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EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

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271–280 of 496 posts

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#271

EU has the tech. ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight. ASML is the world's largest photolithography systems manufacturer and the only one producing extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These EUV scanners are expensive as hell. Last years model costs $120 million per piece and you need 10-15 of them for TSMC gigafactory. TWINSCAN NXE:3400C (7 and 5 nm nodes, >170 wafers per hour) is probabl…

> TWINSCAN NXE:3400C is probably the most expensive machine in the world. Unfortunately no. A number of pieces of military hardware produced in bigger numbers will leave even that pricetag in the dust.

It's not wholly clear that aircraft carriers etc. should count as machines. What if we limit the definition to "something used to make other things"?

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#272
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech The EU lost leadership in all of them! (And some others!)

> aerospace Airbus is absolutely crushing Boeing in terms of quality. Granted, we are woefully behind on the 'space' part of aerospace. > energy CERN is anchored to the EU. ITER is anchored to the EU. We are world leaders in wind energy. > telecom Except for everyone in the West scrambling to replace Huawei with Ericsson tech. > drugs / biotech BioNtech made the first breakthrough on a COVID vaccine. The EU has many…

> Except for everyone in the West scrambling to replace Huawei with Ericsson tech.

That's entirely political and nothing to do with the tech. Huawei's tech is arguably better, cheaper (and available now).

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a deep question that is asked nowhere near enough. And when it is asked, my experience has been it's mostly been Americans doing the asking. Here's a story. I was once visiting Silicon Valley for work and getting dinner with a friend who lives there. I'm a Brit who lives in central Europe. On the way over I'd bought a copy of Der Spiegel, which likes to write tabloid-esque articles about the Power Of Tech Firm…

I run a tech company in the Netherlands. I can corroborate most of this. Giving employees equity in the Netherlands is nearly impossible without getting taxed to death. The position of the tax authority is that the sole reason you get equity, is because of your relationship as employee, and therefore the "gift of equity" is actually a form of salary, and therefore salary tax must be paid based on the value of the equ…

I"ll echo VC scarcity in NL as a main problem. Coming from Israel I really notice in NL bootstrapped Dutch companies of high quality that are quite happy serving the local market and maybe Belgium and that's about it. No expansion planned, or if one is planned it could take years and years. I read once its due to lack of ambition by Dutch entrepreneurs, but that isn't it. Without VC money its simply realistic to stay local; how are you gonna compete with U.S companies without money? Even the big names in NL like WeTransfer, Mollie, Bux, Bunq etc would have raised way more in Israel or the US. It's quite enough to raise a sizable 1st round in Israel, use connections + acquire traffic and customers to show growth, and then raise enormous subsequent rounds because you showed growth. I'm sure many Dutch entreprenuers could have done the same thing but it isn't possible for them without funding. So they "dream" small. There are probably a lot of missed chances in NL. On the other hand if the tech VC market implodes again Dutch companies won't be hurt as bad.

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#274
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TWINSCAN NXE:3400C is probably the most expensive machine in the world. Unfortunately no. A number of pieces of military hardware produced in bigger numbers will leave even that pricetag in the dust.

It's not wholly clear that aircraft carriers etc. should count as machines. What if we limit the definition to "something used to make other things"?

Most gigantic blast furnaces, or hydraulic instruments on record if you correct for inflation? Though, most things like these made little sense economically even back in the days they were built.

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#275
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the opposite happened in Russia and other ex-soviet countries. The factories were sold and dismantled under the pretense of “transitioning to market economy”.

They were non-competitive businesses producing outdated junk and in majority of cases there was no other way to survive apart of being sold for scrap. Some manufacturers that produced basic sellable goods survived (steel foundries, fertilizer makers)

This is not true, several precision mechanics factories (or parts of factories) in Hungary were producing for Western export and yet they let them rot apart.

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#276
post #222
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies rarely do basic research. Yes, there are exceptions.

Companies do plenty of research, just not basic, since they don’t need to: the government funds it instead. With money taxed from said companies, so...

Yeah, us peons don't pay any taxes and corporations don't evade them...

All those taxes are collected from companies, look at the nice graph that proves it:

https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/corporate-tax-ra...

I'm being ironic, the average corporate tax rate went from 40% in 1960 to 10% today.

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One might wonder if the EU has leadership capacity to be able to maintain domestic strategically important industries. Generalising from 40 years of EU history, I have little confidence. The top US and East Asian processor and semiconductor companies all are extremely successful in the marketplace, in addition to consuming government subsidies. Fostering a competitive market has not been the EU's forte. Indeed the EU…

I know nVidia bought Arm, but what is about DeepMind being lost as domestic industry? It raises to prominence after becoming a Google wholly owned subdiary. I have repeated multiple times in other comments that DeepMind's success is at least built on top of Google's tech and capital. Interesringly, Google's tech infrastructure were blueprinted by a lot of pioneers and two of the most well known are Urs Hozle and Luiz…

I assume, they meant the UK finally fully leaving the EU this year rather than the sale to Nvidia

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#278
post #174

Serious question: Why is the EU so far behind in tech company influence/leadership compared to the US and Asia? Europe has successful tech enterprises, but surely is capable of so much more on a global scale.

There's a good analysis video about it by TechAltar:

How Europe lost its tech companies (2017)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSU5MFPn6Zk

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#279
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the EU treats this as a strategic capability and not commercial, the spending is much less of a consideration. The advantage that the EU has is in fact ASML. No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet. [0] The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with…

Man, I wish I too shared such optimism in EU or other massive multi government bureaucratic organizations to pull something off like this in 2021. But sorry I simply don’t. From my experience with gov trying to do tech investment it’s going to go into the pockets of late career overpaid ‘executives’ with ‘industry experience’ and tons of (also overpaid and underqualified) contractors doing the same thing. Not the bri…

I think I share your concern -- it's a question of "is a top down order to develop some technology (with required investment to 'force' it to happen) the best way to achieve that?"

What often ends up happening is that because it's so "strategically important" and so much money has been directed towards it, you are obligated to have expensive ("experienced") people hired based on past reputation -- which may not be applicable to new technology, roadmaps get laid out which everyone has to say they're meeting successfully, and then at the end you find out somehow that it didn't produce what you wanted.

Versus, a more bottoms-up approach where you hopefully create the conditions that incentivize or make possible some technologies and technologists to succeed -- without knowing fully who exactly or what exactly.

I'm sure that both have some inefficiencies, but the 1st method is sure to pay the people who have already been successful. But then again, maybe for a relatively incremental advance in some technology, there are fewer unknowns and method #1 works ok.

Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

#280

EU has the tech. ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight. ASML is the world's largest photolithography systems manufacturer and the only one producing extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These EUV scanners are expensive as hell. Last years model costs $120 million per piece and you need 10-15 of them for TSMC gigafactory. TWINSCAN NXE:3400C (7 and 5 nm nodes, >170 wafers per hour) is probabl…

If the EU treats this as a strategic capability and not commercial, the spending is much less of a consideration. The advantage that the EU has is in fact ASML. No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet. [0] The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with…

We have been trying to help Infineon get onto its own feet for years and years, it just isn't happening. The investment it would take for competing with TSMC would require massive government support with very few benefits. Specialized chips with higher margins but older tech make more sense than mass production with the most advanced process.

Same with solar or battery tech, we have the tech and the people but economically it isn't feasible to have production in the EU.

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