatably, but probably Europe. If you’re rich, by which I mean you make a few hundred thousand a year or more, America. Obviously.
This depends entirely on which USA state is being compared. Many USA states have healthcare, education, and social safety nets that rival or exceed typical European benefits. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Vermont, for example.
This may be a better way to slice it. If you’re in New York, regardless of income, you have a higher standard of living than someone comparable in the EU. If you’re in Missouri, a median European lives a better life than you do.
> If you’re poor, Europe is better. If you’re middle class, it’s debatably, but probably Europe. If you’re rich, by which I mean you make a few hundred thousand a year or more, America. Obviously.
This is what most Quality of Life America/Europe arguments on Hacker News boil down to. Overrepresentation of rich people. America has more upward redistribution of wealth. Ergo America is better.
The reason Europe can do that today is because of decades of being an industrial leader in the past. But Europe will not be able to do it tomorrow unless it continues to be an industrial power today.
Anyone can take time off work and go on vacation. That is certainly more enjoyable. But it's not an economic plan for high living standards in the future.
Europe is going to have a difficult winter. You are going to see announcements of government benefit cuts, higher costs, and this will continue up until the "high standard of living" in Europe catches up with the realities of economic output.
The American intelligence community choose to jumpstart the Surveillance Industrial Revolution which is what has enabled companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook to dominate.
ASML is not the norm in Europe. It is the exception.
The top ten companies by revenue, worldwide, features zero European companies.
We in Europe cheer our meddling technocratic leadership while sneering at American risk taking and innovation. We have a fundamental cultural malaise, and those of my friends who feel the same as me have simply left Europe for a better life in the US or other dynamic economies.
At this point I feel like a stick in the mud for staying here, and quite honestly, I worry for my children's future here.
> The top ten companies by revenue, worldwide, features zero European companies.
This completely ignores Mittelstand in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. And for the record, Japan has zero corporations by revenue in the top ten, but has top five largest GDP globally. So, a failure? Or a poor metric?
It isn't a full picture, but still a very good proxy. The decline of Europe in global economy is unquestionable.
There were 17 European companies in the top 50 in 2006, 13 in 2016, 10 in 2026. Most of the remaining companies are automotive and energy (oil). None is tech. ASML isn't even in the top 100 in Europe.
Japan is the same story. There are 7 companies in the top 50 in 2006. The only remaining one in 2026 is Toyota. None is tech.
China's share has increased from 2 companies in 2006 to 12 in 2006.
In other words, China's progress and the importance of tech, along with the decline of automobile and energy accurately reflect how the global economy has changed.
(Side question: how much AI does my comment sound?)
Source: you can find plenty. Start with Fortune 500
I will summarise your answer: China GDP grew 7.5 times from 2006 to 2026. If India does the same in the next 20 years, there will be hardly any top 50 companies outside of US, China, and India. Still, it doesn't say much.
The nominal GDP per capita of the United States is about $86,000, while China's is about $13,400. Even if China has a bunch of companies in the top 50, it is still many many many many times better to live in the US, economically speaking. Even if you switch to PPP, China will roughly double to $25,000. Still, the US is way ahead.
This is expected though, right? Even in Europe, unless you're a verysmall country, most business you deal with is domestic. Do by default, the largest companies mare going to be in the largest economies. Doesn't mean you can't get lucky every now and again, but you are handicapped by not having a large domestic consumption base protected via political independence.
China and the US are continent-scale megastates. Obviously a mid-sized Atlantic island like the UK, or smallish peninsula like Italy, are not going to compete on scale.
No, if you lived long enough to remember the 90s and 2000s then you would have remembered that the European Union experiment was one that was supposed to be formidable and address the very thing that you are saying is a problem. Americans literally thought we were going to have to compete with Europeans in enterprise and innovation. Instead, the threat of European Union doing anything interesting was undeserved. China clearly deserves the recognition of being a the competitor we desperately need to keep going and make progress towards a more advanced species
It would be very hard for a country to force it's most ambitious to not leave if there are other places eagerly recruiting them.
But when such a pull exists, it's very hard to counter that. Consider the number of non-SV places in the US that have tried to replicate that environment and basically failed. Even the famously "business friendly" places like Texas or Georgia that are success stories for poaching tech companies or film production largely work by having companies move there once they've left the high-growth phase and are no longer chasing strictly the most ambitious would-be-best-and-brightest talent.
The success stories there (that aren't just resource-extraction) have come from significant protectionism, essentially forcing a country to build its own version of the mega-companies even if it's a money-loser with copycats building shoddy copies for decades at first.
There's no easy way for Europe to magically change that with "culture." There's too many already-established mega-talent-bases in other places to think you can have people just pass up on that in a fully-global-market situation.
I would ask instead: why let those foreign mega-corps be so integral to so many basic services of modern life?
Perhaps not just Europe, but the entire world, would be better off if we had fewer monoliths and more variations, with more flexibility for local markets to develop different solutions or in different directions.
Because eventually there will be an asteroid or nearby supernova that will destroy civilization unless humanity’s total wealth and technology have improved vastly between now and then. Stasis is death.
I don't find it likely that my kids or grandkids will have better odds of avoiding asteroid or supernova death by working to death to try to become interplanetary ASAP.
I think doing so would introduce far more risks to them. Space ain't friendly.
Beyond that I find it hard to care to drive anyone to work their ass off today for whatever humans are around 100+ years in the future. And, of course, more technological development brings more chance of mass self-inflicted die-off of humanity anyway. In 1900 it would've been much harder to kill 10%, 20%, 50%, 90% of the global population than it is today.
Everything is death eventually. And predicting the future is hard.
> working to death to try to become interplanetary ASAP
That’s not what I’m advocating. I’m not even proposing a global prioritization of goals. What I’m advocating is simply to not attempt to slow or halt the progress of technology.
I find it more likely we nuke ourselves with this ratrace to the bottom, than having to worry about supernovas. And what's more I don't buy into this kind of megalomaniac self-serving narrative, that smells of an easy way of enforcing one's broken ideals over others. Happening with AI a lot lately.
It is of course possible that we nuke ourselves. If we choose to. Or we could choose to use the same technology to massively increase our energy production. The more certain thing is that, if we do nothing, eventually something kills us.
Over the course of decades unemployment is generally just fine, so other than "what if AI breaks the economy" there's very little reason for it to be in the top worries. It's a priority but not a worry.
And ASML wouldn't be possible without US taxpayer funded research. ASML's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology utilized foundational research from the U.S. Department of Energy.
> In 1997, ASML began studying a shift to using extreme ultraviolet.[7] Two years later, it joined a consortium, which included Intel and two other U.S. chipmakers, in order to exploit fundamental research conducted by the US Department of Energy. Because the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) it operates under is funded by the US government, licensing must be approved by Congress.[14] Furthermore, in return for being permitted to join this consortium, ASML committed to the establishment of a US-based research center and to source 55 percent of components for all machines sold in the US from American suppliers.[7] ASML collaborated with various manufacturers to obtain mirrors, including the Belgian firms IMEC and Sematech as well as Germany's Carl Zeiss.[14][15]
The same is true for several US companies - not doable without published research funded by the EU (or other countries in Europe outside the EU). We all freely share our publicly funded research, and whoever wants to use it for commercial success can try. That's how it works.
That includes the majority of the big tech companies, and why the US tends to throw money on importing expertise for these companies (for example AI frontier labs).
The logic is backwards. The research was already there, so ASML licensed it.
If the research wasn't there they would have developed it, and/or find another way to make it work using a somewhat different tech. This is but one of the dozen large technical issues that needed to be solved en route to EUV.
To state the obvious: Because Europe isn't adding any new fab capacity. That is crazy in the 21st century. They should be helping TSMC and Samsung build new fabs in Europe. What happened to the plan by Intel to build a modern fab in Europe?
I do not live in Europe, but I have a lot of friends living there, mostly in Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. We recently met in Croatia, and after a few beers this topic came up. We came to the conclusion that the following crises caused Europe to start lagging behind the rest of the world:
- 2008 financial crisis. Somehow, the U.S. was able to spend its way out of the crisis, while Europe's strict austerity measures made things quite bad. That was followed by the 2010-2012 debt crisis, the 2013 Cyprus banking crisis, and another Greek debt and banking crisis in 2015.
- COVID: Most European countries, at least those with strong economies, had very strict restrictions and closures. The restrictions were as strict as they were in California. They did not really have any Texas or Florida style "rebellion" states. Sweden was the main exception. But borders and travel restrictions still existed.
- Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Europe was much more economically integrated with and dependent on Russia (especially for energy), than the U.S. or many other parts of the world.
So basically, the world has gone through three major crises in the last 15-20 years, and in each case the U.S. was either less directly affected or somehow managed the economic consequences better than Europe.
Your group started the history way too late. The 1990s is when the first big computer wave happened and Europe mostly missed on it. And then it could have had its own Google, Facebook, and Uber, but then it missed that too. This is before you start your history in 2008.
There is definitely much more happening than what american media tells us. When I visit family in Germany they are all doing pretty well. There are problems with expensive housing but that seems to be a worldwide problem.
But there definitely seems to be a lack of ambition in business and technology. For example, the car companies seem to be more coasting on past successes vs pushing things forward. Europe is also not trying much to compete in AI.
When I visit the US everything strikes me as overbuilt to the point of being dull or in the case of vehicles, downright dangerous. The dullness part, especially, is a real pain. Cheap concrete sidewalks. Cheap looking infrastructure everywhere, etc.
There are few places I've seen that seemed as dull or boring when walking through them as the LA metro area, for example. Yes, there are also awesome looking neighborhoods, but damn, I didn't actually realize those concrete brick 1 floor no sloped roof buildings were truly universal as were those very ugly vacant lots with wire fences.
I imagine most LA residents are just used to them plus they only drive by them.
I was there a couple months ago and all the cities I visited felt very poor. The buildings were depressing and drab, the trains were frequently delayed, the food was probably the worst I had anywhere in Europe.
I had 2 hour transfer in Frankfurt am Mein, so I wanted to do something that is Germany is know for, so I decided to get a nice doenner kebab (it was good :))
(Btw. Last week I was in Istanbul; maybe unlucky, but I did not like kebab in Turkey, ingredients were somehow strange)
I had the same experience. I was very excited to try a Doner in Istanbul, because one of my favorite restaurants in Seattle was a Doner place (The Berliner). They didn't seem to know what I meant. I got something they insisted was a Doner, but not really the same sort of thing.
Not sure if the Seattle place is really Americanized or I need to save up and try one in Germany.
Plenty of great Turkish food btw, but obviously Doner's are not really a local thing.
SV in 1990s was effect of 60-70 years of hardcore government funding that was not only not stopped, but amplified by WW2 whereas Europe was heavily wrecked by it (UK finally stopped wartime rationing of food in 1954!). In comparison, in 1945 USA was trying to redirect wartime production surplus into other sinks to give "soft landing" to industry and invented new approaches to discriminate women from workforce to create openings for returning soldiers.
Could something be done starting with 1990? Probably, though the much fragmented by natural borders (if not regulatory) markets with resulting less cash-flush companies had issues fighting against US competition being able to underprice them with politicians ensuring there were no barriers for american companies "or else".
Some of it was at worst mostly local (if with American "advisors"), like in Poland - we started technically from same position as Taiwan when it came to semiconductor manufacturing, but instead of investing "shock therapy" destroyed it. At the same time... can you mention a taiwan major business that is not TSMC, or part of semiconductor manufacturing chain? Without thinking too long or googling?
They had two world wars and devastated cities to rebuild. They also had the very real threat of further escalation with the raging Cold War. Meanwhile, the US had no real threat of further violence. Most of those with the adventurous spirit found their way to the US to continue the westward expansion and seems to be Europe's biggest export.
Maybe not. As always, I think it's more complex: It certainly used a lot of funding, not just from and for Germany that wasn't available then for other things; at the same time there was not much defense spending (to go back to the origins of SV) either, there was also a lot of socio-politcal change binding change capacity, and in parts there has been a certain distrust/dislike of information technology in countries like Germany.
The damage from WW2 to Europe was not limited to bombing and killing, it includes the economic harm inflicted on Eastern Europe in the decades afterwards by the Soviets.
Then as somebody who predicted Claude Code and the current state of AI in 2023 January, you must trust me, that Krugman is right.
Or rather, you shouldn't appeal to authority.
The discussion here is a mess. This specific article about ASML is more about outlook, than Krugman's, which is about the current state. This will be a problem in the future. Currently, Europe's quality of life is at least on par, or probably even better in some parts of Europe, but these are signs that this won't last.
If the current positive sum game is eroding more, then there are two options. Embracing the feudal times as in America, or keep pretending. In the short and mid term, the former is better. However, in the long term, if you pretend for the following decades, then you will win. Unfortunately, there is only a slim chance that you will be able to, but all of those countries will win in the end.
For not the 1%, feudal logic is obviously not good at all, but they are still voting for them. Even in Europe. Those European countries which stay democracies will win.
I don't know economics well enough to judge his ideas, but I know his track record well enough to be suspecious of his judgement in his arguments about the economy.
I'm not a particularly big believer in infinite growth, so I'm not really concerned. But, I have noticed that many people both complain that nothing is being built, but also NIMBY. Could be the goomba fallacy...
The difference is almost no American in HN will defend the crazy tariffs. But Europeans I have seen will go to the mat every single time explaining why Germany's economy growing a total of 7% for the 10 years between 2015-2025 isn't a problem actually. US grew almost 27% in the same time period.
This is only what I have noticed as someone from a continent that is not North American or Europe. The Europeans don't seem to see a problem with their stagnation.
You can't really compare the economy of countries on two different contintents just based off of a single macroeconomic metric and expect to capture anything. It's way more complicated than that
I think you can. You can completely distill it down to the simple reality that one is growing on the other is not. There's no clever nuance that handwaves that fundamental fact away.
The guillotine is probably the only time I physically cringe as it gets romanticized due to people only remembering the 1st part:off with the king's head and not the countless innocent people beheaded equally due to one man's paranoia which was his own downfall and he too was guillotine'd.
If anything it should symbolize the cautionary tale of the how to have the power to exact punishment can and will come back to you.
I would characterize it a bit differently. It seems like there’s a combination of not understanding what drives prosperity, and consciously rejecting the tradeoffs of prospering. Namely, insisting on lots of government regulation and social programs.
Which country? It's a pretty mixed bag across the continent (though you could say the same about US states). From my POV it's fine, preferable to the US even (much as I would likely make more there). Most of the supposed problems are heavily exaggerated, especially with regard to the EU's rules and regulations.
From a Canadian perspective, the US looks like it's trying to destroy itself, not just lose. But yet people in the US seem far more interested in shitting on other countries than fixing their own shit.
I’ll assume your question is genuine and benevolent and not like my social media feed full of Europe vs USA ragebait.
I believe these economies and cultures are optimized for different things. And also I’d be precise about the country as well, since UK, Norway and Italy are also optimized for different targets. More accidentally then a cunning plan around it to be honest.
Americans as a culture are more risk takers. This is normally a good thing for entrepreneurship. They are also rather tax friendly. Which is great for capital intensive businesses like the unicorns you are asking why we see less of this in Europe. Take Norway, come here with a ton of cash and make a anthropic competitor, and you are probably a fool. Taxes alone will punish such huge capital. Less so in UK though.
But what you hear less about is the huge amount of medium companies around Europe. They have their small niche in pharma, manufacturing etc. They are often highly trusted. Often highly profitable. Often keep their people longer with lower tendencies of burnout.
But would often be seen as a failure by US vcs, as they perhaps lack a giant market to grow further into. This can lead to a lower stock price then price per earning would suggest.
Nor to say that those companies don’t exist in the US. I’m just saying the entire economy is not just lifted by companies like alibaba and google.
I’m also curious sometimes how Americans kept their risk appetite so high through nearly a century. Japan went a similar lane until the 90s crash, where after they became a lot more risk averse.
Part of my speculation here is that the US could borrow their way out of the crisis in their own currencies.
Right and there are also quite a few industries where Europe is way ahead of the US, to name a few:
- Railways and signalling equipment
- Container shipping
- Reinsurance
- Industrial machinery
- Wind turbine technology
- Luxury goods, luxury fashion and fast fashion
- Tourism
A big difference is that in Europe most companies are not big conglomerates. Yes everyone has heard of Siemens. But then you have tonnes of companies like WALDNER, based in a small German town with revenues of €350m, they make packaging equipment that can fill 100,000 yogurt pots per hour. Oh and they are a private company.
> What a weird one to pick. Do you think the US doesn't have massive ports like Europe?
The US has ports. But they don't build civilian ships, and they don't really own ships either. The vast majority of American ocean-going shipping is floated on ships owned by Europeans and built by East Asians
Neither the US nor Europe builds ships, they are almost all built in East Asia. China, South Korea, and Japan collectively build virtually all ships.
But of course anyone can buy and operate ships. Europe still has large shipping companies, although they are losing marketshare to Asia now, whereas the US has never been a dominant player in this area.
The US does operate some massive logistics companies that are a bit higher in the stack.
That's why it's so crazy to see Europe sabotage its shipping industry by seizing Russian ships and banning so many oil transports. That is going to result in Russia seizing European ships and the asian shipping carriers taking even more market share.
And from a purely European perspective it looks like the US is trying to do the same. We just don't have the full picture of either side.
Europe did not push enough in the software market, which is where the US is definitely on top. There's tons of specialized engineering companies in Europe that manufacture equipment that can't be done anywhere else. Less public coverage because it's not consumer facing, but ASML is just one example of it (who are well known publicly of course). There are obvious factors right now (e.g. war in Ukraine) that put a strain on public spending, but that's also the case for the US, and before that covid, and honestly when's the last time this has not been the case for everyone. Though the EU currently also needs to first scramble to reduce it's dependencies (especially in energy).
Hype. And I don’t mean this pejoratively although it has negative consequences — the US does hype better than anyone. The challenge for the US is that people can exploit hype to the point that its effect gets diminished (eg Tesla) which might have long term consequences for the sustainability of the hype machine
Nothing. Europeans can be divided into two groups. Skilled people working nice jobs. These people already have enough and are satisied with their lot. Then you have the people that are struggling. These are generally not the kind of voter that would support effective government policies and instead mostly gravitate towards pro-welfare and anti-immigration parties.
Something that distinguishes Europeans from Americans is the general level of economic security here. This is generally good for the mental and physical health of everyone involved, but it does mean that there's no hustling or grindset among the educated classes here.
I knew two engineers, one in the US, one in europe.
The one in the US worked at a chip company and they had gotten a chip back and it worked without any respin.
The one in europe was working with GPS stuff and with a european chip that was on spin 400+. (it's been a while so I don't have more info, but I think maybe it was government subsidized?)
I couldn't help but think something was seriously wrong with european engineering.
I knew 2 engineers too. One worked in the UK for ARM and one worked for Intel. At that time, Intel were doing IA64 and ARM weren't that popular. Can't help but think something is wrong with USA engineering.
Yeah but the quantum computing "industry" in the US is exactly the same thing.
The US goverment continues puking out cash to prop up this clusterfuck. The EU governments stopped puking cash for it, which is why all the EU quantum companies moved to the US.
Quantum computing has basically zero credible commercial demand.
Timelines for anything useful are perpetually 15 years out. Even the QC boosters refuse to commit to a timeline for Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computing. But they sure love scaring everybody with it as a boogeyman.
The first rule of government spending, why build one when you can build two at twice the price? Sounds like the project's goal wasn't to build a successful thing, but to bilk the government for as much funding for as long as possible.
Have you ever been to Europe?? Things they are building: proper trains; proper roads; proper particle accelerators; proper airliners; proper bread; proper cars; the AI that the USA thinks is so amazing; ARM CPUs; ...
And speaking of "a less prosperous society" -- have you been to most of the USA recently? Doesn't look very prosperous to me vs most of Europe.
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.
The EU is not a single country. It feels like a lot of Americans at the moment think of the EU as a single homogeneous entity that they often also just confusingly refer to as “Europe”.
Even the EU is a lot of different countries. Some of them quite poor, and some of them wealthier also with high GDP per capita.
GDP per capita does also not give you the whole picture. It is a number. Other numbers are median life expectancy, shootings per capita, PPI, median income, average vacation days, average distance to nearest high-speed rail station, physicians per capita, average number of pupils in a school class. Unemployment rate. Air quality.
GDP per capita is one indicator among many that says something about the country’s or region’s inhabitants, but in itself it is just a measure of how much money is being moved around annually. And it is potentially quite misleading. You could have a high GDP per capita and a poor population, if all the money went to large cooperations and billionaires.
I am not saying that everything is rosy in the EU, but just that there are also other important indicators and that it is a lot more complicated than just looking at GDP per capita across the entire EU.
Not sure if you still conflate "poor" with "GDP/capita". If you do, that is an incorrect statement. Mississippi's GDP/capita is lower than many EU members' (e.g. Luxembourg, Ireland, Denmark... ). If you look at purchasing power parity (PPP) it also becomes a lot more muddy.
And that is not counting the substantial safety net that your average European has. I would MUCH rather live in Belgium than Mississippi, and I say this as an American.
Not GP, but: Belgium and Louisiana. And I’d pick Belgium again in a heartbeat, even if you removed all of the non-political (e.g. climate) differences.
Yet there are many places in Europe I would rather live in than Mississippi. That’s America in hard mode.
The best thing about living in Mississippi is that you have absolute freedom to move to another State where the benefits of living in the US are much easier to realize.
My point was that many of the oft-argued benefits of living in the US are relatively difficult to access in Mississippi. But if one finds themselves in that position it is relatively easy to improve their lot even if they are poor and don’t work in tech.
Been there, done that, and know many others that have.
The “freedom of movement” in the EU is considerably more difficult and limited in practice than what exists in the US.
40-50% of US citizens live in a different State than the one they are native to. 4-5% of EU citizens live in a different country than the one they are native to. That is a very large disparity.
An economy is there for the people. The people in Europe seem to have a higher quality of life than those on the other side of the Atlantic, don't you think?
