Have you heard of ASML? NXP?

Ignorant comment

Please don't move the goalposts. What computer parts does ASML or NXP make?

ASML only makes the lithography machines, 85% of which go outside the EU (let that sink in). And then fabs in Taiwan, Korea or the US use those ASML machines to etch US IP for computer chips. EU doesn't make any computer parts domestically.

And NXP mostly makes various microcontrollers and small chips, not high margin IP decenter centric parts like ASICS, FPGAs, CPUs or GPUs.

So not only are you the ignorant one here, but you also have the audacity to insult others with so much confidence.

@dwa3592 below. Firstly, why are you moving the goalposts in bad faith again just to stir an argument? What does that have to do with my original comment?

And secondly, there's other lithography machines out there, not just ASML.

And thirdly, the IP Nvidia, AMD, etc develop to etch on silicone via ASML machines makes them more valuable than ASML.

Fourthly, repeating my "let that sink in" phrase is just childish and low-IQ trolling, unworthy of this platform.

Europe is currently hosed because we made the mistake of trying to develop economies complementary to the US and china.

That was a big strategic mistake. In the US case it was borne of the mistaken belief that we shared values and were partners.

But don’t mistake the situation for lack of innovation of capability. Europe is currently adapting, but I think the success of Ukraine is one reason to be optimistic that current adversity might actually leave us better off in the long run.

Corrupt countries with broken legal systems tend not to fare that well in the longer run.

>Europe is currently hosed because we made the mistake of trying to develop economies complementary to the US and china.

NO, it's hosed because it's not competitive and slept on the wheel at several key digital economical revolutions plus sleeping at the wheel at preventing obvious geopolitical issues (gas dependence to Russia, losing auto industry to China, losing semiconductor industry, losing SW industry, etc).

You can't be an economic leader if you keep losing on all fronts and only be a leader at how much welfare your spending.

> the mistaken belief we shared values and were partners.

We do share. US and a lot of latin america is mostly European immigrants and European culture, making our cultures are much more similar than the african and middle eastern ones the EU has been importing and adopting. Where we differ is that US still has free speech and isn't devolving into a stasi police state that arrests people for Tweets that the political establishment find uncomfortable.

> might actually leave us better off in the long run.

How? EU's economy has been pretty much stagnant since 2019 when you account for inflation loss.

> But don’t mistake the situation for lack of innovation of capability. Europe is currently adapting,

How? Where is Europe's Nvidia and AMD? Where is Europe's TSMC? ASML can't feed an entire continent.

>>ASML only makes the lithography machines

Woah! only lithography machines???? it is literally impossible to make any device capable of running anything close to AI without ASML. Let that sink in.

Funnily ASML owes its current success partly to US funded research (straight from Wikipedia):

> 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.[12]

Why are you acting childish and petty? I said EU hasn't got AI compute manufacturing(aka no equivalent IP to Nvidia and AMD and no equivalent to TSMC or Samsung fabs), not that it doesn't have lithography machines manufacturing.

Surely you understand that while you can have the latter, you can also lack the former.

In a recent podcast, it was summarized as:

ASM (International) makes machines that add material to a silicon wafer (deposition).

ASML makes machines that remove material from said wafers (lithography, etching)

(I was a bit surprised that's not combined in 1 machine. But let's move on)

Then Besi makes machines to stack / interconnect / package those ICs into a package. I'm assuming pick & place machines are other companies' turf.

The above are all Dutch companies, operating a pretty important section of the tech stack.

Iirc there were (& probably still are) some IC fabs in Europe, but mostly older nodes (like useful for microcontrollers used by car manufacturers. Wikipedia has a list). So for SOTA smartphone SoCs it's off to Taiwan (TSMC), South Korea (Samsung) or China (who makes everything, including smartphones & the chips going in there).

So as far as EU goes, the capabilities are mostly there. Skilled workforce? Check. Money? This is a rich continent.

What's missing is the guts to say "hey, let's dump €100B into this & make ourselves some laptop & server CPUs!".

But now the important thing: several of such initiatives are starting to bear fruit, and b) confidence that EU can do such things, is growing.

As for bureaucracy / red tape... sigh... (won't be fixed any time soon)

>In a recent podcast, it was summarized as: ....

Yes, all true, and all things I didn't disagree with because I wasn't talking about that.

The point I was talking about you only addressed to some extent in a line below that:

>What's missing is the guts to say "hey, let's dump €100B into this & make ourselves some laptop & server CPUs!".

Yeah exactly, the EU doesn't have computer manufacturing capabilities (just like I said 5 layers up) and it never will because it doesn't invest and also doesn't attract investors to invest.

>So as far as EU goes, the capabilities are mostly there. Skilled workforce? Check.

No they're not. We don't have the skilled workers for that. Nobody in EU knows how to design Nvidia and AMD level GPUs and Altera and Xilinx levels of FPGAs that power AI datacenters. Nobody in EU knows how to make competitive 2nm fabs, otherwise EU fabs would have already bought ASML EUV machines and updated their ancient processes to the highly more profitable nodes instead of being stuck making cheap legacy nodes for cars and white goods. Those old nodes are still important to have to an extent, but ask yourself, would you rather sell a die for 10k a pop or sell 1000 dies for 10 cents a pop? Would you rather make more money or less money?

> Money? This is a rich continent.

Money is meaningless if you're not using it right. China is pushing to beat the EU and they have less money than the EU.

The World's Most Important Machine ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0

Most important machine ... built on US IP, subject to US export restrictions, used to manufacture high value US IP, in factories outside the EU, so profits of those chips goes to US. A point I have addressed over two times already.

Also ASML even threatened to leave the NL if the Dutch government doesn't do what they want on taxes and labor policies. So having only a single card to play that EU can loose at any time, it's not putting EU tech sovereignty argument in a good light.

The "wahabout ASML" that keeps being spammed by people here, isn't proof of EU compute and AI sovereignty. It's the exception which is why it's the only thing people can mention on EU tech and they DDoS you with it as if that changes anything.

Are people here that petty that they can't stay on topic and argue in good faith and instead need to hijack your argument to go on offtopic whataboutism for a cheap gotcha spamming "whatabout ASML" on unrelated arguments?

>ASML only makes the shovel making machines