Outside a handful of places, the standard of living is unambiguously higher in the US. Average Americans have insane incomes (~45% of US households earn >$100,000) and can afford many things the average European cannot. Many types of lifestyle spending Americans think of as “normal” is definitely not normal in Europe.
Quality of life has few objective measures beyond standard of living. One man’s “quality of life” is another man’s oppressive conformity and risk averseness. American culture places an enormous value on self-actualization and trades comfort and certainty to get it. Average Europeans demonstrably would not make this trade in many cases. Neither is objectively correct.
I think Europe may have had a comparable or better quality of life at one time allowing for the cultural differences. As someone who has spent a lot of time on both sides of the Atlantic, I don’t think that has been true for well over a decade. The slow impoverishment of Europe has become noticeable to American eyes in a way it wasn’t before.
I obviously said that in jest, an air conditioner is not expensive nor is it that expensive to run if you keep the set temperature within reason. The question itself is disingenuous. There is no one thing, because whatever the thing, there is a cheap knockoff available. It’s the quality of all things.
A cheap Android phone can do all the things an iPhone can, but the experience is worse. How do you quantify that?
I would urge Europeans to visit the US and stay at an AirBNB outside of a city to see how people live. I’ve done the same in reverse. Could I have a similar lifestyle to what I have in the US? Yes. But only with my American salary. This is the point that is being made here. There is nothing that Europe lacks. The problem is the numbers and what is available to the median household.
A bigger house, a bigger car, a second car, a second home, more eating out, more vacations abroad, more charity spend, I can go on, but I think you get the idea. You can try to write this off as cultural differences, but if we're being honest, that's just cope.
The idea that economic growth is irrelevant is nonsense.
I, for example, haven't owned a car in decades, no need or interest.
Size of homes, yes, certainly different, but population density is also different. In super expensive places in Europe you'd pay more for less compared to the US (London comes to mind).
Charity spent - social model is different.
Agree that economic growth matters, though, but I would rather look at less cultural, political or physically linked indicators (e.g., cancer survival rates).
> The people in Europe seem to have a higher quality of life
Absolutely not, most places in Europe outside of a few rich countries like Switzerland and Liechtenstein and maybe a few flagship cities seem very low-QoL compared to similarly sized population centers in the US.
I think this may be partially about perception. I have been to the US over ten times. The first time I went to the US as a teenager, I was surprised how poor the US looks outside rich neighborhoods. Crumbling infrastructure, 80 year olds still working at supermarkets because they couldn't afford a living, many overweight people, most of the food sold in supermarkets is over-processed junk, and it is a car hellhole (can't walk or cycle to many places). I have also travelled most of Europe and with a few exceptions, European cities/villages look greener, more walkable, the people look healthier, people retire timely, etc.
There is also really weird segregation, like neighborhoods where only African-American people live. We once walked into a large restaurant and people looked at us in shock. There were only black people in the restaurant and by the shock on their faces, a family of white people walking in must have been rare occurrence. They were super kind, but it also was very weird.
How many years ago was this? Because over the past 20 years things have gotten better
Last time was 15 years ago, though family has been as recent as a few years ago and havent's seen a much of a change change. Also, in many ways, the last 20 years is quite a bad example to pick, since wealth of everyone under the 90th percentile was the same in ~2017-2018 as in ~2007:
Food quality used to be better in Europe but that's flipped, except France which still has some things better (eg French dairy is still better than US dairy)
Average (and probably 10th percentile) retiree is much richer in US. Yes we have higher variance but the mean is much higher too
Europe also has racial ghettos, it's just different groups
I mean the best way to measure QOL is to see which countries people want to migrate to. The hurdle to do so is high for most people, so they pay a significant cost to get their preference.
If you adjust for population size and limit just to high income countries, the US comes out on top.
> Is that why they're electing far-right parties at an unprecedented rate?
According to a recent Guardian article, the reasons are immigration and the far-right's ability to masterfully tell a story how things were better in the idealized past.
Sorry, but you are just talking out of your, well whatever. E.g. in The Netherlands we have mostly had right-leaning or right-wing governments in the last few decades [1] and still right-wing populists are very popular. It's more that xenophobia is a disease that spreads very easily over and over again. Combine this with refuge crises, partially caused by the US (e.g. the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and knock-on effects), partially caused by proximity to a lot of countries with continuous instability (the middle east, North Africa). Finally, add some Russian disinformation campaigns on top and this is what you get.
Many Europeans are better off than a few decades ago. Heck, many European countries were still under authoritarian rule until a few decades ago (East Europe, Spain, Greece, etc.).
"Dammit why don't the voters realize how much better their lives are!!! Must be xenophobia then"
I get that people always want a simple answer and vilifying your political opponents feeds the ego.
Clearly Europeans don't feel like things are better than a few decades ago. Any politicians who ignores that or blames something like xenophobia has blinders on.
Germany, not even comparable lol.
Affordable healthcare, clean living spaces, decent wages for the majority of people. Also, Mississippi has the highest gun death rate in the US.. Not sure how much feeling safe should factor into QoL for you but that's a pretty significant one in my book
I have lived in Germany for five years and your parent poster is right. Scandinavian countries and The Netherlands are generally better. But Germany is a great country to live in with high living standards.
My country has lots of successful companies, subsidies for startups and funding available. Second highest by some metrics in terms of innovation in the world.
Truth is though none of it matters if the planet goes up in flames.
I am European, and I share this sentiment. I also think that's it's not only about preventing advancements, but also trying to kill the industries that have been important to our economy.
That totally depends. If you're focused on tech, then that's one thing. But if you want overall quality of life, I can't imagine this is true. Work/life balance seems way more balanced in pretty much any part of Europe. It also probably depends on one's age.
I firmly believe my quality of life where I live is many times better than in places like San Francisco or Seattle. In many ways, this was likely the best decision I ever made.
Not getting too specific to avoid having my HN account being in any way related to my real identity. In fact, it is about time I should create a new account and retire this one.
Reading between the lines, I blame essentially the opposite thing: too much neoliberalism, preventing governments from enacting effective industrial policy (for ideological reasons, not as a choice for a plausible pathway to the desired outcomes). There is some but too little and too indirect. The focus is more on doing as little as possible than on really doing things, on giving permission and as-small-as-possible incentives for things to be done rather than causing them to be done (let alone straight up doing them - neolibs recoil in horror).
That's how I see it anyway, almost everyone else wants to double down on neoliberalism ie the negation of industrial policy. Except perhaps Frank Heemskerk from the article, who mentions wanting governments to create demand for made-in-europe chips so that fabs get built to supply that demand.
You can read the history and learn that the technology was developed almost entirely by the US government Department of Energy, Intel, IBM, and several Japanese companies.
ASML is an important company but it is largely just an integrator of tech and process IP licensed from several different countries.
There are no competitors because USA doesn't need a competitor since it already owns most of the technology and is merely licensing it to ASML for production. The EUV light source itself is entirely researched, developed, and produced in California, for instance.
The EUV LLC research was US-funded, agreed. But the light source is Cymer, which ASML has owned since 2013. Its drive laser is Trumpf (Germany), and the optics are Zeiss (Germany). Nikon and Canon had access to the same public research and dropped EUV. The US had GCA, Perkin-Elmer and SVG, and lost the market anyway. If integration were the easy part, someone else would have done it. You are underselling what it means to perfect the machines by calling it "just integrating".
By that logic SpaceX is a German company. Liquid-fuel rocketry was researched and developed at Peenemünde, and the US brought in von Braun's team wholesale to build its program. SpaceX just integrates German IP. Or Google is Swiss. The web was invented at CERN; Google is just an integrator of European tech. Or Apple Silicon is British. ARM was designed in Cambridge; Apple just licenses it.
They're referring to the idea that a particular Toyota pickup (Hilux) has become oddly popular for any group with the means and motive to bolt a machine gun onto a consumer vehicle.
Not from any wrongdoing on Toyota's part, but a combination of it being cheap, reliable, repairable, etc.
That's because it's borderline impossible to produce SOTA chips in Europe (due to costs), and all non-SOTA fabs here already have what they need, and are reluctant to invest more (also due to costs).
The cost of SOTA chip production is so high that anything influenced by its physical location is a rounding error. It's why TSMC didn't think twice about building a water-guzzling factory in the middle of a desert: building an extra water treatment plant is pocket change.
Strange that all make the link between AI and the low number of fabs / low nm fabs. None of the AI companies have their own production, so indeed none would be expected to buy ASML machines.
as an european, europe have become lazy (even more so), and tax and stupid goverment policies limits innovation. It would be interesting to see how long, this trend can continue, because at the moment europe is so far behind the US and China, and just keeps on failling further behind.
this doesn't really make sense to me. fundamentally, if naively, price is a function of supply and demand. if there is no demand in Europe - then there is a price problem. but i don't like the expectation that governments should subsidize mega corporations profits. the article doesn't really convince me the investment is beneficial to europeans.
>if there is no demand in Europe - then there is a price problem
A price problem in terms of it not being worth the cost... sure.. but that's because there are little/no fabs in Europe. Lowering the price, even by magic, doesnt really seem like it would matter.
>but i don't like the expectation that governments should subsidize mega corporations profits.
To be clear they are asking the EU to kickstart chip fabrication. Which is a chicken-and-egg problem. A fab can't tool up without orders. Orders wont come without tooling. It's in the EU's interest to fabricate chips locally.
> It's in the EU's interest to fabricate chips locally.
Is it though? I'd put forward that it's in the EU's interest to foster good international relationships. Countries can get away without domestic strategic industries if they can play nice with others.
Good relationships won't do much when China puts the squeeze on Taiwan. Obviously there are other fabs in other countries, but the EU won't be the only market looking for alternatives.
Absolutely not. A quick Google search can provide a long list of fabs in Europe. There are many, many fabs in Europe. However, they are not expanding, so ASML has nothing to sell them.
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?
Lots of mentions of "EU regulations" in this discussion, but not a single concrete case of a regulation that would be to blame.
The combination of Trump's Iranian shitshow and Putin's Ukranian madness, means energy prices in Europe are currently insane and predicted to keep rising. Uncertainty due to the possibility of war is not exactly conducive to investing in fabs either.
Europe has been deindustrializing for decades, and IMO that's had more to do with profitability than anything else. That hasn't changed.
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.
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?
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.
>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
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)
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
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.
America and China cannot build ASML or anything close or they would have (China may soon). Europe is the same as ever. America relies on tech software which is getting replaced very quickly by AI. China relies on cheap labour which will get more expensive as they become more prosperous.
> 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 mean the EU got its diplomacy so badly wrong that it sparked one of the deadliest wars this century in Europe and the EU countries appear to be rearming in preparation for the state of war spreading. The EU seem to be in the process of destabilising the state that controls the largest cache of nuclear weapons in existence.
The project has not scored well on matters of war and peace. And there is still a far too likely possibility here that after re-arming and in an era of war the Europeans fall back to their old tricks and descend into a state of war against each other again, given that the adults keeping them peaceful seem to have left the building.
How could they not share the blame? Is the EU so institutionally weak it has no power to influence events in Europe? I don't see how they could be that ineffective.
> 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.
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.
We've now learned that this isn't true for all migrant groups, and it has been an extremely costly mistake to make. Demographic replacement can't work positively if the productivity of migrants is below of the original demographic, and actually makes the situation worse. Europe might have learned this too late, but at least now EU and most European countries are changing course.
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.
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.
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.
I would not build nordstream 2.
I would not turn off nuclear reactors and build pan EU 1 type nuclear reactor project.
I would put sanctions on Russia the moment they invaded ukraine the first time.
Build armies and heavy industries before second invasion.
Make EU PRO business. MOre interesting tax incentives and reformed retirement plans and social services, because this is what will drag most countries do ground.
0 consequences when we look back
Def would try to get off russian gas - Schröder is basically traitor to the whole EU.
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.
China perhaps... but US? really? personally I can't think of any single person who grew up (like me) in Europe and would choose US as a destination.
From my point of view is as awful as it can get: stark inequality, literally hundreds of thousands of homeless people roaming, no basic health care, but to be honest just the number of guns pro capita is enough to keep me and most of other Europeans away for good, it's just insane for what we're accustomed to. And I'm not even referring to the dystopian situation worsened daily by the current administration.
Unless you're the kind of person who confuses absolute numbers (e.g. money you can spend per month) for actual wealth / quality of life / freedoms / rights protection / etc. Then perhaps USA is the right place, I guess?
FWIW, FEANTSA estimated over 1.2MM homeless in Europe in their most recent report[1]. That's over a population of 515MM so ~23 per 10k population. Us 746k homeless is roughly 22 per 10k population. I suspect that differences in methodology will overwhelm that 1/10k difference, but the order of magnitude seems similar.
1/3 of the US homeless are unsheltered ("Living Rough" in the FEANTSA terminology). A quick skim of the FEANTSA report did not show any countries breaking out their rough-sleepers from the rest of the data. I do suspect that this number is higher than in the EU.
Perhaps in USA is very much unevenly distributed? I visted a couple of big cities in California and the situation is abysmal, I don't know of any place in Europe even close to that, still have to see campings in the middle of a big city. I could't see the same in other cities I visited, e.g. Las Vegas and Miami.
The numbers seem to say it's the same in theory, in practice my experience is that it very much doesn't _feel_ the same.
> still have to see campings in the middle of a big city
I saw that in London, in Rome and afair in Berlin
Not to the same extend as camping villages in LA but still.
But I also didn't go that much inside those bad parts of cities in Europe, in US I drove through them
It's actually the extent which is the measure here. I don't think a population with 0% homelessness ever existed nor is even possible, it is just endemic to human societies, like e.g. nomadism is.
More in general, the feel you get as an European visiting the US is that either you're in, or completly out of the society. There's not much of a grey area, more like a quantum leap.
Brussels too. There's some US cities that seem to be exceptionally bad, in a league of their own, but that's probably still a small fraction of all the homeless.
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.
That is because contrary to what Russia claims, it is not a war between EU and Russia, but between Ukraine and Russia. EU support is there but still minuscule compared to what EU could do.
Ukraine isn't in the EU and the USA has a duty to help Ukraine but doesn't because they (choose your favourite) [have been compromised by Russia] [are too weak] [can't afford it] [don't have enough weapons left because they used them helping Israel commit genocide] [are scared of losing votes for a pedophile] [all of the above]
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.
Yemen, one of the poorest countries on earth, closed an important EU trade route for over a year and we couldn't fix it. Defending your land vs protecting your trade interests are different things.
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.
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
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).
> 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.
the geopolitical takes on this website are something else man. I would say don't bother, but letting this type of rhetoric go would also be unfortunate
Yeah, there are a lot of similar bad takes everywhere, not just on this website. This particular one seems to be reasonably common in finance type spaces. I think it presuposes a "correct" outcome to the war and then just tries to take shortcuts to that outcome despite that outcome not being desireable for the parties that get a vote. Its especially frustrating when it ignores the instability of the outcome, which is true in this case. After all both sides have already demonstrated a willingness to fight to try to change the outcome.
> 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?
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.
Ukraine is winning. Defending your own territory is natural. Ukraine don't want a war, Russia can stop whenever they want it to stop. What is Russia's end game? look weak and easy to beat and have to threaten to use nukes to feel like a big man?
> 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.
No? If that’s common knowledge that’s a common lie. It’s not really growing much but there is no collapse occurring. And if you look more specifically at countries some are growing rapidly
You need to travel rather than just hearing about boogeyman stories online. Most of the world is relatively poor. Who do you think is about to catch up? Indonesia? India? Have you seen these places? Their economy is big largely due to their population size.
If you stagnate economically then you are shrinking. Inflation eats up the purchasing power and you get poorer. In a lot of European countries the purchasing power of the population has been decimated over the last 20 years. Only a few countries in the east are the exception.
A lot of the "growth" is debt and money going in circles. We'll see how much of it actually stays around next year. So far the US already has to bail out the datacentre expansion by funding transmission lines upgrades instead of asking for money for it from the companies.
What single source would satisfy you that the current US economy is a Ponzi scheme? I don't think it's really provable or falsifiable until long after the fact. We could start by pointing to the bond market or the price of gas?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I'm referring to the countries borders consisting of sea, not neighbouring countries. More to the point, all industries I'm referring to were established prior under the constraints of the stated population.
The population of the 26 counties only hit 5 million in 2021, in the midst of lockdown. It then surged massively with global instability, with a 2.2 per cent increase in 2022 alone with the first round of Ukrainian refugees forming the majority of the 117,000 added to the population count.
It makes sense since the AI in Europe is being regulated to the neck and investments in data centers, chip factories are much more expensive and difficult to operate.
There's a lot more market opportunities in China and USA...
As someone who works at a small data center on AI topics, that's a bit misleading. (Speaking for myself, not my employer of course.) Regulation is not a bottleneck, supply is. We are buying as many GPUs as we can and are waiting months for them, and still barely keep up with demand. And the government support, while it could always be more ;-), feels fairly generous compared to other fields at the moment.
We would probably buy slightly worse value European GPUs if they were available right now.
There is regulation and people moan about it. But realistically the AI act and other laws give us legal certainty (a German favorite) and the requirements are not so onerous. We pay a lawyer to figure it out and he tells us to slap a few "AI generated" labels on our website and to have a couple of procedures in the drawer and that's it. ISO 9001, 27001, C5 or whatever you can get as a cloud provider are orders of magnitude more hassle.
If you’re building an AI data center, you are not a customer of ASML. You are a customer of NVIDIA, who is a customer of TSMC, who is a customer of ASML.
Building a competitor to TSMC is definitely something Europeans would like, but it’s also a multi-decade undertaking.
Where are you seeing that it’s being heavily regulated? The only thing I’ve seen is land procurement but that’s been a European problem for centuries now.
GDPR and other privacy related regulations have existed for basically a decade at this point so it should not be a surprise that companies need to follow those laws.
Anecdotally, there is data center and energy buildout talk here in the Netherlands, a country where land is the top priority for everyone.
Europe might not have a “frontier” lab but this is absolutely investment happening at breakneck pace.
No other country outside the US and China really even matter when it comes to AI. Cohere and Mistral are important labs, but in no way do they make Canada or France significant in any way shape or form.
In 2026, Europe is great for a holiday. That's about it.
I’m european, and I don’t buy into the idea that profit over everything is good.
I really like living in Europe (Sweden right now, but I lived in Czech, Estonia and I’m from the UK)…
But, I think unless we do some wealth generating activities, we won’t be such a nice place to live in future.
Our power on the world stage will decrease, our infrastructure will start to be neglected due to lack of investment, quality will diminish in most areas…
I say this because that’s how the UK feels in most areas (outside of London), a bunch of “new flashy stuff” to prove that “we still got it” but it’s incredibly low quality while the actual infrastructure crumbles to bits.
> Our power on the world stage will decrease, our infrastructure will start to be neglected due to lack of investment, quality will diminish in most areas…
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.
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.
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.
No, Europe is not a factor in cutting-edge chip assembly. That is a tiny fraction of the overall supply chain to manufacture a finished, compute-ready semiconductor. There is sense in not trying to compete with the "sexy" part of chip manufacturing, and instead concentrating on the steps of the supply chain you are already good at.
I'd say being able to compete instead of trying. I bet a lot of euro companies would love to compete against nvidia, amd, intel or tsmc, globalfoundries, etc. They just can't.
USA just can’t compete at banana production, film at 11.
If banana production was such an important cornerstone of world economy, a competent team of engineers would be able to create the perfect indoor plantations to raise bananas.
The plantation described above is less complex than the ultra-cleanrooms used by semiconductor producers like TSMC.
Yeah, but it's not for lack of talent in tech, investemnt money and support from lawmakers. Just a climate that doesn't help bananas grow, unlike chip design and manufacturing in europe.
That’s completely useless. The point is that we need full control over the full pipeline for security.
If China invades Taiwan 70% of noting is still nothing.
I dont think there is any hard fact behind your statement. EU has a number of semiconductor companies and fabs, though they tend to focus on embedded/industrial applications. Some went bankrupt (e.g. a big German RAM manufacturer) and the number dwindled, but it's not like there's nothing.
Like in anything high tech you need either massive subsidies or network effects, this is why things have built up in Taiwan, Shenzhen and South Korea, with remnants in the US, EU and a bit more Japan as all three thought they can let the market play out, fell a bit behind, and then the network effects won out.
Similarly the car industry - Germany (and Japan) rose due to massive investment and network effects, then the shareholders put in CEOs with a clear mission just to milk the cows and get wealth out of the system; this gave China a chance to go all in on investments and overtake them on innovation and price. This has nothing to do with regulation, just with short-termism and the inherent diseases of a "pure" capitalism.
That there are few new innovative companies coming up is probably more due to regulations (need to figure out how to make the product work and be legal in various regimes). In turn that they don't scale is due to less financing options and a much more fragmented market (to sell in France and Spain and Poland you need to translate everything and adapt it to local expectations and payment standards.. to sell in Florida, Minnesota and Texas you just need to throw a single English version up.
A shame that the national governments keep blocking any real integration of the financial and regulatory regimes at EU level, this would solve the startup and scale up issues to a large degree. The EU just proposed "EU Inc" as a solution, not sure this will not be ground up in 27 regimes...
To give a idea of fun regulations. This is one regarding imports that my partner is dealing with recently.
A new regulation when importing into Europe, is that you need to show that import materials do not have toxic substances, ... on ... shipping labels (meaning the physical labels are free from harmful chemicals like BPA, PFAS, or PVC).
You need from every company that ships from China, they need to provide certificates that their shipping labels are toxic free.
Pulled from AI because i hate summarizing this...
* EU Ecolabel: The gold standard in Europe. It officially guarantees that a product has low aquatic toxicity, a reduced environmental footprint, and strictly limited hazardous substances throughout its life cycle.
* EN 13432 Certification: If using compostable labels (like those from Better Packaging Co.), this mandatory European standard ensures the label, liner, and adhesive break down safely in industrial composting without leaving toxic chemical residues.
* FSC (Forest Stewardship Council): Certifies that the paper backing and label face stock are sourced from sustainably managed, non-destructive forests.
* Phenol-Free / BPA-Free Declarations: Thermal printing labels must formally declare compliance with EU Regulation 2016/2235, which legally restricts bisphenols in thermal paper across the European Economic Area.
Its a mess of paperwork ... We have not talked about a ton of others, and those are on the import side.
We had some fun discussions about vitamine pill manufacturing, where importing materials made it "made in China".
But if we imported the raw material, and the capsules are made in Europe, and its mixed / bottled here. Well, made in Europe. But the prime materials that goes into your body is from China ... Does not matter.
But wait, if the capsules are made in China and mixed / bottled here in Europe, then its still made in China. Because the capsule somehow made the difference?! I do not remember the details but the amount of easy customer cheating that can be done with "Made in EU / Germany / France"..
I can go on with some of the insanities i get told about ... There are good rules but a lot are like this mix that make no sense, and you can almost hear that somebody pushed for exceptions when the rule was designed. So you get this odd crap that half the time makes no sense.
Hard to do business when the rules are often a issue.
This almost reminds me of the Ancien regime mess with a million different taxes and fees on everything
I'm glad we're not importing hundreds of tons of toxic labels that, when touched, mess with your endocrine system. What's your point?
The fact that the issue as described is such a small problem, that pales into the other issues.
One of the issues mentioned is PFAS, ... ignoring the fact that we have tons of PFAS pollutions already in our soils and not a darn thing is done.
We live very close to one of those sites, but its always excuses after excuse to solve. But PFAS on labels, panic, panic, ... The whole label issue can easily be solved by random sampling at import and a fine system. That automatically puts backpressure to fix it. No need for certificates left and right.
My point is that we keep making bureaucratic rules, that make every step more difficult for entrepreneurs here in Europe, instead of having a proper compliance setup. There is a entire industry around yearly audits (that cost 10.000's), like people who do it non-stop suddenly forget how to do it.
That is the issue ... Its not about rules but about barriers that make often setup in such a way to be barriers of entry/working, then compliance.
Tell me, how many times do you go to have your car checked. Yearly or every two years? That is one of those example where in some countries its yearly, other twice. Do the countries with two years have issues with their car park. No ... The result is the same but some people get to be inconvenienced twice (and pay twice). Do you understand it a bit more now?
There are rules and there are rules that add little beyond making everything difficult, when it can be solved in a better way.
Maybe don't dump some AI Bullshit about many things that don't apply to shipping labels or are mandatory at all. Like 3 out of the 4 are completely irrevelant at all.
FWIW I view Japan as still a player, just more specialized (although yes, TSMC is often still involved.)
Specifically, imaging sensors. Canon still makes their own sensors in Japan, and Sony makes all sorts of sensors that are used both by competitors in the camera space as well as Phones, (e.x. Apple after over a decade is only now starting to diversify with Samsung US Fabbed sensors,) Dashcams and Security Cams(Even a lot of the Chinese built ones, if you see STARVIS it's a Sony sensor)
That said, Imaging sensors do hit a curious level of 'needing bleeding edge but is not necessarily as complex as a cpu'. i.e. you're striving for precision and quality but the part itself is a lot more 'repetitive' across the silicon area compared to a CPU.
They're making the point that you're wrong. The CHIPS act under Biden is a big subsidy to bring modern fabs to the US and without it there wouldn't be any orders in the US either (which has less regulation). The EU came up with a competitor to that subsidy but it wasn't generous enough to compete (neither regulation nor bureaucracy at play here).
On a side note, none of the TSMC fabs in the US are cutting edge. They're all at least a generation behind.
> none of the TSMC fabs in the US are cutting edge. They're all at least a generation behind.
TSMC Arizona is a "gigafab" built in phases. The 4nm fab is already built and in volume production of chips for Apple and Nvidia. The 3nm fab construction is complete, and the 2nm (current SOTA) is under construction slated to start chip production in 2028.
TSMC is starting A16 mass production this year. Its 2nm process entered mass production in their domestic fabs in 2025.
In other words: TSMC Arizona isn't SOTA - it is lagging 3 years (~1.5 nodes) behind.
Taiwan isn't stupid. It knows that keeping SOTA domestically is the only way it can rely on the US for protection. The second their fabs aren't absolutely crucial for cutting-edge chips anymore, the US will drop them like a brick - and China will happily devour the country.
Isn’t ASML a European company?
Yes, but but but evil regulations and bureaucracy
> primarily due to regulations and bureaucracy
Or, more likely, due to energy prices.
The energy prices in Europe are also up due to regulations and bureaucracy, without which the continent would be full of nuclear plants.
For example, the Netherlands are currently pouring cement down their oil derricks to try and prevent a future government from re opening them, over absurdly minor earthquakes, despite the energy crisis.
Europe is the only continent where some countries are close to fully nuclear and they aren't close to being the industrial powerhouses HN commenters would make you believe. Tell my why are the US (gas) and China (coal) are beating France (nuclear)?
The whole world essentially stopped building nuclear power plants at the end of the 1970s and there's one obvious answer which you guys just can't accept, so you keep inventing one stab-in-the-back narrative after another for why nuclear energy failed.
>The whole world essentially stopped building nuclear power plants at the end of the 1970s
China has over 30 nuclear power plants currently in development, the only way nuclear "failed" is the industry's failure to convince dumb boomers not to regulate it out of existence in the west.
Nuclear failed in terms of price/megawatt and will fail because it economically doesn't pay off requiring large government subsidies for everything from large scale power purchase agreements, to security and long term waste management. Its also centralized, and more difficult to defend in a world that is threatening to descend into regional conflicts and climate driven disasters. If one were take a serious long term view about industrial progress, one would avoid nuclear, avoid fossil fuels, and install and develop decentralized renewables and battery techs
And yet their % share of nuclear is declining and will continue to decline every year. Because nukes are too expensive, even for a single party state
which regulations and bureaucracy are you talking about specifically?
there are several nuclear plants operation in Europe, some countries also just announced to restart some of their old power plants. There are no regulations that prevent any of the countries from doing it, each country makes that decision for themselves and has their own reasons to do it or not to do it
Energy prices are up in Europe because Europe was too dependent on Russia for gas (and now the US) and the Middle East for oil, not regulation. We are too dependent on fossil fuels because (mostly right wing) politicians tried to block/underinvest in wind/solar/geothermal for too long.
Almost correct, except it's the green/left that forced a shutdown of nuclear and sold the gas as "green". At least in Germany/Scandinavia, might be different in the rest of Europe.
> During the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder, the social democratic-green government decreed Germany's final retreat from using nuclear power by 2022.[1]
The Gerhard Schröder that
> Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom.[2]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der
> Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies
People often cite this fact as if there were a problem to it. (Not sure it is your case though.) Is it that Germany is not allowed to have national interests? Who is the judge on this? Our "friend", the remaining exceptional occupation power?
By the way, chancellor Merz, before taking office, had worked for (and owes his personal wealth to) Usanian financial company Blackrock, thus creating a (rarely cited) allegiance problem at the highest level of the state apparatus.
And yet, Germany does not import gas from Russia anymore. Did nuclear industry in other countries stop importing from Rosatom already?
If the Nord Stream didn't get blown up it could have been different.
The nord stream pipeline was not carrying gas when blown up. But other pipelines were.
Different in the rest of Europe. Many countries have kept mostly the same number of nuclear power plants.
They're also up thanks to corrupt politicians like Katharina Reiche in Germany which sabotages Renewables and Battery Storage in favor of Gas Plants
The same regulations and bureaucracy that doesn't stop ASML from producing these machines? Makes sense. Also it's funny how in the US/China/EU threads, you'd never guess that China is state-run. You'd think they are a capitalist heaven like the US.
Could the "EU has too much bureaucracy" users even say how much more bureaucracy EU is producing compared to the US and China? I doubt it. The US Congress has produced some insane behemoths of laws where the glossary is bigger than your average EU directive, so please put some numbers behind your claims.
Lastly, I think the average HN user just doesn't understand that the EU streamlines regulation across 28 countries, which is almost the opposite of coming up with new regulations. It makes things easier. But that would already require an iota of knowledge past the HN kneejerk worldview.
ASML is selling $300 million dollar machines that are fairly small for it's price point. Regulation is going to have very little impact on producing something like that vs mass produced widgets, cars, or chips.
All nations have tariffs and subsidies, we need to move beyond restating these basic facts like "Governments exist to impose taxes and provide subsidies" but move to analyzing how effective they are at promoting industrial policy.
With Europe, I have no idea what they aim to achieve. They are losing their auto industry. Energy is so expensive they are losing their chemical and metallurgy industries. They are not moving to tech. They are not, as far as I know, investing heavily in any area at all other than spending money on stuff made elsewhere.
What is the plan for Europe's economy? Tourism?
> Aren't subsidies supposed to be a bad European thing??? I'm confused.
Are you earnestly confused or are you being rhetorical? The US has a long history of subsidies across nearly its entire catalogue of exports.
It's rhetorical because I see that complaint about the EU too often and I just want to point out what you have said but in my case I'm ridiculing the moralising lecture about the dire consequences of anti-free-market behaviour.
The US has had tariffs and government subsidies for literally its entire existence.
In a different reality, the UK government didn't allow 90% of ARM to be sold to Japan/SoftBank, and ARM expanded into chip fabrication in Europe.
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.
Out of around 70 EUV machines a year.
70 machines does not mean 70 orders
But 0 orders definitely does mean 0 machines.
... Yes ? Though it does mean 0 new machine ordered, not no delivery of machine built. Sorry I'm not sure what information you're trying to convey.
And about 300-400 DUV machines a year
400 machines could be anything between 400 and one order, btw.
Sure. But no European company is ordering more than a few DUVs at a time
Could be zero orders too if they are fulfilling a back order
Hopefully for RAM and RISC-V ultra-performant µarchitectures.
Yeah, I am advocating for I would like to happen (hopefully INTEL and AMD will put a RISC-V decodecs on their µarchitecture out of good will... yeah since they hold the x86 and x86_64 IP then excluding all alternatives de-facto... the incentive is.. negative.
If I am not mistaken, EU is currently pouring money in defence. For defence needs, one state-of-art chip build line is enough... the EU armies could even share it.
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).
Large shopping malls would fail the air purity requirements for semiconductor manufacturing.
EUV lithography and etching rooms require ISO class 1 clean rooms. Those can have a maximum of 10 particles of size 0.1 microns per cubic meter.
While a shopping mall can get away with 2 - 4 air changes per hour, an ISO class 1 clean room requires 400-600 an hour, or about 10 a minute. Airflow needs to also be controlled: vertical and laminar. Every human entering the cleanroom needs to undergo an air shower with speeds of 60-90 mph to shear off loose skin flakes, hair and lint. This area needs to maintain constant positive air pressure to repel outside dust as humans move in and out.
In the EUV lithography systems, temperature control is measured in milliKelvins (0.001 C). If a wafer stage has a temperature variation of 0.05 C, the silicon expands by a few nanometers and the multimillion dollar batch is toast. Meanwhile in the same room, the EUV machine is generating extreme ultraviolet light using a plasma light source that gets to above 200,000 C. That's 40x hotter than the surface of the sun.
> I always thought of these as high-precision, not-too-high-volume processes
EUV rooms are churning out about 150 wafers an hour, 24/7. That sounds like not too high of a volume, but each wafer is about 500 cpus. So 75,000 cpus an hour.
Exactly this. The process is super complex and expensive. The result, a cpu, is sold for a few dollars. To be profitable, the scale / volume has to be absolutely massive!
I doubt I could even work in a fab having psoriasis.
It is mandatory to wear a bunny suit, mask and goggles in every fab I've been inside of.
They have special security guards who make sure you do the procedure correctly.
seems like doing this in a vacuum would be more economical
Laymens guess what problems it could introduce:
Vacuum does not dissipate heat well (extra engineering in that department)
Vacuum is never 100% vacuum. If you have some dust in the air, it will mostly flow to the direction of the airflow, but in vacuum dust particles will do random walk thing and settle on surfaces.
Plus the fact that then you need the everything to be structurally strong to be able to support 1atm of pressure differential, keep the vacuum sealed, and keep material degassing under control, so you end up with some heavy duty, expensive stuff. Pretty sure a lot of steps in the chip fab are done under very very high vaccums tho!
In general it's easier to control the air you're blowing into a room than what you're extracting, so I'd expect it would be more economical to keep the fabrication rooms under high pressure than low pressure. Also, in case of a leak, air and contaminants will flow out of the room instead of into it.
I worked a lot with and built up ultra-high vacuum systems during my PhD. At least for that level of vacuum, you introduce a lot of headache.
You can't use normal plastic or any kind of lubricant anymore because it starts degasing inside the vacuum, pump down after opening to air is a multi-day process that involves heating everything up to 150°C to get rid of the water that will settle on basically every surface when you pull the vacuum, every electricity feedthrough is a potential point of failure, transfering objects between different stages is a huge hassle etc. pp.
I'm sure there's still lots of UHV and HV systems in a chip fab, but there's no way that's easier on a full factory scale than clean room operation.
I don't think he meant UHV, just vacuum good enough that dust particles are not suspended.
Heat dissipation would be the obvious problem.
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.
> Finally, and here is where Europe really really suffers, generally you need these things to be planned, approved and built within a year.
I think that is not even possible in China, let alone in the USA.
Not the OP and 1 year is too much. But eu is still much slower than Arizona. See https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/intels-german-fab...
And what's so special about 200 MW? Many factories in Europe use these amounts and they run their own power plants. The only edge here is that the US has cheaper fossil fuels, which it amounts to.
> Finally, and here is where Europe really really suffers, generally you need these things to be planned, approved and built within a year.
Like the offshore wind farms in the US? I think Europe and China are building these things much faster. ;)
Why would the turnaround time need to be so small?
The decision loop needs to be faster than the market shifts. Otherwise, you are fighting yesterday's war.
A great example of this is trying to compete with the New Space companies.
Why suffer worse bureaucracy than you absolutely have to? As long as there are no trade barriers companies will go where circumstances are the most favorable. What's the argument in favor of settling in Europe?
There are plenty of locations with redundant power supply, and even building a new power line from another substation would generally not be too expensive given the short distances (unless NIMBYs block it, which they do).
Check out asianometry on YouTube for deep dives into many parts of semiconductor manufacturing, including the lithography processes ASML uses.
They have hundreds of machines that use microwaves, turbo molecular pumps like cvd, ion implantation, plasma etching, idk what else? I'd say it's just the sheer density of equipment within. An average fab has 2000 tools aka machines for wafers alone
> 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).
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...
Also, if you start now you would not compete with TSMC in the coming 20-30 years, so the energy requirements won't be that high off the bat
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.
I wonder. Had any privatisation in NL any net benefits for the population? Not talking shareholder revenues.
There's a possibility that the postal and telecoms systems did but I can't give you a counter. For everything else it has not been particularly effective; but a lot depends on what is privatised and how it's actually ran.
Water. Energy. Public transport (which is partially privatised). Healthcare has been a disaster.
Same thing for the UK but the results there were much much worse, especially the water (Brexit made it 10x worse). It was driven by the actions of the Unions in the 1970s (where they were taking the mickey) but of course went way way way too far. What was needed was to tweak the system such that the unions couldn't blackmail the Labour governments. Not to break it all up and sell it off for pennies on the dollar.
In most areas it made things worse. One could argue that the only exception are ISPs/cellular operators. But for public transport, healthcare, energy, etc. I can't say it was an improvement.
But yeah, we have one party that is most often in government that just loves privatisation, taxing workers more and the rich less, etc. and engages in a lot of short-term thinking. Apropos short-term thinking, one of them was a prime minister for 14 years and cut defense spending and did not even consider increasing spending when Russia invaded Crimea. And now he is the secretary general of NATO. Talking about failing upwards. Though he is probably primarily chosen for being able to communicate with Trump.
Rutte can't even speak English properly. My 7-year-old speaks better English than he does (kind of by accident, but that's another story).
Of course not. The whole concept just doesn't make sense.
Even worse: the right-wing politicians blocked all preemptive grid investments, as it would lead to "needlessly high" grid transport fees.
A consequence of a totally self-imposed handicap.
I get the feeling you're suggesting it's due to government regulation or 'socialist' policies.
But no, this failure is due a mixture or privatisation and politicians looking no further than the next election, leading to structural underinvestment.
Oh, and the energy transition going faster than even the most forward looking scenarios anticipated.
Going faster... until now. It's screetching to a halt. And they want us to get off gas in a few years while also being unable to handle the electrical load. I'm gonna buy a gas boiler thank you very much.
We can’t let industry be built, because the power infrastructure is so shabby, because the state can’t afford to improve it, because the economy is in tatters, because there is no industry, because we can’t let industry be built
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.
How? I thought there was still tons of demand for every node that has launched in the last 15+ years.
The problem is that constructing a cutting-edge fab is stupidly expensive, and you can only pay for it by selling chips at quite a premium - and nobody is paying a premium for 5-year-old CPUs.
So that brand-new fab has to pay for itself within the first 3-5 years, or it'll simply never pay for itself. But indeed, once it has paid off its initial construction costs it'll happily keep running for another 10+ years, churning out pure profit.
An additional problem here is that the costs have been rapidly increasing as the nodes have gotten more advanced. The tech for something like, say, the 40nm node is now mature enough that building new fabs isn't too expensive, so there's a decent market for building new ancient fabs for cheap mass production. But with EUV everything has gotten so complicated that there's no reasonable way to make it cheaper as it matures, and scale-wise you're well into the diminishing returns for everything which isn't logic. It is very much doubtful whether building brand-new 7nm-and-smaller fabs for mass production will ever make economic sense.
CPUs and GPUs a node or two old aren't really cheap compared to the cutting edge, though. If the fab's selling price has dropped a ton, are Intel and Amd and nVidia all making an extra big profit on the older models they're still selling?
Yes, and many applications don't need / work on the latest node.
There is a whole niche in semiconductor called abatement which usually involves burning fluorine based gases used for etching, in order to make them less hazardous before releasing them into the environment. They use natural gas for combustion. The chemicals are not liquids anymore just gases because they are easier to control and manipulate with plasma via e.g. dry etching, CVD, ion implant
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.
France corporate taxes are not that bad, but the corporate paid social charges are massive (40-45% of employees gross salary)
I pay similar in the USA and get literally nothing in “social” or otherwise return. I’d trade with french anytime
I understand your frustration, but it's not literally nothing - just less than it should be. The US still has Medicaid/Medicare, public schools, welfare services, emergency services, etc (even if you don't use them yourself you benefit from a reduction in the number of desparate people around you if they were cut back even further than they already have).
If you are completely broke and go/are brought to a hospital in the US with an immediate life threatening medical issue, they will still try to save your life.
it is literally almost nothing :)
I am too young for M&M, public schools are the worst and I pay ridiculous amount of money for private education. welfare services? depending on where you live (I live in urban area) welfare services would make sure I am just as homeless as if I didn’t get any welfare service…
and yes, the ER will take me to save my life but that about as low of a bar as one could come up with.
Just to be clear, the employer first pays ~40-45% of the original salary, then the employee pays ~32-38% of the original salary.
i.e. a 100,000 EUR annual salary, the employer pays ~40,000 EUR to the government, then the employee gets their wage slips with additional deductions of ~38,000 EUR.
= total of ~78,000 EUR tax on a 100,000 EUR salary.
I don't think anything like that level of taxation exists in the US?
The tax loading in the US on the equivalent of a 100,000 EUR salary is much lower than this.
At 100,000 USD (a bit lower than EUR) the combined tax load on income for both employee and employer is typically ~30-35% depending on locale. In the US, $100k is pretty close to the median household income.
If you have extremely high incomes (e.g. 1,000,000+ USD) the gap closes a bit but even in the highest tax locales the marginal tax loading maxes out at ~60% of top-line income.
US Federal tax rates are some of the most progressive in the world. Only ~20% of households are net taxpayers after transfer payments and subsidies. Ironically, this is why it is so difficult to significantly increase income tax revenue in the US. It would require the middle-class majority to vote to raise their own taxes.
Which jurisdiction? I highly doubt your effective tax rate is anywhere close to that. Especially considering the myriad deductions and exemptions one should be able to take with a high income (401k, Roth IRA, HSA, 529, etc).
"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...
Overreach? Annoying one guy and making him rich in exchange for such a huge buildout isn't overreach in my book. When I think of the overreach of eminent domain the examples have a lot more people and a lot less free millions of dollars.
> Enter the 21st Century Luddite, Thomas Reid, from stage left.
How does any of this make him a Luddite?
Luddites weren’t anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers that actually wanted to be involved with it.
They wanted technology to serve them not make their conditions worse as they worked with it.
This guy just doesn’t to sell his farm. That’s not the same at all.
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
That's just low taxes pushing against everything else in the Irish regulation.
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.
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...
> HDI is a good metric for gauging living standards
A country with living standards at Bill Gates levels with perfect good health until 200 where everyone is illiterate has a lower HDI than South Sudan. Even if we fix it by setting the minimum education value at 0.1 billionaires with perfect health land would have a HDI lower than 180 countries. HDI has a 90%+ correlation with GDP. It’s not a worthwhile measure.
>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?)
We have a politician putting up very obviously hand drawn (because we need to be fucking certain that AI didn't do it right?) posters for an anti-datacenter meeting. I'm pretty sure that if you were to talk to the actual humans in our society they'd talk about housing, employment, public transport. Not datacenters. If datacenters even feature in their real world outcomes it's 3rd hand, but the usual lefty crowd will turn up to any vaguely lefty protests with their bizarre mix of rainbow flags and keffiyehs.
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.
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.
So you are fully dependent on US companies anyway.
That's a different problem than discussed here.
And it's not like US has companies doing own manufacturing outside of Intel. CHIPS specifically wanted to address that.
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.
Again, the sniper seems to prove the point. Decadence and non effort are strictly related.
Just one more innovation and humanity will heal. Just one more!
No, humanity needs to actively (actively) rediscover human Values, to correct the proportion in the run towards technological growth vs Human growth - condition that has been noted for centuries and it substantially amounts to giving power to monkeys.
This does not counter that an idle, decadent mentality will have curbed growth everywhere.
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...
They kinda did that to themselves, but it's slowly changing. My partner's iPhone 16 is made in India. They really do lack waste management infrastructure though, and it's pretty crucial for this type of manufacturing. They should also borrow the regional concentration of industries that China has done, it really does make things more efficient.
The phones are not made in india. Their final assembly step is in India while the grand majority is in China.
“Made in” has no clean and clear meaning, because our world is so interconnected that everything of sufficient complexity is made from parts that are made from parts that are made in other places.
The iPhones that are “made in india” contain sub-assemblies that are made in china, that contain chips that are made in taiwan, made of metals that were mined in africa, wrapped in plastics derived from middle east oil.
In this case, the motivation to finish a product in India is mostly about tariff bypassing; with the final assembly being pretty minimal. Not quite putting the badge on, but close.
A good metric is the difference in value between the precursor and the final product; for most Indian phone production, it's less than 1%. This is also a big reason why Indian export headlines are a bit silly; they never account for the increased import associated with the high value components.
Unclear if this will change going forward; there are some companies doing a higher proportion of the value chain in India, and some big incentives... But to me it's unlikely.
> the motivation to finish a product in India is mostly about tariff bypassing
I don’t think that’s the whole story. Apple started making phones in india in 2017, back when the tariff situation was merely a twinkle in epstein’s best friend’s eye. I think back then it was about general supply chain diversity, more than tariffs specifically. Useful in cases of natural disasters, or trade embargo, and leverage in business negotiations.
By 2024 they were making 36 million iPhones in India, you don’t get to that capacity if you start in november, after the election. Way I see it india was the backup system, and tariffs are the reason they are using the backup system - not the reason they built the backup system in the first place.
> A good metric is the difference in value between the precursor and the final product;
I agree, that’s a useful metric, especially in this case. But it’s also not perfect. E.g. it’s easy to have a >50% “made in USA” product if all the parts are made in china but the last assembly step takes time. Labour in the US is more expensive, so 5-10min of clicking parts together can easily cost more than the parts themselves. You could increase the capacity of that type of manufacturing indefinitely without ever gaining any real independence.
You can't just "borrow" some of the things from China without China politics. Regional concentration there is directly tied with their hukou system. No democratic government is able to implement that system without collapsing.
Most of China development is sui generis and not replicable elsewhere.
I don't think the important part is actually one for one replication of the system in China. I think the key parts to deliver progress are diversity of investment decisions, competitiveness in markets, and stable long term goals & fiscal support.
It's too easy to get tied up in political labels, when any hybrid of public and private support for those helps growth. None of political ideas has an exclusive lock on providing the factors. At this point, I really don't think any political system guarantees the development outcomes, there are examples of all labels which fail one to all of those progress factors.
China is very much repeating the history of Japan, and while we can argue how democratic Japan was in the second half of the XX century it definitely wasn't totalitarian.
Its part Japanese and Koreas model and part British Empire Mercantilism.
I've seen (at least in prior decades) a similar phenomenon where certain more laissez-faire US folks talked up Hong Kong's reputation for business-friendly taxation. Yet the other necessary parts of the system were glossed over, like the massive sovereign-wealth fund, or how half of all housing was government-run or subsidized.
You're mixing up Hong Kong and Singapore; Singapore is the one with the massive sovereign wealth fund and subsidized housing.
> You're mixing up Hong Kong and Singapore;
I lived there, Mister Confidently-Incorrect!
It sounds like you're saw Singapore Fun Facts once, and in your mind it permanently excluded any other place from having similar features.
* Like I said, Hong Kong does have a significant sovereign wealth fund that ranks in the top 10. [0]. It doesn't stop mattering just because Singapore runs a bigger one.
* Here's a article from 2021 with a nice stacked-graph showing 45% public housing [1], close to the half I mentioned.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund
[1] https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/249172
> They should also borrow the regional concentration of industries that China has done, it really does make things more efficient.
That is actually something of a natural phenomenon (see [0] it is a large topic). Historically when a centre of excellence forms it tends to be a tight geographical region learning how to do work well.
Government policy should be cluster-friendly but as long as policy doesn't get in the way it happens naturally. The incentives on businesses are to form a cluster independently because the cluster in-group outcompetes businesses outside the cluster.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_geography
This happens ‘naturally’ but in China’s case I would say the majority is planned, see Shenzhen were 90%(?) of the worlds electronics are coming from. The basically send the engineering corps there, flattened the land with explosives and build a special economic zone.
Guangdong had a pre-existing agglomeration of black-market capitalists because the proximity to Hong Kong made smuggling viable. From https://andrewbatson.com/2020/10/20/the-upcoming-westad-chen...:
"One example we use is the No.3 Memory of Lenin Tractor Repair Factory in Zhuhai, which already in 1973 had started repairing tractors outside the plan. It would take tractors that needed to be repaired from other units, repair them on the side of the plan, and then get payment in kind. That payment in kind was then either bartered further within Guangdong, or smuggled downriver to Hong Kong. By 1973 this unit had a Hong Kong bank account. If this had been discovered at the central level, these people would have been shot."
Turning Shenzhen from an off-limits border area into a special economic zone made it easy for those businesses to go legit and grow, but they were already waiting in the shadows to seize that opportunity.
There are a few more SEZs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_Chin... but none did as well as Shenzhen, probably because of location factors.
Nice reference, thanks! And yeas, for sure proximity to Hong Kong was a big part of this! It is a financial hub, was a production hub, smuggling, triads, international hub, tax haven, the list goes on.
Given the success of Shenzhen I'm always a little confused that no-one ever seems to talk about what actually makes it a SEZ. Those policies (mainly local governance & tax exemptions AFAIK) should probably be more widely applied.
If the government plans to try free-market capitalism then I'm in favour of the plan.
Its a pretty complex topic. There are some hints in the book Extrastatecraft by Keller Easterling, also the Great Leap Forward by Rem Koolhaas and a dozen more urbanism books. But these only highlight specific aspects, of which there are still many to be talked about.
The success is also not equally distributed, but the mythmaking is also part of the story ofc. Living in factory campusses is very brutal etc.
But it would be hard to keep up with a country which has grown its GDP by 50 times since 1990, like China did.
> 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.
For whatever reason, India had quite a lead on pharma manufacturing and still runs carries its own pretty well
India's lead in pharma manufacturing is because of their willingness to ignore US patents for simple drugs , not a technological reason.
That’s great, but does not translate well to ..say.. manufacturing modern chips or jet engines.
> India's lead in pharma manufacturing is because of their willingness to ignore US patents
US patents are only valid in the US. India is not "ignoring" anything by not following foreign laws. Can someone with an Indian patent enforce it in the US?
Yes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Cooperation_Treaty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internation...
From your first link:
"A PCT application does not itself result in the grant of a patent, since there is no such thing as an "international patent", and the grant of patent is a prerogative of each national or regional authority."
So, actually, No.
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Indian GDP per capita is predicted to reach $13k (China's current level) around 2050, so closer to 20 years behind.
India will as far as I'm aware get hit pretty hard by climate change too, which will be an additional hurdle for them to clear.
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 30% spending is from government numbers in the last budget, so let’s get that out of the way.
How many people do you think could conceivably work in manufacturing? And who buys all those manufactured goods? The social problem isn’t solved by quotas.
China has over 100 million people working in manufacturing and India has only about 20 million. https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab8d391-e4e4-83eb-bddd-efd9338e71...
India's data collection is much worse than China's but we can also look at other metrics like exports. India exports less in total value than a resource-starved, tiny nation like South Korea.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/3aba98a3-cba1-49d8-bcb4-869...
Thus, India could at least add another 100 million manufacturing jobs, along with an additional 100 million service jobs to support manufacturing in logistics, trade, maintenance, customer support, insurance, and food service.
Given the structure of Indian constitution which gives very little power to local governments to raise revenue and build infrastructure, India is structurally limited as of now from ever becoming as developed as China, let alone western countries.
I see India becoming more like Brazil than China. That's not necessarily a bad thing since even Brazil is 4-5x richer in per capita than India.
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.
> 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.
> a little behind China on the same trajectory
I'm hoping for India development but that is quite far from the truth yet.
Hope they can solve the whole littering problem somehow.
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.
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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.
Their communal system hasn't been relevant since the mid 80s when Deng Xiaoping got inspired by Thatcher and opened up the economy. The name remained, though.
> 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 nothing to do with India's cast system, so this is a straw man that attempts to replace the argument with something you're more ready to defend; however, I was talking about India and it's caste system, not China. China also has extreme issues and their people live under oppression, just like in India and the US.
- As another commenter has noted, modern China is Communist only in name.
- Your analysis of how simple creating new wealth is, or how people only stay poor when a "gun forces them to" makes it painfully obvious that you and I grew up in different wealth classes. It's not that simple to acquire wealth, and poverty is a massive feedback loop. Wealth compounds, and so does poverty. This is the nature of capitalism.
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.
China has a legal caste system in the form of birthplace registration and limits on internal migration.
People can still move and apply for residency in different provinces. Those from rural provinces also get more perks and handouts from the government.
Does India's caste system work like that? Can a lower caste person apply to be in a higher caste?
I think you mean all systems by design do not distribute wealth and prosperity evenly. Thats actually not a thing.
This is called a straw man. You literally just put words in my mouth.
Is it evenly distributed in China or the US?
Does that somehow affect the point I made?
Yes. You implied that the caste system was somehow unique to India. Reality is that every country has its own way of sorting wealth to the most favored.
I did not imply that, you misinterpreted what I said, presumably due to preconceived bias.
> Reality is that every country has its own way of sorting wealth to the most favored.
No shit!
However, when I discuss the issues with wealth distribution here in America, no one goes, "But India has a caste system!"
Yet apparently pointing out issues with India's wealth distribution, I'm met with deflection, blame games and a horde of people patronizingly assuming without cause that I live under a rock and have no grasp of global economics, politics or history.
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*
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...
I grew up in the racist, religious Deep South and believe me when I say these toxic ideals are built into the culture. I was literally raised by a hyper-abusive "Obama is the Anti-Christ" type Catholic deacon who force-fed the Bible down my throat on a daily basis. I wasn't allowed to consume media which went against the teachings of the Church.
I educated myself and didn't participate. I resisted. I have little sympathy for those who cannot do the same in their own lives. It's a choice to adapt toxic culture into your life due to social pressures. We all have the internet now.
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?
That doesn't make it any less arbitrary and ostracizing to those who do not benefit from it. This is the same argument people make in favor of focusing on middle class politics in the US and leaving the poor to kick rocks and die of homelessness, disease or drug addiction. It's an anti-human system rooted in archaic practice and colonial reinforcement.
> 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.
I agree and will go further to point out that the "rags to riches" story of the US is mostly a fairytale propped up by a few exceptions. I grew up impoverished and have seen over and over how it affects the trajectory of my life in ways out of my control. Any remarkable success on my part would be in spite of the American economic system, not because of it.
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?
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.
Actually you can change it, by getting rid of it. No one here thinks reparations are a bad thing. But the ongoing discrimination is unacceptable. Conflating the two does not help.
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.
The caste system has matter-of-fact not been abolished. The only thing that has been "abolished" is discrimination regarding caste.
Yet, we also outlawed slavery and Jim Crow laws in the US and yet my local prison in the Deep South is filled with 90%+ Black people. We outlawed redlining and yet the modern credit score system does an excellent job of continuing the purpose of preventing Black people from getting loans and leveraging their wealth.
All this to say, my understanding is the sentiment and infrastructure are still in place regarding India's caste system.
Racial discrimination is bad and we should say that out loud, too.
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.
Have you considered that you, like many economic classes, might exist in a bubble?
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
There are multiple falsehoods in your post, and then you support them with mere conjecture. It would be tiresome to try to pick this one apart.
I appreciate your response.
> 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
This is a straw man; The US is a shit show. China has major problems. The topic is wealth distribution in India.
> While it makes sense for Indian nationals to want their government to do better ... outside observers comparing ought to benchmark countries against one another fairly
I am allowed to study and comment on the state of any government I please. Being from the US doesn't change my ability to think critically and again, the topic of my comment is not "a benchmark of all countries fairly", it's a discussion on future wealth distribution in India.
> All countries have social inequality
Sure! Doesn't change a thing.
> If India were to eliminate social inequality it would become superior to most countries on the planet.
Besides the point. No one here is arguing about where India fits into some arbitrary ranking of countries.
> For the rest of us, I think we need to be reasonable in our assessments, especially when the other country under discussion is China.
China has massive wealth distribution issues as well. We all remember the recent bank runs. That doesn't mean India doesn't have its own problems, which I have brought up.
What's funny is how many of them jumped to compare India to the US or China... two very corrupt nations each with their own wealth distribution problems... as if that has any bearing at all on India and its caste system. "Hey, I beat my wife, but so does my neighbor! At least I do it with style!"
All I see is cultural and national biases coming out. I simply did not comment on China's own economic and democratic issues, but everyone assumed I either was ignorant or am playing favorites.
Toxic Nationalism.
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.
But India has a problem. India is one-third size of the United States or China, and they have 1.4 billion people and growing 2 billion or 2.3 billion is not going to work.
Bangladesh is already at ~3x the population density as India
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
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 mean, the west had literal human slaves ffs.
So did India until 1843 (legally) and, like the rest of the world, still has many people in forced labor and human trafficking in essentially slave relationships.
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.
We are making progress but it is slow. Current govt is more for headline management.
Govt do work as long as beneficiaries are good friends - tatas and adani for example. I cautiously optimistic
What a strangle "Europe is failing!" comment thread, when ASML is a European company selling to all of the factories.
ASML doesn’t prove Europe’s economy isnt stagnant and the lack of European chip fabs does demonstrate an inability to produce its own chips which is a critical failure point.
Every material markers indicate the EU economy is in contraction since about 2007. It's the degrowth boogeyman nobody wants to believe in but everyone will get... Cheap and unlimited fossils are not coming back and without them gdp growth is just a mathematical artifact
What's special about fossil fuel? Is a kilowatt-hour from burning carbon magically able to power an economy better than one from a solar panel, a wind turbine, or a nuclear reactor?
I think you could make that argument (at least structurally) as late as the 2000s when batteries and solar were still un-economical. Today it's very possible to power a modern economy without fossil fuels in almost every sector except long haul trucking, a few industrial processes, and aviation, and those together are a small percentage of overall fossil fuel use. Aviation and trucking are less than 10% of oil use.
Europe doesn't have an energy shortage that's not self-inflicted. Becoming dependent on Russian gas combined with anti-nuclear in Germany probably contribute. German greens are basically an advertising arm of Gazprom. (Just like how America's huge inflation is self-inflicted via dumb tariffs and unnecessary wars. We should pay politicians an extra bonus to do nothing.)
The most likely explanation for Europe's stagnation is a mix of stifling bureaucracy, low birth rates, brain drain (mostly to the US), and policies that are explicitly growth-limiting.
> What's special about fossil fuel?
Is this a real question?
- just bend down to harvest, nature has done all the work over millions of years
- energy dense as fuck
- reliable, it doesn't matter if you have sun, wind, if it's winter or summer
- easy to store and transport
- can be transformed into fertiliser, which allowed us to feed more people, for cheaper and more easily
- literal building block of everything that made what the world is today: plastics, medicine, synthetic fibers, etc.
- allowed us to transform materials which required high temperatures: metal, glas, etc.
We're quite literally a fossil fuel society...
All that is historically true, but most new energy being added to the grid is now renewable. Solar and batteries continue to get cheaper and it's already the cheapest source of new power in sunny places.
I have seen this raised as yet another interesting Fermi paradox idea: maybe our planet is unusual in that it stored up a giant store of easily exploitable energy to bootstrap a technological civilization.
> All that is historically true, but most new energy being added to the grid is now renewable
Cool, "added" is doing a lot of work here. We're still mostly relying on fossils, about ~70% of our mix.
> Solar and batteries continue to get cheaper
Bonus question: how much does it cost to build a solar panel or wind mill when fossils get 2x, 5x, 10x more expensive? When we run our of fossils?
It's impossible to run out of fossil fuels. There are always more places to look. But the cost of extraction may continue to rise if there's not another technical breakthrough on the scale of fracking or horizontal drilling.
> just bend down to harvest
Ah yes, oil extraction, refinement, and transport is a famously simple and low-capital process.
It's a fraction of what it would have cost us to make the oil itself, like not even close
I mean doesn’t this apply to solar too? How much would it have cost us to produce the Sun itself?
This specific point sure, the rest not really. Peetrol is like 50x more energy dense than common batteries for example. Peak sun doesn't coincide with peak demand at all, it's a pain in the ass to store long term, it's unreliable when you need it the most, it's not as easy to transform into fertilizers/plastics/medicine
> What's special about fossil fuel?
It's cheaper than nuclear. If one is discussing vs. renewables, then Europe is comparatively poorly situated to exploit those, especially solar.
I think Europe's larger problem is a smothering blanket of taxation and regulation. Good for standard of living in the short term (or at least was), but not good for growth and long term competitiveness.
Is it cheaper, with externalities priced in?
No, but that's beside the point I was making. Europe can't compete with places that aren't imposing Pigouvian taxes or the equivalent. Even if those are added, in a renewable (which will be mostly solar) powered world Europe will be at a disadvantage relative to places closer to the equator.
You need fossil fuels as feedstock for your chemical industry.
And obviously energy too, until Europe completely electrifies .
So it's quite a big deal when gas goes from being cheap and reliable to expensive and unreliable.
Fracked gas in the US is remarkably high in ethane, the base feedstock for polyethylene. There's so much that it's become almost free (there's a maximum concentration of ethane allowed in pipeline gas, so it has to be separated, and the surplus is almost being given away.) Liquefied ethane is shipped internationally, much like LNG, but it's still cheaper to use it locally.
> Today it's very possible to power a modern economy without fossil fuels
Citation needed, or I don't know what "very possible" actually means. Possible perhaps, but not realistic, and certainly not economical.
It's not economical if one ignores the negative externalities of fossil fuels. But ignoring those doesn't make them go away.
What "material markers" would this be? EU economy is certainly growing over this time frame (and also today, even Germany).
In France at least: amount of freight, sqm of new buildings, industrial production, primary energy consumption, etc, basically all the physical things you can actually measure, etc.
Then you add in "services" and "assets growth" to cook the numbers (don't forget to incldue illegal drug trafficking and illegal prostitutions numbers to jack things up even more even though you have no real data about it), and magically everything in the the green, although pensions are decreasing, retirement age is increasing, social benefits are being cut left and right, but don't worry brother, we're in the green!
I don’t think it’s cooking the books to include economic output from the service sector in GDP. If you did this in the US you’d have a very different growth story as well
15% of the french gdp comes from rent, which basically did +30% over the last 10 years, that alone is ~0.4% of annual growth according to the official numbers... 1/3rd of the "growth" is rental inflation...
What value was added here? None, gdp is meaningless in post industrial countries, it wasn't designed to measure anything other than industrial outputs.
Most GDP numbers look at real growth, not nominal, which would filter out the 30% number you’re talking about. Under those numbers about 1/10 of the growth is rent, not 1/3
But if your core take is “GDP is meaningless in post industrial countries”, then you’re at a level of crank not worth engaging with
Services are not generally all fake economy as you seem to imply and industrial production still has a higher share of GDP in Europa then the US.
Oh they're not fake, the factors used to infer the "value" added for each are totally fake though.
1k of produced steel is 1kg of produced steel, no matter how you look at it.
How much value does illegal prostitution brings to you country though? Someone had to come up with a number apparently
If you want to measure all economic activity than one has to include also illegal activity. Whether any activity - legal or not - has any "value" in a non-economic sense is a different question. GDP can certainly be criticized. But it seems you point was mainly that industrial production went to down in Europa since 2007, but I can also not see this.
The main issues Europa has are dependency on Energy imports, an unhealthy but fixable dependency on US IT tech, an ongoing war with Russia, and an aging population. Renewables are are really good idea, immigration would also help a lot, but is politically difficult.
Well, canada is knocking at the door. They have energy to spare, from sunlight to uranium.
How do you think they're going to transmit the sunlight to Europe?
Tankers for oil. Lng ships for gas. And for electricity, that comes in the form of high-energy base products like fertilizer and metal ingots. Aluminum is sometimes called "solid electricity" because while the raw material is extreemly common/cheap the energy needed to smelt it is not.
Uranium is energy-dense enough that it could come by private jet and still be cheap.
They can send iron powder to Europe.
not to mention that ASML is likely majority owned by Americans
Perhaps. Who cares? It is a publicly traded company with widely disperse ownership.
I don't know about stock ownership,but for sure the IPs ASML uses for the cooler machines are all licensed from the US government.
The technology was developed in national labs in 1980s and 1990s and licensed to Silicon Valley Group, which was bought by ASML in 2001. But I assume the old patents all expired by now and ASML has many new ones. But I don't think with anything so complex one can really assign this to a single country anyway.
It's not.
a.) Lack of doesn't imply inability b.) There are plenty of chip fabs in Europe
But no state of the art ones, which would need to use ASML. All good ones are in Taiwan, Korea or the US.
The best Europeans are 10x worse, only China is catching up with only 2x worse.
Are there any competitive fabs in the US now? My understanding was no.
Intel is miles ahead of anything Europe has.
Okay, and?
Europe is allied with Taiwan and South Korea, and until recently also with the United States. Those countries can't build new chip factories without European lithography. Do you want everyone to innovate and grow by having each country focus on what they are good at, or do you want everyone to burn trillions reinventing the wheel over and over again solely for their own domestic market?
If every chain of the supply chain for state of the art semiconductors except one has left europe already, it's safe to say it. Or do we have to wait for this one to go too in a couple of years?
This would pack more of a punch if ASML wasn't the only go to example about Europe doing something in tech.
that's not even remotely true, just because you haven't heard of companies doesn't mean they don't exist. Though it does make sense because tech in Europe is a lot more focused on B2B than B2C, but the latter should definitely be funded more.
Zeiss?
Dunno, honestly, most HN people have an extremely narrow view of what constitutes "tech" (= web commerce and adware) and wouldn't survive 5 minutes in an actual engineering company. Europe is all over the supply chain of just about everything that is hard to make.
> most HN people have an extremely narrow view of what constitutes "tech" (= web commerce and adware)
The grandparent literally said "it would pack more punch if ASML wasn't the only go-to example European company accomplishing something in tech."
Do you consider ASML to be a web-commerce or adware business? If yes, then I am not sure you could be helped.
If not, then how is this relevant to the discussion?
it's hard to understand the granparent's statement actually.
It seems to me it would make sense if it were:
it would pack more punch if ASML WAS the only go-to example...
Is that what it's supposed to be? And then, since it isn't the only go-to example it must follow that the example packs little punch.
If it is supposed to be that perhaps the person you are responding to misunderstood and thought it actually meant exactly what it said, which after all was that ASML IS the only go-to example. And thinking what it seemed to be saying was actually what was meant they responded to that.
However I think you and I agree that what was actually meant was a sarcastic observation that hey, ASML is not the only go-to example European company thus this carries a reasonable amount of punch, it was just poorly phrased.
"Europe are so stupid. They're busy selling shovels when there's gold in them hills!"
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).
The road to gigatonnes of CO2 is paved with the good intentions of the Greens in every country.
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".
> Schröder also famously called Putin a "true democrat".
I do not get why you're mentioning this as an ironic thing. Dictatorship is the culmination of the democratic process. There are tons of historical examples at hand throughout history, just to name a few: Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Trump etc. they all channeled the democratic power of the masses to increase and consolidate their own power.
Just because it has happened in the past doesn't mean it's good for "the masses".
So yes, it's ironic because "the masses" normally want democracy, but the person you're responding to is conflating two things one which is good for "the masses" and the other one is bad.
It does not need to be 100% Russia operation. Some people did actually want nuclear shutdown (greens), Russia then just needs to help a little (in completely unrelated Mr. Gerhard S. has comfy chair at Rosneft)
Most of the population wanted to get of nuclear power. The greens never had enough control over the government to do it alone.
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Maybe... but let's not forget the 1986 event.
The one where you couldn't safely eat anything from the Bavarian woods for a decade. And that was during years without major droughts. People are fast to forget. Nowadays loosing a harvest to a nuclear plume during a drought would be devastating.
Also, even the nuclear plants near the coast are often shut down during the summer. E.g. France's Gravelines was running only half it's generators due to jellyfish nearly shutting down the cooling system (at least) the second year in a row.
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.
One uncomfortable position being that opinion is a dangerous beast, and what is popular is not necessarily in the best interest of the people who harbor an opinion.
ChatGPT could be wrong, but according to it Germany has had an unusually strong anti-nuclear movement since the 1970s.
German post-WW2 distrust of anything seen as related to war, plus the fact that Germany has large coal reserves and so less need for nuclear than many other countries, are likely to have contributed to the phenomenon.
Right, I bet Russians are also why Deutschebahn is a disaster and the beurocracy of the country still runs on fax machines.
Get real.
They didn't manufacture it (Chernobyl did that), but they certainly help an issue along when it is in their interest.
Considering that nuclear is expensive and in no scenario part of a minimal-cost power system, it was a rational decision. This is also the reason nuclear isn't build anywhere else without government intervention. This should be entirely obvious to anybody looking at the economics. As a physicist, I am not scared of nuclear, but I am also understand numbers... while the nuclear fans here apparently need to resort to conspiracy theories to make sense of the world.
(Edit: Russian influence is German politics is welle stablished though, but in relation to the right-extremist AFD party)
The countries with the cheapest electricity in the EU all have nuclear:
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_average_map/char...
Furthermore, old nuclear is already paid for, and hence often the cheapest option where available:
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/EUROPE-ENERGY/NUCLEARPOWER/...
Market price does not necessarily imply cheap to produce, especially in France where EDF was renationalized. And yes, old nuclear is very cheap, but this does not mean it makes sense to build more nuclear.
I always wonder how western population is so brainwashed that you always explain everything using two mutually exclusive ideas:
1. "Russia is insignificant infinitely small nothing. It's economy is less than economy of Texas!"
2. "Putin and russians are controlling all the world. They bought every world leader, everyone from Trump to Xi is controlled by them! Anything bad that happens in the world from USA to Africa is directly staged by Russia!"
There is nothing contradictory about a country that is a relative shithole having a very effective propaganda machine. Russia puts a lot of their resources into foreign propaganda, and it shows. It is still a shithole when it comes to economy and standard of living.
IMHO, democratic countries should do the same. I want pro-Western, democratic, liberal propaganda bots to flood the internet, just like the Russian ones do. But I guess liberal governments are just too good to use the same weapons. It could be their downfall.
Reminds me of this joke: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42963542
> But I guess liberal governments are just too good to use the same weapons. It could be their downfall.
Western governments are spending billions on propaganda. There's so-called "Russian opposition" - a clique that receives millions from western funds such as NED (CIA proxy fund).
If you open YouTube from a freshly created Russian google account, the whole home page will be filled with videos from Radio Liberty, BBC News Russian, DW Russian, Khodorkovsky Live, and other channels. The theme of all these channels is the same: "You must surrender and bow to the great western overlords".
Even though my google account is ~15 years old, I still get such recommendations on my main YouTube page daily.
There was an interview with a former Russian lady that works for Google in London and her job is to pick such videos to push to Russian audience.
> Western governments are spending billions on propaganda.
Perhaps, but my point is that the money could probably be spent more effectively: instead of funding high-brow videos on YouTube to preach to the choir (such longform videos are watched mostly by liberal intellectuals), just flood social networks with propaganda bots to convert the IQ-bottom of society that is increasingly addicted to social media; just like Russia is doing.
We have a saying here: "Russian propaganda is not making idiots from people. Russian propaganda is targeting the idiots." Perhaps western liberal propaganda should more effectively target the idiots, too.
If you'd be able to speak Russian, you'd already know that there's western propaganda for all levels of IQ. From highbrow to lowbrow in all the media you can find. And it's there for decades already.
Also, you can find in the Snowden's documents lots of evidence that there are entire departments in CIA and MI-6 working on this propaganda and ways to deliver it.
And it's quite effective, too. CIA managed to instigate many coups in the world using their propaganda approaches. Arab Spring, Ukraine coup in 2014. In Russia they had almost succeeded, there was (and partially is) large percent of population that believed propaganda despite that we already succumbed once in the recent history (in 1991) and results were absolutely catastrophic.
> And it's quite effective, too. CIA managed to instigate many coups in the world using their propaganda approaches. Arab Spring, Ukraine coup in 2014
Ah, I see you are one of the IQ bottoms that believes the Russian propaganda which is targeting the idiots... Sure, all those hundreds of thousands of people on Euromaidan were there because of some nebulous CIA manipulation, and not simply because they saw the much higher standard of living in the EU and wanted the same for themselves (which Yanukovich the traitor abruptly refused).
> In Russia they had almost succeeded, there was (and partially is) large percent of population that believed propaganda despite that we already succumbed once in the recent history (in 1991) and results were absolutely catastrophic.
Russia changed its whole economic system from Socialism to Capitalism. What did you expect, immediate improvements? Of course there will be a period of chaos. I am from Slovakia. It took my country almost 10 years to regain the previous standard of living after the same drastic change. But then we finished the needed reforms, joined the EU and witnessed massive economic growth. Now we are better than ever. In the end it was all worth it.
What was catastrophic for Russia is electing autocrats and warmongers. No country thrives as a dictatorship, and comparison of standard of living of our two countries shows that. Enjoy your burning refineries.
> Russia changed its whole economic system from Socialism to Capitalism.
No, it didn't. It tried to change from state capitalism (the system the Soviet Union had, not the ideology it presented) to private capitalism but ended up veering off into kleptocratic corporatism.
Could you provide a link to this interview? I am genuinely interested.
I suppose it's this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6tLCevZjHo
Can't open it now myself to confirm. Here Alfred Koch states that his daughter worked for Google in 2014 and her job was to pick so-called "opposition" media that would be pushed to users with Russian ip addresses or probably with Google account language set to Russian.
But actually you don't even have to listen to interview. If you're Russian you already know how aggressively this propaganda is shoveled down our throats on YouTube. You have to ban channels for months to minimize the amount of the recommended propaganda videos.
And you still get it because there're like millions of NED funded channels of all sorts in all languages. E.g. in the last three days YouTube aggressively pushes to my recommendations some video in English about how "Russian missiles are all hitting Ukrainian toilets instead of military targets" which is even from the title sounds like some nonsense propaganda for low IQ watchers.
You just need to use a little brain, that’s all, no brainwashing needed.
> "Russia is insignificant infinitely small nothing. It's economy is less than economy of Texas!"
It is insignificant on a large scale war against united West, short of using nukes. At the same time it doesn’t mean they can’t terrorize Europe for decades or slowly chip it bit by bit.
Think of it as a delinquent, poor neighbor constantly throwing shit to your back porch, and alternating between threatening you with a knife and a grenade (nuke). Constantly trying to bride, and recruit citizens of your home for its goals.
> Putin and russians are controlling all the world. They bought every world leader, everyone from Trump to Xi is controlled by them! Anything bad that happens in the world from USA to Africa is directly staged by Russia!
I don’t think anyone in their right mind thinks that Xi is bought by Russia. On the contrary, it is widely believed that modern Russia is China’s vassal.
You have to remember that people on the left side of the political spectrum fancy themselves as the intellectual elite. They've never been wrong about anything, and if in hindsight it appears that way (like shutting down nuclear plants), well, surely that was because of a highly sophisticated brainwashing operation by Russia.
Yeah, that's exactly when all the semiconductor industry left Germany! And why France - the only country that's close to fully nuclear - is the industrial power house of the world. Stay shallow, HN.
France the industrial power house of the world? No.
It does well for itself and Europe but there are several US states that have a larger GDP and industrial output than France does.
That's the point. France has 70%+ nuclear energy in the mix, but isn't the economic miracle that nuclear power is supposed to bring.
> France has 70%+ nuclear energy in the mix, but isn't the economic miracle that nuclear power is supposed to bring.
Cheap energy is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for "economic miracle". France has relatively cheap energy, but it has other problems. It would be worse off without nuclear, though.
Also they are going to save the world by going carbon neutral next decade or so. According to them the world’s carbon emission would be zero as soon as they become carbon neutral and just going back to Germanic tribes days.
> But luckily Germany saved the world by shutting down their power plants for good
No, the big contribution was the large renewable subsidies that kicked off the subsequent rapid descent of their costs by experience effects, experience effects that nuclear never had.
The hard on some people have for nuclear is incomprehensible. It's a shit loser technology. Get over it.
Europe is still going through the hangover from the last night's party - automobile industry, consumer appliances, heavy machinery, democracy, globalism, tourism, single market, EU policies and so on. They are yet to wake up to whatever happened over the past few decades. To be fair, Europe is not a single country or has strong central control like Anerica does.
Isn’t that true of the US at the same time?
The US has papered their problems over largely because of its wildly successful service companies. Who knows what that looks like with the increasing utility of LLMs though.
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.
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?
> 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.
On Asianometry, perhaps related: "The EU Chips Act is a Failure"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqoX9OIR-DI
Just like all these initiatives have been failures.
The problems are pretty fundamental issues of how we set up and developed our economies since around the late 80s.
Unfortunately that also means it will take decades to right the ship (and probably at least one more decade until people are even willing to accept that there's fundamental issues), but we still have lots of money, lots of engineers and lots of scientists. We'll get out of this, but it won't be pretty for quite a while in my opinion.
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.
Directionally correct, but rather: the process moniker became disconnected from the feature size.
I think it's still /somewhat/ close to feature size - I think the fin pitch of the "N3" tsmc process was about 5nm, which gives a "minimum feature size" of ~2.5nm to ensure the "gap" between them.
I think one of the big differences is that the "Gate Contact Area" simply isn't the smallest "feature" anymore - but the ITRS that defined those names called it "feature size", not "gate size" from the beginning intentionally.
You probably could make a transitor with a gate size of a similar order to the "feature size", it'll just perform awfully to be completely useless.
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.
It is somewhat disappointing that Global Foundries basically stopped participating in the leading edge process node race around the time of the split with AMD. The world is in a rather precarious place with virtually all eggs in the TSMC basket.
[ Intel has yet to prove that it can sustain itself as a foundry for third parties, and until they do, I have a hard time believing the massive culture shift required across the whole company can be achieved without splitting the company up into separate parts. Samsung has fallen behind, but at least they have diversity across a variety of markets including HBM. Neither have leading edge fabs in Europe, so everything continues falls back on TSMC. ]
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.
Not gratuitous, Infineon's stock price rose because of the AI datacenter demand.
Every local Dresden newspaper article and Bosch press release said so.
> Untrue
So you seem to know more about ASML's business than the ASML executive quoted in this article.
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.
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
I think there's potentially confusion around timing; the order for this facility would probably have been a year or so ago, so fits with not selling anything in 2026.
> lithography giant calls on EU to help create demand
Will lie for billions of taxpayers money.
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.
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?
No, ASML is not lying about ASML's business developments.
That would make it the only company in the world not doing that
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.
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 :-)
I would wait for its regulation before the buy :D
Best I can do is half a pair of ASML socks.
Very Red Hot chili peppers of you
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
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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)
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.
Lower wages but worth a lot more. Most CPUs are European designs. No one wants to be in the USA at the moment.
US is only 10-15% of ASML's sales
And without the CHIPS act that would probably be closer to zero.
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.
Europe needs chip fabs _owned by the state_. Look at what China is doing with immersion lithography. Europe could be doing the same thing, but with state of the art ASML technology, securing both digital sovereignty for hardware and all the downstream technologies that build on it (such as AI).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
But why one factory? TSMC has fabs in Taiwan, China, Japan, and the US.
And there’s a supply chain, with packaging often separate from fab.
It seems like a reasonable objection but not a showstopper.
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.
Don't you mean Morris Chang/張忠謀? He was the founder. Also, this near-meme level phrase "received zero equity" is meaningless when you are paying senior executives millions per year. They just buy shares with their earnings. He was one of the highest (if not highest) paid executive in Taiwan for more than a decade.
You're right - I was a little too fast looking it up. I was basing it off of the interview for the Acquired podcast which was awesome.
Hat tip for the Acquired podcast episode reference.
For those unaware, Mo Chang rarely gives interviews, let alone to English language media. This Acquired podcast episode is pretty incredible: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/tsmc-founder-morris-chang
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.
Fun fact in this context: (Dutch) Philips was a major initial investor in TSMC (both in money and IP):
Only Philips was willing to sign a joint venture contract with Taiwan to put up $58 million, transfer its production technology, and license intellectual property in exchange for a 27.6 percent stake in TSMC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#History
> 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
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I get its sarcasm but TSMC has done so much to try to get the Americans getting some decent yields in their new factories and it's failing so hard, there's real questions about whether they can ever meet their targets. They've sent thousands of existing Taiwanese workers to help at this point and from anecdotal things I hear it's not going well. (I live in Taiwan)
This stuff is all blood, sweat and tears to get it done, and to be honest a culture.
You can't just buy it off the shelf. If that was possible everyone would have gone paid for it like an Ikea product years ago.
Investment is risky and uncertain. If you did not do anything because it might fail, you would do nothing at all.
The inability to cope with failure is a culture that is common in Europe. Failure is so personally devastating, so destructive to social and cultural standing that not only must you not take risks but other people must be actively prevented from taking risk.
Maybe the US investment doesn't work, but the US will have tried at least. Taiwan is, ironically, the perfect example of where the initial impetus came from the government because there was no culture of risk-taking. Parts of Europe have a savings culture that is very similar to Taiwan and led to very poor growth and very high inequality.
If the US keeps trying, they will succeed. On here, the view was that China could never build out this capacity, they did. The only way to guarantee failure is to never try.
It’s more about not being able to hire PhDs for $50k a year, tell them it’s a lot of money and make them work Asian hours and efficiency
That's part of the culture OP was referencing. Another part is not having ad tech jobs easily available paying 5-10x as much for easier work. A big part of Asian success at hard tech fields is just not having better options.
There are probably zero STEM PhDs working for TSMC making 50K USD total comp per year. The bonuses are enormous at TSMC these days.
The amount of supercars and high end vehicles in Hsinchu is unreal. Probably all anyone needs to know here, until you've seen it firsthand you wouldn't understand.
Great point. I read about this a few times. Here is a juicy quote that I found: "Ferrari sales in Taiwan doubled over a four-year period." Yikes! Hello, new money!
then just hire them in asia.. and stick to globalization...?
There are businesses and business failures and government project failures in Europe all the time.
From neglect, not enterprise. The level of failure is also too low.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-24/tsmc-s-ar...
Older article, but seems like things are going pretty ok?
They've got huge monetary losses, if you're ok with that sure but its not like any other chip fab on the planet is losing cash.
The Taiwanese are doing a lot to try get it up but all the reports on the ground level are rough.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...
> They've got huge monetary losses, if you're ok with that
USA passed the CHIPS Act and is spending close to a trillion dollars to strategically re-home all of TSMC's most advanced fab technology to Arizona as a matter of national security. Monetary losses don't matter when the point is to not be reliant or China in the event of South China Sea conflict.
I think the point of this article, and the warnings from ASML, is that Europe is not making the same effort.
But that's sorta of hits to the heart of my comment, it's not particularly working well. TSMC has 2 fabs in China and yields+costs are a fraction of whats coming out of Arizona, let alone in Hsinchu.
Like are you really going to buy a chip that costs 70% more out of national pride? Might work on some but think that very few else will sign up for that.
Pride has nothing to do with it. It's about being able to get the chips at all when an adversary controls the supply.
Will you buy a computer chip with the same specs that costs 70% more? Please be honest with us all.
You'll do that because of national adversity?
70% extra on top of a trillion or two in investment is a relatively small price to pay when faced with the possibility of that being your only option at some point in the future.
People are spending more than 70% more on memory because that's all that is available. Everything seems to indicate that people will pay a lot more.
I'll admit that I haven't followed the chatter about TSMC Arizona at all. But how does what you say square with https://semiwiki.com/forum/threads/tsmc-overseas-fabs-see-pr...?
I don't want to speak bad about them but it's just general demand for semiconductors at this point, everyone is just buying it all up because they can. The Arizona plant still doesn't seem to be pumping out and the self-sufficiency target for the US doesn't seem all there. Im sorry to be the bearer of bad news but honestly it's a culture that's hard to replicate and its how it somehow gets done in one country on Earth. The 2030 target for the states surely isn't happening, it's way too ambitious.
People really don't understand how this stuff is borderline magic turning silicon into these things. There's so much that can go wrong at every step, it's the most advanced manufacturing process on Earth.
Once upon a time chips went down in value but I don't think that's happening anymore, lot of other people seem aware of that. Not to mention the semiconductor talent is getting eaten up like pancakes everywhere.
Do you have local sources we can look at? I’m not familiar with Taiwan but would be interested reading more about the issues
First time I saw that. The phrase “regulate growth” seems like the definition of an oxymoron. That’s a hell of a thing.
Every ridiculous thing Labour does in the UK is a hilarious slap in the face to the Tories who are still not preferable to all this stupidity.
Well, we're stuck between a left-wing party and a left-wing party, both of whom, despite what they say, hate economic growth and try to restrict it at every opportunity.
And that's largely because the average Brit has terrible beliefs that actively make them poorer. A shockingly high percentage of people believe that building more houses won't lower costs.
I live in amerifatland. They're building new houses all the time, everywhere I look, entire complexes of them. "McMansions," we call them.
I make average US wages, have my entire adult life. I cannot afford a house in my city unless I buy a literal ruin in the ghetto. The suburbs are far more expensive, and that's where the McMansion complexes are. I don't know who's buying them, but it isn't me and likely never will be.
That's because we regulate growth. Seriously. It's exactly the same root cause. Have you heard about why zoning drives up housing prices?
Do you want a strip club or a dispensary to open up next door to where you live? Or maybe a glue factory down the street? There are reasons zoning laws exist, and it isn’t to regulate growth in the sense you’re implying.
Very disingenuous counterpoint.
When people talk about zoning ruining things, they're talking about restrictions on housing. A good system would get rid of 95% of those.
Also corner shops should be allowed everywhere.
Yes, all those things are fine.
People should be able to build where they want.
We can have reasonable restrictions around noise and pollution, but not on the land use itself.
99.9% of the work done in zoning is about restricting housing. And no, you shouldn't be allowed to stop any of those things, you can regulate any negative impacts directly if you like.
Actually, yes. I would unironically like the first two things, and what's the issue with the glue factory?
Smell
We already regulate bad smells separately. You can't operate a new glue factory without capturing it.
A shockingly high percentage of people don't want house prices to fall.
Left-wing in what sense? Who is opposing building houses?
Home owners
For left-wing governments in Britain, building houses is putting yourself out of a job.
Scotland is a good example: every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences so they attempt to build council houses, it is impossible for the government to build enough council houses to make up for multiple decades of underbuilding (this problem has accelerated significantly whilst they have been promising to build housing, had explicit targets, etc.), but at the next election they make the same promises (and people vote for them because there is no alternative).
The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.
The politics of this topic are very strange. The public is still at the stage where they think in vague terms that the problem is a lack of housing.
I believe the problem is worse in Scotland because the growth in council housing in the 60/70s was organised in order to create this permanent bloc vote. The same has happened in London where you have whole constituencies where 70% of the effective vote is void.
> every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences
This doesn’t add up. Promising to get more housing built is getting these people elected, but they can’t make good on this promise because then they will lose their election?
It depends what you mean by add up. Logical? No. Reality? Yes.
Politicians continue with the lie that they will build council houses. Voters continue with the lie that voting will change the outcome.
> The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.
That's a conspiracy theory and a half!
A lot of the new student accommodation being built is privately owned. They're chasing the (pre-Brexit/pandemic) overheating market for student accommodation that resulted from the universities targeting international students for the inflated tuition fees they can charge, and in some cases have features explicitly advertised to international students as positives (e.g. some of the ones in Nottingham have built in rice cookers as standard).
However, some of the properties are at risk of becoming unviable (i.e., lying empty or having to be turned over to housing non students [0]) because of a combination of Brexit and tightened immigration rules reducing international student numbers.
If they're being built as some kind of social engineering it would be a really convoluted way of going about it.
0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3l09p664ro
> 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.
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.
Is EU chips act 2.0 any good?
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.
Europe, like the US, is rich because it outsources lower-value production and focuses on higher value targets.
Chip production is not nearly as high in value as all the things you can build with those chips.
Local production is about supply chain security, not profit. Europe doesn’t mind one bit paying for chips produced somewhere else, but it does mind a world order where global trade is unreliable.
If we did mind a world were global trade was unreliable we have a military to match that concern, but we don't. The Houthi close the red sea for years and we can't do anything about it. Iran, attacked by the US, retaliates against us by closing the strait of Hormutz and we sit in the monitoring chair.
It is what it is.
Don’t buy too much into the propaganda. Back when the US was a reliable partner that still understood how much it was gaining from global trade, it would have been idiotic to focus on building European military capability.
The thing that seems to have changed is that both the US and Russia are determined to destroy their own future.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49804613
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?
I am European, and I feel the same way.
Europe has been anti-innovation for a long time, completely missing the tech wave in the 2000s. I was hopeful that Europe would learn from its past mistakes, but now it is also completely missing the AI wave and falling behind.
The politics are bad, way too user-centric (see Arthur Mensch complaining about AI regulation), and the European mentality does not help. The social safety net is strong, which is good, but perhaps too generous given the state of the economy. Without sufficient economic growth, it becomes unsustainable, leading to a lower and lower quality of social benefits.
People complain, rightly so, that things were better before, but nobody does anything or even seems to understand that innovation and economic growth are what fuel everything.
I am very bearish on the state of Europe, which, as a European, makes me sad.
Disclaimer: I have immigrated to the US.
It's just the takeover of the continent by an ossified bureaucratic class. Their opinions and actions do not represent the European people's but quite the opposite of it.
> No one seems to be building anything
The article is literally about ASML, the company that builds the most complex machine ever built by humans.
I can pick a couple of other companies across a wide variety of industries if you'd like.
Fair point, ASML is a linchpin in the global economy, and very much a European company. But Europe has a population larger than USA, shouldn't they at least be close to us in leading edge companies? They invented the Industrial Revolution.
> But Europe has a population larger than USA, shouldn't they at least be close to us in leading edge companies?
An economy is there for the people. If that larger number of people have a higher quality of life than in the US, aren't they wealthier?
And if they do it for less money, aren't they wiser?
> They invented the Industrial Revolution.
And a lot more, my friend! You're welcome.
You sound like someone who is enjoying the retirement benefits and full social safety net. One which does not have the funding to continue on for the youth of today. You have a certain smugness about your current situation but maybe you should look at how things are actually coming along today for young people staring down the barrel of higher inflation and lower wages.
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> An economy is there for the people. If that larger number of people have a higher quality of life than in the US, aren't they wealthier?
It's a little unclear how it shakes out there.
I've met a number of young western Europeans while traveling there who are jealous of the ability of Americans to afford cross-ocean/different-continent multi-week trips to tier-1-hotel-cost cities, while feeling like it's more out of reach to them to find a job that would let them. (Phrasing edited here because, as a reply pointed out, "international" travel in Europe is easy and common due to proximity.)
On the flip side, those people also enjoy having much more time off. But hey, at least American isn't as 996'd as China yet?
There's no single linear "better" scale.
(There are, of course, many Americans without the means to travel to Europe or Asia themselves, who could give two shits about an "innovative" company being based in the US vs anywhere else since it doesn't seem to be helping them personally, but the overall mobility is still higher for now. But that's more due to the age of the country than anything else. History suggests that as low-hanging-fruit continues to close the US will also get more and more of that social stagnation too. It's easier to become upper class when you go to a place without an upper class yet.)
> I've met a number of young western Europeans while traveling there who are jealous of the ability of Americans to afford cross-ocean/different-continent multi-week trips to tier-1-hotel-cost cities, while feeling like it's more out of reach to them to find a job that would let them.
Anecdotally, I think it’s out of reach for many young Americans in my cohort (26) but we’re insulated from that in tech
> I've met a number of young western Europeans while traveling there who are jealous of the ability of Americans to afford that travel, while feeling like it's more out of reach to them to find a job that would let them.
The statistics tell a story different from those anecdotes: young Europeans are considerably more internationally traveled than young Americans, probably by something approaching a factor of ~2 in the likelihood of crossing national borders in a given year. But they're not necessarily twice as geographically well-traveled. Much of the difference is due to Europe's small countries, open borders, dense transportation network, and cheap short-haul international travel.
Look up what percentage of Americans between 25 - 34 have never traveled outside their own country, vs. Europeans in western or Northern European countries.
etc.
I had this exact conversation with a barber on the UPC campus in Barcelona in 2005 (if my memory is right). My reply to his assertion was to ask if he ever considered how large US states are compared to EU countries. People do travel within the USA alone and with their families all the time. Just this week mine crossed three states for a beach vacation and the returned home. International travel is not unheard of but not the same distance scale. If I recall he said something like he had not thought of it that way. I do not recall if we were talking in Spanish or English anymore after 21 years.
I must be well traveled since I travel internationally multiple times a week! I even do intercontinental weekend getaways.
Not that hard as a European.
> The statistics tell a story different from those anecdotes: young Europeans are considerably more internationally traveled than young Americans, probably by something approaching a factor of ~2 in the likelihood of crossing national borders in a given year. But they're not necessarily twice as geographically well-traveled. Much of the difference is due to Europe's small countries, open borders, dense transportation network, and cheap short-haul international travel.
Means and using those means for any given particular end are entirely different things. It's hardly surprising that Americans are generally insular and uninterested in non-American things. (This is not a good thing IMO. But it's a thing.)
But more importantly, like you say, "interntional travel" in Europe includes, say, "going to the UK from France" vs the overseas 5-to-10hr+ flights that are required to cross the Atlantic to have these conversations in my anecdotes.
That's my bad for saying "international" instead of "cross-ocean" or such. So let me clarify that the jealousy here is being able to pay for flights and hotels to spend 2+ weeks across an ocean in cities with $100-or-equiv-per-night-to-$300+-per-night hotel costs. They didn't think they'd ever be able to afford a similar trip to SF or NY.
---
The non-anecodotal version of this story would likely be the rise in social-acceptance and popularity of the more right-wing parties in Europe. A lot of people, younger especially, feel like they're getting left behind and aren't interested in mostly-older or born-into-more-money people's generic remarks about how it's still great overall for them.
K-shaped economies + "stay in your lane" are how you get Trumps :(
We're on the same page. Yes, young Americans are more likely than young Europeans to have traveled intercontinentally / across the ocean.
Well, those Europeans are only encountering the Americans who can afford to travel. There are millions of Americans who have never even left their own state. Tens of millions more who have never left the US.
It's true that most of us in Europe get more time off but we don't really get more to spend on expensive holidays. We don't have the culture of spending thousands upon thousands on holidays. Most of us think it's crazy to spend that much on travel and do it much more frugally which means we get more but at a lower level of luxury.
Americans have money for traveling but not the time off.
Europeans have time for traveling but not money. A third of Europeans can’t even afford a one week holiday.
Quite the generalizations there. A third of Americans also "can’t even afford a one week holiday".
while there are a lot of people in the US who also can't afford to leave the continent, even if we assume what you say is true (it isn't), I'd still prefer having the time
That is a bold claim you are making here. Want to expand on that?
Missing out on every Revolution after the Industrial Revolution isn't a recipe for long-term success. I think you might be missing the point of the article.
It appears to me that in most of Europe there is an unspoken bargain: society provides you with a reasonably comfortable and secure life where your basic needs are guaranteed at least to some level, and in exchange you are supposed to stay in your lane, make sure your ambitions match and follow one of the approved tracks, and leave things like starting businesses to a hidden aristocracy with family money, who for their part generally accept higher demands on their contributions and avoid "vulgar" displays of their wealth in exchange.
Eh, better than the capitalist dystopia that is the US in the 21st century.
If you enjoy being an NPC it's absolutely better. For everybody else...
Europe manages to give a measurably better lifestyle for more people for less money than the US. Europe’s a success.
France has a PPP-adjusted GDP per capita that’s much closer to Russia than it is to the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
What does this mean in practice?
tanks getting closer.
cool.
But no one cares about gpd per capita
I’m increasingly convinced this is a myth Europe has told itself to get comfortable with American subjugation.
I'm not trying to be inflammatory but just thought it was kind of funny that one could say the same about your own comment but just swap the placement of the words Europe and American. I think unless someone pulls up actual stats on quality of life and all that just saying what people feel is kind of meaningless.
> one could say the same about your own comment but just swap the placement of the words Europe and American
Maybe. I have citizenship in Switzerland and America. I aim politically active in both. That doesn’t give me authority—but it does afford me perspective.
And no. Europe is poorer than America. Comparable measures show the effect one would expect.
> unless someone pulls up actual stats on quality of life
These exist. Individual numbers slope as one would expect.
If you’re poor, Europe is better. If you’re middle class, it’s debatably, but probably Europe. If you’re rich, by which I mean you make a few hundred thousand a year or more, America. Obviously.
> If you’re poor, Europe is better.
This depends entirely on which USA state is being compared. Many USA states have healthcare, education, and social safety nets that rival or exceed typical European benefits. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Vermont, for example.
This may be a better way to slice it. If you’re in New York, regardless of income, you have a higher standard of living than someone comparable in the EU. If you’re in Missouri, a median European lives a better life than you do.
> If you’re poor, Europe is better. If you’re middle class, it’s debatably, but probably Europe. If you’re rich, by which I mean you make a few hundred thousand a year or more, America. Obviously.
This is what most Quality of Life America/Europe arguments on Hacker News boil down to. Overrepresentation of rich people. America has more upward redistribution of wealth. Ergo America is better.
The reason Europe can do that today is because of decades of being an industrial leader in the past. But Europe will not be able to do it tomorrow unless it continues to be an industrial power today.
Anyone can take time off work and go on vacation. That is certainly more enjoyable. But it's not an economic plan for high living standards in the future.
Europe is going to have a difficult winter. You are going to see announcements of government benefit cuts, higher costs, and this will continue up until the "high standard of living" in Europe catches up with the realities of economic output.
How do you measure that "better lifestyle?" Quality of life in the USA outside of crowded/expensive cities is exceptionally high.
yeah, but what are they doing for the poor billionaires who depend on infinite growth, uh?
Europe knows how to burn furniture to stay warm...
And to express opinions or commemorate a good/bad football match :)
The American intelligence community choose to jumpstart the Surveillance Industrial Revolution which is what has enabled companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook to dominate.
Europe didn't choose to do that.
ASML is not the norm in Europe. It is the exception.
The top ten companies by revenue, worldwide, features zero European companies.
We in Europe cheer our meddling technocratic leadership while sneering at American risk taking and innovation. We have a fundamental cultural malaise, and those of my friends who feel the same as me have simply left Europe for a better life in the US or other dynamic economies.
At this point I feel like a stick in the mud for staying here, and quite honestly, I worry for my children's future here.
It isn't a full picture, but still a very good proxy. The decline of Europe in global economy is unquestionable.
There were 17 European companies in the top 50 in 2006, 13 in 2016, 10 in 2026. Most of the remaining companies are automotive and energy (oil). None is tech. ASML isn't even in the top 100 in Europe.
Japan is the same story. There are 7 companies in the top 50 in 2006. The only remaining one in 2026 is Toyota. None is tech.
China's share has increased from 2 companies in 2006 to 12 in 2006.
In other words, China's progress and the importance of tech, along with the decline of automobile and energy accurately reflect how the global economy has changed.
(Side question: how much AI does my comment sound?)
Source: you can find plenty. Start with Fortune 500
I will summarise your answer: China GDP grew 7.5 times from 2006 to 2026. If India does the same in the next 20 years, there will be hardly any top 50 companies outside of US, China, and India. Still, it doesn't say much.
The nominal GDP per capita of the United States is about $86,000, while China's is about $13,400. Even if China has a bunch of companies in the top 50, it is still many many many many times better to live in the US, economically speaking. Even if you switch to PPP, China will roughly double to $25,000. Still, the US is way ahead.
This is expected though, right? Even in Europe, unless you're a verysmall country, most business you deal with is domestic. Do by default, the largest companies mare going to be in the largest economies. Doesn't mean you can't get lucky every now and again, but you are handicapped by not having a large domestic consumption base protected via political independence.
China and the US are continent-scale megastates. Obviously a mid-sized Atlantic island like the UK, or smallish peninsula like Italy, are not going to compete on scale.
No, if you lived long enough to remember the 90s and 2000s then you would have remembered that the European Union experiment was one that was supposed to be formidable and address the very thing that you are saying is a problem. Americans literally thought we were going to have to compete with Europeans in enterprise and innovation. Instead, the threat of European Union doing anything interesting was undeserved. China clearly deserves the recognition of being a the competitor we desperately need to keep going and make progress towards a more advanced species
It would be very hard for a country to force it's most ambitious to not leave if there are other places eagerly recruiting them.
But when such a pull exists, it's very hard to counter that. Consider the number of non-SV places in the US that have tried to replicate that environment and basically failed. Even the famously "business friendly" places like Texas or Georgia that are success stories for poaching tech companies or film production largely work by having companies move there once they've left the high-growth phase and are no longer chasing strictly the most ambitious would-be-best-and-brightest talent.
The success stories there (that aren't just resource-extraction) have come from significant protectionism, essentially forcing a country to build its own version of the mega-companies even if it's a money-loser with copycats building shoddy copies for decades at first.
There's no easy way for Europe to magically change that with "culture." There's too many already-established mega-talent-bases in other places to think you can have people just pass up on that in a fully-global-market situation.
I would ask instead: why let those foreign mega-corps be so integral to so many basic services of modern life?
Perhaps not just Europe, but the entire world, would be better off if we had fewer monoliths and more variations, with more flexibility for local markets to develop different solutions or in different directions.
Your children need the number go up?
Yes. Any other questions?
Why?
edit: In all seriousness, some numbers I'm concerned about for children are the
- % of carbon in the atmosphere
- the number of militaristic demagogues in positions of power
- the number of hours the average person spends reading propaganda on social media
- the parts per million of microplastics in drinking water
- the democracy index
The sum of dollars consumed, dollars invested, dollars spent by governments, and net exports is a weird proxy signal to obsess over
Because eventually there will be an asteroid or nearby supernova that will destroy civilization unless humanity’s total wealth and technology have improved vastly between now and then. Stasis is death.
I don't find it likely that my kids or grandkids will have better odds of avoiding asteroid or supernova death by working to death to try to become interplanetary ASAP.
I think doing so would introduce far more risks to them. Space ain't friendly.
Beyond that I find it hard to care to drive anyone to work their ass off today for whatever humans are around 100+ years in the future. And, of course, more technological development brings more chance of mass self-inflicted die-off of humanity anyway. In 1900 it would've been much harder to kill 10%, 20%, 50%, 90% of the global population than it is today.
Everything is death eventually. And predicting the future is hard.
> working to death to try to become interplanetary ASAP
That’s not what I’m advocating. I’m not even proposing a global prioritization of goals. What I’m advocating is simply to not attempt to slow or halt the progress of technology.
I find it more likely we nuke ourselves with this ratrace to the bottom, than having to worry about supernovas. And what's more I don't buy into this kind of megalomaniac self-serving narrative, that smells of an easy way of enforcing one's broken ideals over others. Happening with AI a lot lately.
It is of course possible that we nuke ourselves. If we choose to. Or we could choose to use the same technology to massively increase our energy production. The more certain thing is that, if we do nothing, eventually something kills us.
Unemployment rate doesn't make the top 5?
Over the course of decades unemployment is generally just fine, so other than "what if AI breaks the economy" there's very little reason for it to be in the top worries. It's a priority but not a worry.
And ASML wouldn't be possible without US taxpayer funded research. ASML's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology utilized foundational research from the U.S. Department of Energy.
> In 1997, ASML began studying a shift to using extreme ultraviolet.[7] Two years later, it joined a consortium, which included Intel and two other U.S. chipmakers, in order to exploit fundamental research conducted by the US Department of Energy. Because the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) it operates under is funded by the US government, licensing must be approved by Congress.[14] Furthermore, in return for being permitted to join this consortium, ASML committed to the establishment of a US-based research center and to source 55 percent of components for all machines sold in the US from American suppliers.[7] ASML collaborated with various manufacturers to obtain mirrors, including the Belgian firms IMEC and Sematech as well as Germany's Carl Zeiss.[14][15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML
The same is true for several US companies - not doable without published research funded by the EU (or other countries in Europe outside the EU). We all freely share our publicly funded research, and whoever wants to use it for commercial success can try. That's how it works.
That includes the majority of the big tech companies, and why the US tends to throw money on importing expertise for these companies (for example AI frontier labs).
Aren't basically all high tech companies the inheritors of basic research funded by highly developed countries?
ASML is definitely a fully globalist enterprise.
The logic is backwards. The research was already there, so ASML licensed it. If the research wasn't there they would have developed it, and/or find another way to make it work using a somewhat different tech. This is but one of the dozen large technical issues that needed to be solved en route to EUV.
The heart of the machine, the light source, is from San Diego.
That's just globalisation. Wouldn't europeans be fools if they never used american research??? And vice versa?
ed: and also to the above point, those optics companies look frightfully european...
Why deflecting from the implicit question? Why is european ASML incapable of finding fellow european buyers - among 27 strong nations and 500M people?
To state the obvious: Because Europe isn't adding any new fab capacity. That is crazy in the 21st century. They should be helping TSMC and Samsung build new fabs in Europe. What happened to the plan by Intel to build a modern fab in Europe?
Other comments mention: Ireland and Dresden (orders placed earlier probably)
All big European companies are over 30 years old. Their startup scene is relatively minuscule compared to the US, borderline nonexistant.
>The article is literally about ASML, the company that builds the most complex machine ever built by humans.
Yet Europe is stagnant.
I do not live in Europe, but I have a lot of friends living there, mostly in Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. We recently met in Croatia, and after a few beers this topic came up. We came to the conclusion that the following crises caused Europe to start lagging behind the rest of the world:
- 2008 financial crisis. Somehow, the U.S. was able to spend its way out of the crisis, while Europe's strict austerity measures made things quite bad. That was followed by the 2010-2012 debt crisis, the 2013 Cyprus banking crisis, and another Greek debt and banking crisis in 2015.
- COVID: Most European countries, at least those with strong economies, had very strict restrictions and closures. The restrictions were as strict as they were in California. They did not really have any Texas or Florida style "rebellion" states. Sweden was the main exception. But borders and travel restrictions still existed.
- Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Europe was much more economically integrated with and dependent on Russia (especially for energy), than the U.S. or many other parts of the world.
So basically, the world has gone through three major crises in the last 15-20 years, and in each case the U.S. was either less directly affected or somehow managed the economic consequences better than Europe.
Your group started the history way too late. The 1990s is when the first big computer wave happened and Europe mostly missed on it. And then it could have had its own Google, Facebook, and Uber, but then it missed that too. This is before you start your history in 2008.
There is definitely much more happening than what american media tells us. When I visit family in Germany they are all doing pretty well. There are problems with expensive housing but that seems to be a worldwide problem.
But there definitely seems to be a lack of ambition in business and technology. For example, the car companies seem to be more coasting on past successes vs pushing things forward. Europe is also not trying much to compete in AI.
When I visit Germany everything strikes me as meager. Like everything is rationed.
When I visit the US everything strikes me as overbuilt to the point of being dull or in the case of vehicles, downright dangerous. The dullness part, especially, is a real pain. Cheap concrete sidewalks. Cheap looking infrastructure everywhere, etc.
There are few places I've seen that seemed as dull or boring when walking through them as the LA metro area, for example. Yes, there are also awesome looking neighborhoods, but damn, I didn't actually realize those concrete brick 1 floor no sloped roof buildings were truly universal as were those very ugly vacant lots with wire fences.
I imagine most LA residents are just used to them plus they only drive by them.
Ok. And what does the US have to do with anything?
The odds of you not being American are less than 0.
Out of curiosity, how so?
I was there a couple months ago and all the cities I visited felt very poor. The buildings were depressing and drab, the trains were frequently delayed, the food was probably the worst I had anywhere in Europe.
I had 2 hour transfer in Frankfurt am Mein, so I wanted to do something that is Germany is know for, so I decided to get a nice doenner kebab (it was good :))
(Btw. Last week I was in Istanbul; maybe unlucky, but I did not like kebab in Turkey, ingredients were somehow strange)
I had the same experience. I was very excited to try a Doner in Istanbul, because one of my favorite restaurants in Seattle was a Doner place (The Berliner). They didn't seem to know what I meant. I got something they insisted was a Doner, but not really the same sort of thing.
Not sure if the Seattle place is really Americanized or I need to save up and try one in Germany.
Plenty of great Turkish food btw, but obviously Doner's are not really a local thing.
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Europe should have had their own SV starting back in the 90's...
Instead the wall fell and Europe decided to go on vacation for 35 years
SV in 1990s was effect of 60-70 years of hardcore government funding that was not only not stopped, but amplified by WW2 whereas Europe was heavily wrecked by it (UK finally stopped wartime rationing of food in 1954!). In comparison, in 1945 USA was trying to redirect wartime production surplus into other sinks to give "soft landing" to industry and invented new approaches to discriminate women from workforce to create openings for returning soldiers.
Could something be done starting with 1990? Probably, though the much fragmented by natural borders (if not regulatory) markets with resulting less cash-flush companies had issues fighting against US competition being able to underprice them with politicians ensuring there were no barriers for american companies "or else".
Some of it was at worst mostly local (if with American "advisors"), like in Poland - we started technically from same position as Taiwan when it came to semiconductor manufacturing, but instead of investing "shock therapy" destroyed it. At the same time... can you mention a taiwan major business that is not TSMC, or part of semiconductor manufacturing chain? Without thinking too long or googling?
They had two world wars and devastated cities to rebuild. They also had the very real threat of further escalation with the raging Cold War. Meanwhile, the US had no real threat of further violence. Most of those with the adventurous spirit found their way to the US to continue the westward expansion and seems to be Europe's biggest export.
Ironically the US was the one holding the line against that threat.
Europe did itself in with intense bureaucracy and a culture of "individual wealth is bad"
The rebuilding phase was over by 1990. And so was the cold war, more or less, and that strongly involved the US too.
Did you misread the time period they suggested?
Look at the huge cost of German reunification from 1990 onwards, for example - "rebuilding" Eastern Europe was a big effort.
I count German reunification as something quite different from rebuilding from WWII.
By the mid-90s we were 50 years after the end of the war. It didn't take three generations to put the cities and infrastructure back together.
It took about 2 trillion and maybe a couple of decades from 1990 onwards.
Okay, but it wasn't the thing we were talking about...
Sorry, I just tried to add that post cold war there was substantial rebuilding (again).
That's fair but I don't think it would have stopped a "Silicon Valley" effort, especially not across all of Europe.
Maybe not. As always, I think it's more complex: It certainly used a lot of funding, not just from and for Germany that wasn't available then for other things; at the same time there was not much defense spending (to go back to the origins of SV) either, there was also a lot of socio-politcal change binding change capacity, and in parts there has been a certain distrust/dislike of information technology in countries like Germany.
The rebuilding phase only really got started in the 90s! Integrating the post-communist states was a huge effort that is still arguably going on.
A continent of people didn't sit in bombed out cities and countryside for fifty years before getting major repairs going, what are you talking about.
The damage from WW2 to Europe was not limited to bombing and killing, it includes the economic harm inflicted on Eastern Europe in the decades afterwards by the Soviets.
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Krugman recently wrote about this and argued this perception is heavily biased by poor comparative measurements: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/europe-v-america-whos-rea...
Krugman, really? The guy who's been wrong about every single prediction he's tried to make and got fired by the NYT?
Then as somebody who predicted Claude Code and the current state of AI in 2023 January, you must trust me, that Krugman is right.
Or rather, you shouldn't appeal to authority.
The discussion here is a mess. This specific article about ASML is more about outlook, than Krugman's, which is about the current state. This will be a problem in the future. Currently, Europe's quality of life is at least on par, or probably even better in some parts of Europe, but these are signs that this won't last.
If the current positive sum game is eroding more, then there are two options. Embracing the feudal times as in America, or keep pretending. In the short and mid term, the former is better. However, in the long term, if you pretend for the following decades, then you will win. Unfortunately, there is only a slim chance that you will be able to, but all of those countries will win in the end.
For not the 1%, feudal logic is obviously not good at all, but they are still voting for them. Even in Europe. Those European countries which stay democracies will win.
How many Nobels do you have to win to post a credible opinion on the Internet, in your mind?
Nobel winners can be wrong about a lot or even cranks. Don't pretend winners are superhuman.
Meh, judge the ideas, not just who they came from. He has cited some articles if you’d like to read them and evaluate the info yourself.
I don't know economics well enough to judge his ideas, but I know his track record well enough to be suspecious of his judgement in his arguments about the economy.
US Based big tech is skewing your perception. real world economies dont revolve around social media entertainment and ad serving mechanisms.
Take those out of what US "builds" and Us doesnt look very exceptional
> Take those out of what US "builds" and Us doesnt look very exceptional
If you take out the exceptional parts then the US doesn’t look exceptional? Forgive me if I’m not convinced by this argument.
You’re also generalizing too deeply. The top companies in the US cover a lot more than ads and social media.
The EU has only one company among the world's top 50 companies: ASML, ranked 21st.
In the top 100, there are only 8: ASML, Siemens, SAP, L'Oréal, LVMH, TotalEnergies, Santander, and Seagate Technology.
In 2005, the EU (excluding the UK) had 19 companies in the top 100.
So something is going on.
You’re mistaking the SP500 with the whole US economy.
Big tech isn’t that big. Silicon Valley is $840B, while the US is $32T, so about 3%.
The US could lose all of Silicon Valley and still be much more productive than the EU.
no way silicon valley is only 840B
Classic SV is about that. Bay Area is 1.5T
I'm not a particularly big believer in infinite growth, so I'm not really concerned. But, I have noticed that many people both complain that nothing is being built, but also NIMBY. Could be the goomba fallacy...
> I'm not a particularly big believer in infinite growth, so I'm not really concerned.
I think this is part of it. Growth is treated with skepticism in Europe.
Growth isn't "jobs, high salaries, innovation, cheap good/utilities, well funded military" there it's "pollution, inequality, big corporations".
It's no surprise that they aren't growing as fast as other regions: it's not their priority.
As the saying goes, if you aren't growing...
Goomba fallacy: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
More Europe bashing here lately. Are you a bot?
> From my American perspective it looks like they are trying to lose
How're the tarrifs going?
The difference is almost no American in HN will defend the crazy tariffs. But Europeans I have seen will go to the mat every single time explaining why Germany's economy growing a total of 7% for the 10 years between 2015-2025 isn't a problem actually. US grew almost 27% in the same time period.
This is only what I have noticed as someone from a continent that is not North American or Europe. The Europeans don't seem to see a problem with their stagnation.
You can't really compare the economy of countries on two different contintents just based off of a single macroeconomic metric and expect to capture anything. It's way more complicated than that
I think you can. You can completely distill it down to the simple reality that one is growing on the other is not. There's no clever nuance that handwaves that fundamental fact away.
As if we don’t have tariffs. My AliExpress packages are taxed over 100%
> As if we don’t have tariffs. My AliExpress packages are taxed over 100%
Is it contradicting - does it mean the tariff is "over 100%"?
English is not my first language.
A five euro package has:
€1.05 VAT
€3 duty per product category
€0.36 VAT on duty
€2 EU per package fee (per 1 November)
That is €6.41 in tax/duty/fees/tariffs whatever you may call it over a €5 value.
Apparently well enough that we copied them in europe too. There's now a 3 euro tariff on every package imported from outside the EU.
They're brainwashed, sadly it seems to also affect the smarter people too.
Most people in my circle in EU seems to see it in similar way. Not much we can do about it though :(
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The guillotine is probably the only time I physically cringe as it gets romanticized due to people only remembering the 1st part:off with the king's head and not the countless innocent people beheaded equally due to one man's paranoia which was his own downfall and he too was guillotine'd.
If anything it should symbolize the cautionary tale of the how to have the power to exact punishment can and will come back to you.
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I would characterize it a bit differently. It seems like there’s a combination of not understanding what drives prosperity, and consciously rejecting the tradeoffs of prospering. Namely, insisting on lots of government regulation and social programs.
Which country? It's a pretty mixed bag across the continent (though you could say the same about US states). From my POV it's fine, preferable to the US even (much as I would likely make more there). Most of the supposed problems are heavily exaggerated, especially with regard to the EU's rules and regulations.
From a Canadian perspective, the US looks like it's trying to destroy itself, not just lose. But yet people in the US seem far more interested in shitting on other countries than fixing their own shit.
Norwegian here.
I’ll assume your question is genuine and benevolent and not like my social media feed full of Europe vs USA ragebait.
I believe these economies and cultures are optimized for different things. And also I’d be precise about the country as well, since UK, Norway and Italy are also optimized for different targets. More accidentally then a cunning plan around it to be honest.
Americans as a culture are more risk takers. This is normally a good thing for entrepreneurship. They are also rather tax friendly. Which is great for capital intensive businesses like the unicorns you are asking why we see less of this in Europe. Take Norway, come here with a ton of cash and make a anthropic competitor, and you are probably a fool. Taxes alone will punish such huge capital. Less so in UK though.
But what you hear less about is the huge amount of medium companies around Europe. They have their small niche in pharma, manufacturing etc. They are often highly trusted. Often highly profitable. Often keep their people longer with lower tendencies of burnout.
But would often be seen as a failure by US vcs, as they perhaps lack a giant market to grow further into. This can lead to a lower stock price then price per earning would suggest.
Nor to say that those companies don’t exist in the US. I’m just saying the entire economy is not just lifted by companies like alibaba and google.
I’m also curious sometimes how Americans kept their risk appetite so high through nearly a century. Japan went a similar lane until the 90s crash, where after they became a lot more risk averse.
Part of my speculation here is that the US could borrow their way out of the crisis in their own currencies.
Right and there are also quite a few industries where Europe is way ahead of the US, to name a few:
- Railways and signalling equipment
- Container shipping
- Reinsurance
- Industrial machinery
- Wind turbine technology
- Luxury goods, luxury fashion and fast fashion
- Tourism
A big difference is that in Europe most companies are not big conglomerates. Yes everyone has heard of Siemens. But then you have tonnes of companies like WALDNER, based in a small German town with revenues of €350m, they make packaging equipment that can fill 100,000 yogurt pots per hour. Oh and they are a private company.
https://www.waldner.de/en/about-us/company/
> What a weird one to pick. Do you think the US doesn't have massive ports like Europe?
The US has ports. But they don't build civilian ships, and they don't really own ships either. The vast majority of American ocean-going shipping is floated on ships owned by Europeans and built by East Asians
Neither the US nor Europe builds ships, they are almost all built in East Asia. China, South Korea, and Japan collectively build virtually all ships.
But of course anyone can buy and operate ships. Europe still has large shipping companies, although they are losing marketshare to Asia now, whereas the US has never been a dominant player in this area.
The US does operate some massive logistics companies that are a bit higher in the stack.
That's why it's so crazy to see Europe sabotage its shipping industry by seizing Russian ships and banning so many oil transports. That is going to result in Russia seizing European ships and the asian shipping carriers taking even more market share.
Across the board, Europe is de-industrializing.
Europe does build ships, even if East Asia dominates. But the US is abnormally low, like it build less tonnage than Finland.
Not everyone can operate civilian ship fleets, managing a global shipping operation is not a "pick up and do it", it requires some build up.
> What a weird one to pick. Do you think the US doesn't have massive ports like Europe?
Probably alluding to the fact that Europe owns the largest portion of the worldwide fleet.
> Do you think the US doesn't have massive ports like Europe?
I assume they mean the ships.
They think the same of you…
And from a purely European perspective it looks like the US is trying to do the same. We just don't have the full picture of either side.
Europe did not push enough in the software market, which is where the US is definitely on top. There's tons of specialized engineering companies in Europe that manufacture equipment that can't be done anywhere else. Less public coverage because it's not consumer facing, but ASML is just one example of it (who are well known publicly of course). There are obvious factors right now (e.g. war in Ukraine) that put a strain on public spending, but that's also the case for the US, and before that covid, and honestly when's the last time this has not been the case for everyone. Though the EU currently also needs to first scramble to reduce it's dependencies (especially in energy).
In america nothing is getting built except data centers. Without the drug-addled AI push, we'd be in same spot as Europe, maybe worse.
Hype. And I don’t mean this pejoratively although it has negative consequences — the US does hype better than anyone. The challenge for the US is that people can exploit hype to the point that its effect gets diminished (eg Tesla) which might have long term consequences for the sustainability of the hype machine
Nothing. Europeans can be divided into two groups. Skilled people working nice jobs. These people already have enough and are satisied with their lot. Then you have the people that are struggling. These are generally not the kind of voter that would support effective government policies and instead mostly gravitate towards pro-welfare and anti-immigration parties.
Something that distinguishes Europeans from Americans is the general level of economic security here. This is generally good for the mental and physical health of everyone involved, but it does mean that there's no hustling or grindset among the educated classes here.
I knew two engineers, one in the US, one in europe.
The one in the US worked at a chip company and they had gotten a chip back and it worked without any respin.
The one in europe was working with GPS stuff and with a european chip that was on spin 400+. (it's been a while so I don't have more info, but I think maybe it was government subsidized?)
I couldn't help but think something was seriously wrong with european engineering.
I knew 2 engineers too. One worked in the UK for ARM and one worked for Intel. At that time, Intel were doing IA64 and ARM weren't that popular. Can't help but think something is wrong with USA engineering.
Yeah but the quantum computing "industry" in the US is exactly the same thing.
The US goverment continues puking out cash to prop up this clusterfuck. The EU governments stopped puking cash for it, which is why all the EU quantum companies moved to the US.
Quantum computing has basically zero credible commercial demand.
Timelines for anything useful are perpetually 15 years out. Even the QC boosters refuse to commit to a timeline for Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computing. But they sure love scaring everybody with it as a boogeyman.
> I think maybe it was government subsidized?
The first rule of government spending, why build one when you can build two at twice the price? Sounds like the project's goal wasn't to build a successful thing, but to bilk the government for as much funding for as long as possible.
Putting aside the n=1, Chip != Chip.
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Have you ever been to Europe?? Things they are building: proper trains; proper roads; proper particle accelerators; proper airliners; proper bread; proper cars; the AI that the USA thinks is so amazing; ARM CPUs; ...
And speaking of "a less prosperous society" -- have you been to most of the USA recently? Doesn't look very prosperous to me vs most of Europe.
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.
The EU is not a single country. It feels like a lot of Americans at the moment think of the EU as a single homogeneous entity that they often also just confusingly refer to as “Europe”.
Even the EU is a lot of different countries. Some of them quite poor, and some of them wealthier also with high GDP per capita.
GDP per capita does also not give you the whole picture. It is a number. Other numbers are median life expectancy, shootings per capita, PPI, median income, average vacation days, average distance to nearest high-speed rail station, physicians per capita, average number of pupils in a school class. Unemployment rate. Air quality.
GDP per capita is one indicator among many that says something about the country’s or region’s inhabitants, but in itself it is just a measure of how much money is being moved around annually. And it is potentially quite misleading. You could have a high GDP per capita and a poor population, if all the money went to large cooperations and billionaires.
I am not saying that everything is rosy in the EU, but just that there are also other important indicators and that it is a lot more complicated than just looking at GDP per capita across the entire EU.
> Even the EU is a lot of different countries. Some of them quite poor, and some of them wealthier also with high GDP per capita.
All poorer than Mississippi per-capita
Not sure if you still conflate "poor" with "GDP/capita". If you do, that is an incorrect statement. Mississippi's GDP/capita is lower than many EU members' (e.g. Luxembourg, Ireland, Denmark... ). If you look at purchasing power parity (PPP) it also becomes a lot more muddy.
Nonsense.
Mississippi: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPCPI
Belgium: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
And that is not counting the substantial safety net that your average European has. I would MUCH rather live in Belgium than Mississippi, and I say this as an American.
I think he meant mixed Europe with Canada, which would have made the statement true.
Have you lived in Mississippi? How about Belgium?
Or are you basing that on what you see on social media?
Not GP, but: Belgium and Louisiana. And I’d pick Belgium again in a heartbeat, even if you removed all of the non-political (e.g. climate) differences.
Different stroke for different folks but looking at immigration flows between countries on a per capita basis, average preferences are clear
Yet there are many places in Europe I would rather live in than Mississippi. That’s America in hard mode.
The best thing about living in Mississippi is that you have absolute freedom to move to another State where the benefits of living in the US are much easier to realize.
Still people live in Missisippi. Starting a new life somewhere else is easy when you are a rich well-off employee in tech.
My point was that many of the oft-argued benefits of living in the US are relatively difficult to access in Mississippi. But if one finds themselves in that position it is relatively easy to improve their lot even if they are poor and don’t work in tech.
Been there, done that, and know many others that have.
Did you miss the bit about freedom of movement in the EU
The “freedom of movement” in the EU is considerably more difficult and limited in practice than what exists in the US.
40-50% of US citizens live in a different State than the one they are native to. 4-5% of EU citizens live in a different country than the one they are native to. That is a very large disparity.
GDP is flow, there is also stock.
Source?
And yet I expect the QOL for the median French person to be higher than the median Mississipian.
An economy is there for the people. The people in Europe seem to have a higher quality of life than those on the other side of the Atlantic, don't you think?
Outside a handful of places, the standard of living is unambiguously higher in the US. Average Americans have insane incomes (~45% of US households earn >$100,000) and can afford many things the average European cannot. Many types of lifestyle spending Americans think of as “normal” is definitely not normal in Europe.
Quality of life has few objective measures beyond standard of living. One man’s “quality of life” is another man’s oppressive conformity and risk averseness. American culture places an enormous value on self-actualization and trades comfort and certainty to get it. Average Europeans demonstrably would not make this trade in many cases. Neither is objectively correct.
I think Europe may have had a comparable or better quality of life at one time allowing for the cultural differences. As someone who has spent a lot of time on both sides of the Atlantic, I don’t think that has been true for well over a decade. The slow impoverishment of Europe has become noticeable to American eyes in a way it wasn’t before.
What are examples of things the average European cannot afford?
Air conditioning
Plenty of that in Europe - more like there is resistance in some countries against it.
I obviously said that in jest, an air conditioner is not expensive nor is it that expensive to run if you keep the set temperature within reason. The question itself is disingenuous. There is no one thing, because whatever the thing, there is a cheap knockoff available. It’s the quality of all things.
A cheap Android phone can do all the things an iPhone can, but the experience is worse. How do you quantify that?
I would urge Europeans to visit the US and stay at an AirBNB outside of a city to see how people live. I’ve done the same in reverse. Could I have a similar lifestyle to what I have in the US? Yes. But only with my American salary. This is the point that is being made here. There is nothing that Europe lacks. The problem is the numbers and what is available to the median household.
So what characterises the lifestyle you mean that the median US household has but not the median European household?
A bigger house, a bigger car, a second car, a second home, more eating out, more vacations abroad, more charity spend, I can go on, but I think you get the idea. You can try to write this off as cultural differences, but if we're being honest, that's just cope.
The idea that economic growth is irrelevant is nonsense.
https://econofact.org/factbrief/fact-check-has-the-economic-...
I, for example, haven't owned a car in decades, no need or interest.
Size of homes, yes, certainly different, but population density is also different. In super expensive places in Europe you'd pay more for less compared to the US (London comes to mind).
Charity spent - social model is different.
Agree that economic growth matters, though, but I would rather look at less cultural, political or physically linked indicators (e.g., cancer survival rates).
> The people in Europe seem to have a higher quality of life
Absolutely not, most places in Europe outside of a few rich countries like Switzerland and Liechtenstein and maybe a few flagship cities seem very low-QoL compared to similarly sized population centers in the US.
I think this may be partially about perception. I have been to the US over ten times. The first time I went to the US as a teenager, I was surprised how poor the US looks outside rich neighborhoods. Crumbling infrastructure, 80 year olds still working at supermarkets because they couldn't afford a living, many overweight people, most of the food sold in supermarkets is over-processed junk, and it is a car hellhole (can't walk or cycle to many places). I have also travelled most of Europe and with a few exceptions, European cities/villages look greener, more walkable, the people look healthier, people retire timely, etc.
There is also really weird segregation, like neighborhoods where only African-American people live. We once walked into a large restaurant and people looked at us in shock. There were only black people in the restaurant and by the shock on their faces, a family of white people walking in must have been rare occurrence. They were super kind, but it also was very weird.
> The first time I went to the US as a teenager, I was surprised
How many years ago was this? Because over the past 20 years things have gotten better in the US and worse in EU, steadily.
How many years ago was this? Because over the past 20 years things have gotten better
Last time was 15 years ago, though family has been as recent as a few years ago and havent's seen a much of a change change. Also, in many ways, the last 20 years is quite a bad example to pick, since wealth of everyone under the 90th percentile was the same in ~2017-2018 as in ~2007:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
Recent years are better though.
gotten better in the US and worse in EU, steadily
Not GDP at PPP, it's same-same: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4NLV!,f_auto,q_auto:...
Food quality used to be better in Europe but that's flipped, except France which still has some things better (eg French dairy is still better than US dairy)
Average (and probably 10th percentile) retiree is much richer in US. Yes we have higher variance but the mean is much higher too
Europe also has racial ghettos, it's just different groups
I wouldn’t say the quality of life is higher. Incomes are lower, taxes higher and we know disposable income is linked to quality of life to a degree.
Also, GDP per capita is what pays taxes. Taxes pay for social programs and infrastructure.
The EU is going to have a lot of trouble paying for social programs if its economy is in the dumps.
How do we measure quality of life?
Life expectancy? Infant mortality? Paid parental leave? Gun deaths? Incarceration rate? Income equality? Voter participation? Child poverty?
By any of these measures US falls far behind Europe
I mean the best way to measure QOL is to see which countries people want to migrate to. The hurdle to do so is high for most people, so they pay a significant cost to get their preference.
If you adjust for population size and limit just to high income countries, the US comes out on top.
Is that why they're electing far-right parties at an unprecedented rate?
> Is that why they're electing far-right parties at an unprecedented rate?
According to a recent Guardian article, the reasons are immigration and the far-right's ability to masterfully tell a story how things were better in the idealized past.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/24/nearly-quar...
Perception is reality in people's minds and therefor shapes reality, but it isn't necessarily true.
Yes, it has nothing to do with how the current left-leaning government has been ruling. Couldn’t be that at all.
You have transmogrified the conversation from one of comparing the US and Europe (where we started) to Left/Right in Europe.
I don't get it.
A lot of that comes from the wars that the USA started in the middle east.
Sorry, but you are just talking out of your, well whatever. E.g. in The Netherlands we have mostly had right-leaning or right-wing governments in the last few decades [1] and still right-wing populists are very popular. It's more that xenophobia is a disease that spreads very easily over and over again. Combine this with refuge crises, partially caused by the US (e.g. the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and knock-on effects), partially caused by proximity to a lot of countries with continuous instability (the middle east, North Africa). Finally, add some Russian disinformation campaigns on top and this is what you get.
Many Europeans are better off than a few decades ago. Heck, many European countries were still under authoritarian rule until a few decades ago (East Europe, Spain, Greece, etc.).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cabinets_of_the_Nether... <- note that 'liberal' in NL has a different meaning than 'liberal' in the US.
"Dammit why don't the voters realize how much better their lives are!!! Must be xenophobia then"
I get that people always want a simple answer and vilifying your political opponents feeds the ego.
Clearly Europeans don't feel like things are better than a few decades ago. Any politicians who ignores that or blames something like xenophobia has blinders on.
Most likely that is more caused by fear of mass immigration (which is valid) and propaganda on social media.
Yeah compare the GDP per capita of Mississippi to Germany and then tell me which has a better quality of life.
Germany, not even comparable lol. Affordable healthcare, clean living spaces, decent wages for the majority of people. Also, Mississippi has the highest gun death rate in the US.. Not sure how much feeling safe should factor into QoL for you but that's a pretty significant one in my book
Clean living spaces? Have you lived in Germany? How about petty crime? Government bureaucracy? Employment opportunities? Cost of housing?
Have you been to Mississippi? Have you seen the middle class suburbs?
Most gun crime is limited to a small geographic area either the rest have no having low gun crime.
I'll have what he's having.
Let's disregard all negatives and compare to some made up boogeyman of Germany.
Tell me you’ve never lived in Germany without telling me you’ve never lived in Germany.
I’m not saying it’s terrible but to pretend it doesn’t have problems is pure fantasy
I have lived in Germany for five years and your parent poster is right. Scandinavian countries and The Netherlands are generally better. But Germany is a great country to live in with high living standards.
I've lived in Germany and all the problems are listed are real. Pretending otherwise is silly
You can literally ask any llm on objective living standards and not one will suggest Mississippi.
This answer is 2 seconds away from you yet you still stand by American exceptionalism.
My country has lots of successful companies, subsidies for startups and funding available. Second highest by some metrics in terms of innovation in the world.
Truth is though none of it matters if the planet goes up in flames.
Or if the population decides they won't breed any longer. Which is the problem that's going to play out much faster.
I am European, and I share this sentiment. I also think that's it's not only about preventing advancements, but also trying to kill the industries that have been important to our economy.
I think it is alright. I actually had the choice to move to the US and I picked Europe instead.
If the measure of "winning" is chasing any current hype so that line goes up no matter the cost, I would rather not be in such a place.
Where in US and where in Europe?
I think that that Berlin is 100x better than Atlanta. But on the other hand, San Francisco is a million times better than Milan.
That totally depends. If you're focused on tech, then that's one thing. But if you want overall quality of life, I can't imagine this is true. Work/life balance seems way more balanced in pretty much any part of Europe. It also probably depends on one's age.
Correct.
> Where in US and where in Europe?
FAANG, west coast.
I firmly believe my quality of life where I live is many times better than in places like San Francisco or Seattle. In many ways, this was likely the best decision I ever made.
Not getting too specific to avoid having my HN account being in any way related to my real identity. In fact, it is about time I should create a new account and retire this one.
Have you been to San Francisco lately? Huge swathes of the city look like scenes from Resident evil
I think it's great. I think whatever you are doing in the US under Trump we do best doing the opposite.
I am so glad that I don't have to live in the US right now. If this is loosing we should do even more of it.
I disagree with the downvotes. As an American I ALSO think that we should be doing the opposite.
I wish the US built more stuff domestically. Too many regions seems to just be a circular service economy with little else going for them…
They build the fundamental building blocks of your (American) tech industry so you can scroll Reels at a higher speed.
Reading between the lines, I blame essentially the opposite thing: too much neoliberalism, preventing governments from enacting effective industrial policy (for ideological reasons, not as a choice for a plausible pathway to the desired outcomes). There is some but too little and too indirect. The focus is more on doing as little as possible than on really doing things, on giving permission and as-small-as-possible incentives for things to be done rather than causing them to be done (let alone straight up doing them - neolibs recoil in horror).
That's how I see it anyway, almost everyone else wants to double down on neoliberalism ie the negation of industrial policy. Except perhaps Frank Heemskerk from the article, who mentions wanting governments to create demand for made-in-europe chips so that fabs get built to supply that demand.
lose what?
Holy Kool-Aid.
I mean, Europe built ASML, for one.
Europe did not build ASML.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUV_lithography
You can read the history and learn that the technology was developed almost entirely by the US government Department of Energy, Intel, IBM, and several Japanese companies.
ASML is an important company but it is largely just an integrator of tech and process IP licensed from several different countries.
That's why it has so many competitors, right?
There are no competitors because USA doesn't need a competitor since it already owns most of the technology and is merely licensing it to ASML for production. The EUV light source itself is entirely researched, developed, and produced in California, for instance.
The EUV LLC research was US-funded, agreed. But the light source is Cymer, which ASML has owned since 2013. Its drive laser is Trumpf (Germany), and the optics are Zeiss (Germany). Nikon and Canon had access to the same public research and dropped EUV. The US had GCA, Perkin-Elmer and SVG, and lost the market anyway. If integration were the easy part, someone else would have done it. You are underselling what it means to perfect the machines by calling it "just integrating".
By that logic SpaceX is a German company. Liquid-fuel rocketry was researched and developed at Peenemünde, and the US brought in von Braun's team wholesale to build its program. SpaceX just integrates German IP. Or Google is Swiss. The web was invented at CERN; Google is just an integrator of European tech. Or Apple Silicon is British. ARM was designed in Cambridge; Apple just licenses it.
There will probably be one within the next decade. My bets are on China.
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I would say they do more damage to Europe then US
What’s wrong with Toyota?
They're referring to the idea that a particular Toyota pickup (Hilux) has become oddly popular for any group with the means and motive to bolt a machine gun onto a consumer vehicle.
Not from any wrongdoing on Toyota's part, but a combination of it being cheap, reliable, repairable, etc.
Nothing but it would be more ironic if they were driving Mercedes.
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That's because it's borderline impossible to produce SOTA chips in Europe (due to costs), and all non-SOTA fabs here already have what they need, and are reluctant to invest more (also due to costs).
The cost of SOTA chip production is so high that anything influenced by its physical location is a rounding error. It's why TSMC didn't think twice about building a water-guzzling factory in the middle of a desert: building an extra water treatment plant is pocket change.
Except Intel has Fab 34 in Ireland which would say it's not borderline impossible.
Ireland is a very different jurisdiction.
Very different from Europe? It is part of Europe.
Legally.
Yes, legally and geographically and in every other way Ireland is part of Europe.
Strange that all make the link between AI and the low number of fabs / low nm fabs. None of the AI companies have their own production, so indeed none would be expected to buy ASML machines.
as an european, europe have become lazy (even more so), and tax and stupid goverment policies limits innovation. It would be interesting to see how long, this trend can continue, because at the moment europe is so far behind the US and China, and just keeps on failling further behind.
> ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
That's quite the statement, considering there's still more than a quarter left in 2026.
I doubt an order from ASML today would be delivering this side of 2028
Not really, they know their customers and the roadmaps. Nobody puts in a surprise order.
Guess the EU's self-sufficiency push for chips is running into ASML's global market realities. Or they just found another big customer.
ASML selling zero in Europe by 2026 is a pretty wild forecast. Really shows how fast supply chains and geopolitical strategy can pivot.
this doesn't really make sense to me. fundamentally, if naively, price is a function of supply and demand. if there is no demand in Europe - then there is a price problem. but i don't like the expectation that governments should subsidize mega corporations profits. the article doesn't really convince me the investment is beneficial to europeans.
>if there is no demand in Europe - then there is a price problem
A price problem in terms of it not being worth the cost... sure.. but that's because there are little/no fabs in Europe. Lowering the price, even by magic, doesnt really seem like it would matter.
>but i don't like the expectation that governments should subsidize mega corporations profits.
To be clear they are asking the EU to kickstart chip fabrication. Which is a chicken-and-egg problem. A fab can't tool up without orders. Orders wont come without tooling. It's in the EU's interest to fabricate chips locally.
> It's in the EU's interest to fabricate chips locally.
Is it though? I'd put forward that it's in the EU's interest to foster good international relationships. Countries can get away without domestic strategic industries if they can play nice with others.
Good relationships won't do much when China puts the squeeze on Taiwan. Obviously there are other fabs in other countries, but the EU won't be the only market looking for alternatives.
ASML reporting zero sales for 2026 already? Either their crystal ball is broken or Europe's fab plans are seriously wobbly.
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.
Not an accident, sell to the needful.
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.
China is where the demand is. Sell to China and stop being an ass and US's puppet.
No subsidies and government intervention aren’t bad things. Even Trump realise that.
Sounds like the export controls are really starting to bite, or ASML's just flexing their geopolitical muscle. Tough times ahead for EU fabs.
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?
The European Commission strikes again!
Because they know ASML's paradigm is ending, they are prepping for what's next
Lots of mentions of "EU regulations" in this discussion, but not a single concrete case of a regulation that would be to blame.
The combination of Trump's Iranian shitshow and Putin's Ukranian madness, means energy prices in Europe are currently insane and predicted to keep rising. Uncertainty due to the possibility of war is not exactly conducive to investing in fabs either.
Europe has been deindustrializing for decades, and IMO that's had more to do with profitability than anything else. That hasn't changed.
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.
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.
the nvidia / china ban worked out great for stopping them from developing ai ...
"During a gold rush, sell shovels."
They don't call us Europoors for nothing
So true it hurt mate...
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.
> China still does not have many companies on the level of American technology firms
Maybe in terms of valuation. In terms of tech itself, I would say they are pretty close, few years behind maybe with gap closing
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.
>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
> 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.
> The world would be better without Facebook and Instagram in particular.
Maybe, but it's also better to have our own alternatives for those than to rely in so many cases on US tech only
But Europeans still just use Facebook and Instagram...
You remind me of a new research article on how dumb the new social media make 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)
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?
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
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.
America and China cannot build ASML or anything close or they would have (China may soon). Europe is the same as ever. America relies on tech software which is getting replaced very quickly by AI. China relies on cheap labour which will get more expensive as they become more prosperous.
> 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 mean the EU got its diplomacy so badly wrong that it sparked one of the deadliest wars this century in Europe and the EU countries appear to be rearming in preparation for the state of war spreading. The EU seem to be in the process of destabilising the state that controls the largest cache of nuclear weapons in existence.
The project has not scored well on matters of war and peace. And there is still a far too likely possibility here that after re-arming and in an era of war the Europeans fall back to their old tricks and descend into a state of war against each other again, given that the adults keeping them peaceful seem to have left the building.
> I mean the EU got its diplomacy so badly wrong that it sparked one of the deadliest wars this century in Europe
You're going to have to really spell it out for us how Russia invading Ukraine is the EU's fault.
How could they not share the blame? Is the EU so institutionally weak it has no power to influence events in Europe? I don't see how they could be that ineffective.
Idiot
> 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.
It’s orchestrated. A few sock puppets and a ton of useful idiots.
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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.
We've now learned that this isn't true for all migrant groups, and it has been an extremely costly mistake to make. Demographic replacement can't work positively if the productivity of migrants is below of the original demographic, and actually makes the situation worse. Europe might have learned this too late, but at least now EU and most European countries are changing course.
The migrants Europe is taking in now are literally negative drains on society rn - I believe their children too. You are making the problems worse
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.
> 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.
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So currently europe is exposed to russia-ukraine, us-iran, and shortly china-taiwan. This is not a great place to be in.
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".
It's all because of protectionism. Business got lazy.
Don't forget the airlines taking the longer more expensive route!
Yeah, weakness and appeasement gets that.
What would you do differently? Having to own the consequences, too, remember.
I would not build nordstream 2. I would not turn off nuclear reactors and build pan EU 1 type nuclear reactor project. I would put sanctions on Russia the moment they invaded ukraine the first time. Build armies and heavy industries before second invasion. Make EU PRO business. MOre interesting tax incentives and reformed retirement plans and social services, because this is what will drag most countries do ground. 0 consequences when we look back Def would try to get off russian gas - Schröder is basically traitor to the whole EU.
No, but it is in times like this that one needs to look forward and invest in the future.
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.
Tell me a better place to be in ? Please don't tell me the US.
US. Or China if you are Chinese
Both in longer term ofc
China perhaps... but US? really? personally I can't think of any single person who grew up (like me) in Europe and would choose US as a destination.
From my point of view is as awful as it can get: stark inequality, literally hundreds of thousands of homeless people roaming, no basic health care, but to be honest just the number of guns pro capita is enough to keep me and most of other Europeans away for good, it's just insane for what we're accustomed to. And I'm not even referring to the dystopian situation worsened daily by the current administration.
Unless you're the kind of person who confuses absolute numbers (e.g. money you can spend per month) for actual wealth / quality of life / freedoms / rights protection / etc. Then perhaps USA is the right place, I guess?
Homeless:
FWIW, FEANTSA estimated over 1.2MM homeless in Europe in their most recent report[1]. That's over a population of 515MM so ~23 per 10k population. Us 746k homeless is roughly 22 per 10k population. I suspect that differences in methodology will overwhelm that 1/10k difference, but the order of magnitude seems similar.
1/3 of the US homeless are unsheltered ("Living Rough" in the FEANTSA terminology). A quick skim of the FEANTSA report did not show any countries breaking out their rough-sleepers from the rest of the data. I do suspect that this number is higher than in the EU.
1: https://www.feantsa.org/files/Themes/Overview/2024/Rapport_-...
Perhaps in USA is very much unevenly distributed? I visted a couple of big cities in California and the situation is abysmal, I don't know of any place in Europe even close to that, still have to see campings in the middle of a big city. I could't see the same in other cities I visited, e.g. Las Vegas and Miami.
The numbers seem to say it's the same in theory, in practice my experience is that it very much doesn't _feel_ the same.
> still have to see campings in the middle of a big city
I saw that in London, in Rome and afair in Berlin
Not to the same extend as camping villages in LA but still. But I also didn't go that much inside those bad parts of cities in Europe, in US I drove through them
It's actually the extent which is the measure here. I don't think a population with 0% homelessness ever existed nor is even possible, it is just endemic to human societies, like e.g. nomadism is.
More in general, the feel you get as an European visiting the US is that either you're in, or completly out of the society. There's not much of a grey area, more like a quantum leap.
Brussels too. There's some US cities that seem to be exceptionally bad, in a league of their own, but that's probably still a small fraction of all the homeless.
> I can't think of any single person who grew up (like me) in Europe and would choose US as a destination.
I can and all of them are from EU.
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.
Sure are holding their own against the supposedly much richer Europe at this moment.
That is because contrary to what Russia claims, it is not a war between EU and Russia, but between Ukraine and Russia. EU support is there but still minuscule compared to what EU could do.
Ukraine isn't in the EU and the USA has a duty to help Ukraine but doesn't because they (choose your favourite) [have been compromised by Russia] [are too weak] [can't afford it] [don't have enough weapons left because they used them helping Israel commit genocide] [are scared of losing votes for a pedophile] [all of the above]
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.
Yemen, one of the poorest countries on earth, closed an important EU trade route for over a year and we couldn't fix it. Defending your land vs protecting your trade interests are different things.
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 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.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
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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
Then go private and get the same treatment as the USA. Or wait 16 weeks and get it for free.
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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.
> because they leave them on UA plates
which EU country permits non-EU plates (and insurance?) indefinitely?
> 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.
There is no such thing as moral obligation when it comes to politics and national interest.
There is if you ever want to negotiate a nuclear arms-control deal again. None of this would be an issue if Ukraine had kept their nukes.
They had that treaty that they kinda forgot about already..
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).
Measured response. Remember that you don't want all out war. Support your allies, don't kill everyone in the entire world.
> 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.
the geopolitical takes on this website are something else man. I would say don't bother, but letting this type of rhetoric go would also be unfortunate
Yeah, there are a lot of similar bad takes everywhere, not just on this website. This particular one seems to be reasonably common in finance type spaces. I think it presuposes a "correct" outcome to the war and then just tries to take shortcuts to that outcome despite that outcome not being desireable for the parties that get a vote. Its especially frustrating when it ignores the instability of the outcome, which is true in this case. After all both sides have already demonstrated a willingness to fight to try to change the outcome.
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?
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.
Ukraine is winning. Defending your own territory is natural. Ukraine don't want a war, Russia can stop whenever they want it to stop. What is Russia's end game? look weak and easy to beat and have to threaten to use nukes to feel like a big man?
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.
Previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49844663
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823628
(we eventually merged them hither)
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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)
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No? If that’s common knowledge that’s a common lie. It’s not really growing much but there is no collapse occurring. And if you look more specifically at countries some are growing rapidly
If you don’t grow then you are shrinking as percentage of the worlds economy becoming more and more irrelevant.
You need to travel rather than just hearing about boogeyman stories online. Most of the world is relatively poor. Who do you think is about to catch up? Indonesia? India? Have you seen these places? Their economy is big largely due to their population size.
Lol you don't know anything about me or what I have seen of the world.
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This is because of globalisation. It's cheaper to use their labour. The alternative is the EU using its military might to oppress other nations.
If you visited 3rd world you would realise how much you take for granted. But this is a random fresh account made to respond to this.
You’re defining collapse in a very unique way here
If you stagnate economically then you are shrinking. Inflation eats up the purchasing power and you get poorer. In a lot of European countries the purchasing power of the population has been decimated over the last 20 years. Only a few countries in the east are the exception.
A lot of the "growth" is debt and money going in circles. We'll see how much of it actually stays around next year. So far the US already has to bail out the datacentre expansion by funding transmission lines upgrades instead of asking for money for it from the companies.
Please cite comments like this. It's not helpful to the conversation to make highly opinionated statements.
This is not opinionated. The financial circle between AI companies has been discussed lots of times already, it's everywhere you want to check. Grid funding is here https://www.energy.gov/articles/energy-department-announces-...
Seller financing is not a financial circle. It's how you buy a car, sometimes a house.
Cite -> provide citations for
Yeah, I have always used those interchangeably, do you feel like they're different?
What single source would satisfy you that the current US economy is a Ponzi scheme? I don't think it's really provable or falsifiable until long after the fact. We could start by pointing to the bond market or the price of gas?
Once you go that far, you'll just decide all currency is a Ponzi scheme.
The rumours of our demise have been greatly exaggerated and will continue to do so.
The $23 trillion economy "collapsing" is quite amusing.
That sounds like information from cope propaganda.
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Are you saying the surgeons and phamacists practicing their trade on the streets are not an enrichment?
Europe has no money.
https://www.usdebtclock.org/
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.
> The average salary (not including RSUs/Bonus) in Dublin's Silcon Docklands is north of €130k
That's quite a bit short to buy an EUV machine.
But of course, the parent commenter was not talking about salaries, because ASMLs products are not B2C.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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...
I'm referring to the countries borders consisting of sea, not neighbouring countries. More to the point, all industries I'm referring to were established prior under the constraints of the stated population.
The population of the 26 counties only hit 5 million in 2021, in the midst of lockdown. It then surged massively with global instability, with a 2.2 per cent increase in 2022 alone with the first round of Ukrainian refugees forming the majority of the 117,000 added to the population count.
It makes sense since the AI in Europe is being regulated to the neck and investments in data centers, chip factories are much more expensive and difficult to operate.
There's a lot more market opportunities in China and USA...
As someone who works at a small data center on AI topics, that's a bit misleading. (Speaking for myself, not my employer of course.) Regulation is not a bottleneck, supply is. We are buying as many GPUs as we can and are waiting months for them, and still barely keep up with demand. And the government support, while it could always be more ;-), feels fairly generous compared to other fields at the moment.
We would probably buy slightly worse value European GPUs if they were available right now.
There is regulation and people moan about it. But realistically the AI act and other laws give us legal certainty (a German favorite) and the requirements are not so onerous. We pay a lawyer to figure it out and he tells us to slap a few "AI generated" labels on our website and to have a couple of procedures in the drawer and that's it. ISO 9001, 27001, C5 or whatever you can get as a cloud provider are orders of magnitude more hassle.
If you’re building an AI data center, you are not a customer of ASML. You are a customer of NVIDIA, who is a customer of TSMC, who is a customer of ASML.
Building a competitor to TSMC is definitely something Europeans would like, but it’s also a multi-decade undertaking.
Where are you seeing that it’s being heavily regulated? The only thing I’ve seen is land procurement but that’s been a European problem for centuries now.
GDPR and other privacy related regulations have existed for basically a decade at this point so it should not be a surprise that companies need to follow those laws.
Anecdotally, there is data center and energy buildout talk here in the Netherlands, a country where land is the top priority for everyone.
Europe might not have a “frontier” lab but this is absolutely investment happening at breakneck pace.
Why is this a surprise?
No other country outside the US and China really even matter when it comes to AI. Cohere and Mistral are important labs, but in no way do they make Canada or France significant in any way shape or form.
In 2026, Europe is great for a holiday. That's about it.
Europe is also great place to live, which is much more important than being leaders in AI race to generate more wealth for your mega corporations.
I’m european, and I don’t buy into the idea that profit over everything is good.
I really like living in Europe (Sweden right now, but I lived in Czech, Estonia and I’m from the UK)…
But, I think unless we do some wealth generating activities, we won’t be such a nice place to live in future.
Our power on the world stage will decrease, our infrastructure will start to be neglected due to lack of investment, quality will diminish in most areas…
I say this because that’s how the UK feels in most areas (outside of London), a bunch of “new flashy stuff” to prove that “we still got it” but it’s incredibly low quality while the actual infrastructure crumbles to bits.
> Our power on the world stage will decrease, our infrastructure will start to be neglected due to lack of investment, quality will diminish in most areas…
I believe you've chosen the wrong tense there
Haha, fair point.
The EU is no longer the largest economic bloc in the world, but that happened due to Brexit.
AI labs buy a lot of photolithography machines?
Nobody cares about non-free countries like the US. AI in the rest of the world is the only AI that matters to us.
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.
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.
US companies are to blame and history will remember that.