Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Europe Is Trying to Reclaim Its Lost Chipmaking Glory

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 131 posts

Re: Europe Is Trying to Reclaim Its Lost Chipmaking Glory

#101

Post by nine_k »

lnsru wrote: post #3

Will I get lots of rotten tomatoes telling, that this is a huge waste of money? Chips production is one thing, but the whole ecosystem matters. So these chips produced in Europe must be sent back to Asia for integration in final products. Or a miracle will happen and European Union will resurrect manufacturing? I doubt, because manufacturing means missing climate goals.

The funny thing is that the key machines to produce chips are built in Germany and Netherlands. Not in Korea, not on Taiwan.

The robots that assemble the electronic circuits are also largely built in EU. (And, of course, in Japan, too.)

What made Apple to order their iPhone production from a Chinese company was not the availability of relevant hardware elsewhere; certainly the US has it. It was the nimbleness of that company, the willingness to move fast and make things available fast. Paradoxically, less red tape and less corporate shenanigans. Cheap labor? Maybe, but it did not appear to be the major factor, and wages at Foxconn were / are not as low, by EU standards even.

And this is compared to US; in Germany, things would be even slower, to say nothing of France (which is a real industrial powerhouse nevertheless).

Re: Europe Is Trying to Reclaim Its Lost Chipmaking Glory

#102

Post by jollybean »

nine_k wrote: post #97
azinman2 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But China is doing things no one else is doing. Requiring a local partner, giving up your IP to them and/or “security reviews”, not letting through many companies to give their own home grown a chance (eg Facebook, Google, etc), currency controls, currency manipulation, exploiting the global postal system to facilitate being export-oriented, inaccessible courts that never punish IP theft and abuse, the list is quite…

In short, they are playing the Mercantilist card which Britain played about four centuries ago, and US, a couple of centuries ago. International free trade is profitable in the long term if everybody is buying your goods, which was the case for the US and UK a century ago. China is using the resulting situation to its great benefit.

Germany is trying to do the mercantilism thing as well.

I think the fundamental differentiation is the degree of state involvement, Han nationalism etc..

I don't want to use this word because it's a trigger and possibly misleading but 'Fascist' might actually be the best word to describe what China is right now. The economy is not centrally planned, but managed in coordination with major actors who often seem to want to participate in 'nation building'. There's a strong Han-nationalism among the people, very strong sense of national identity, mass propaganda, ethnocentrism. All of those later qualities are an important part of what is happening, but we in the West tend to think of them as 'cultural' issues. But really it's part of the overall picture. I think a lot of workers wouldn't be working quite as hard if there weren't some kind of national/cultural glory in it.

Re: Europe Is Trying to Reclaim Its Lost Chipmaking Glory

#103

Post by mensetmanusman »

shimonabi wrote: post #22
aruggirello wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that wouldn't count as European, after Brexit :-)

Stop mixing Europe with the EU. EU is a few decades old failed experiment, Europe exists for thousands of years. There is only talk of subsidizing EU chip production, because a few German car executives got worried.

It has succeeded in preventing an intra-EU war.

Re: Europe Is Trying to Reclaim Its Lost Chipmaking Glory

#105

Post by imtringued »

shimonabi wrote: post #22
aruggirello wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that wouldn't count as European, after Brexit :-)

Stop mixing Europe with the EU. EU is a few decades old failed experiment, Europe exists for thousands of years. There is only talk of subsidizing EU chip production, because a few German car executives got worried.

The euro is a failed experiment. The EU is fine.

Re: Europe Is Trying to Reclaim Its Lost Chipmaking Glory

#106

Post by shimonabi »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #103
shimonabi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop mixing Europe with the EU. EU is a few decades old failed experiment, Europe exists for thousands of years. There is only talk of subsidizing EU chip production, because a few German car executives got worried.

It has succeeded in preventing an intra-EU war.

Wars are economic. The € currency makes the southern countries hate the northern ones and vice-versa.

Greece was devastated after the German-enforced austerity after the 2008 economic crisis. We the EU taxpayers had to give the biggest loan in history to the most bankrupt country in history, so that they could repay the German banks, who overinvested in Greece in the previous decade.

Re: Europe Is Trying to Reclaim Its Lost Chipmaking Glory

#107

Post by thu2111 »

arp242 wrote: post #83
shimonabi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop mixing Europe with the EU. EU is a few decades old failed experiment, Europe exists for thousands of years. There is only talk of subsidizing EU chip production, because a few German car executives got worried.

The British use "Europe" to refer to the mainland, often implying that Britain isn't part of it. It's not a coincidence they left the EU, and were ever only half-way in the EU. Is Britain part of Europe? Well, it's not a yes/no type of question. "In some ways, but not in others" would probably be the best answer.

No, the habit of conflating the EU with Europe is endemic in Brussels. It's got nothing to do with the UK. Just look at how EU leaders talk.

Re: Europe Is Trying to Reclaim Its Lost Chipmaking Glory

#108

Post by rsj_hn »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #90
totalZero wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have the technology to deal with those byproducts. It just costs money and takes energy.

Then one answer is to impose tariffs on end services and products, on nations that don’t meet the same environmental concerns. The tariffs should match the cost of said overhead.

Couldn't agree more. that would be a consistent position to hold as it wouldn't cause a net harm by driving manufacturing to places with terrible environmental records. It wouldn't be as good as sponsoring research and capital investment to create cleaner manufacturing processes, which would actually improve the situation.

The combination of rigid environmental/labor practices in the developed world with an equally fanatical devotion to unfettered cross-border capitol flows and 'trade' is systematically immiserating the West and leading to massive net environmental damage even though both of these goals: cosmopolitanism and environmentalism, are individually the darlings of western elites.

Re: Europe Is Trying to Reclaim Its Lost Chipmaking Glory

#109

Post by walligatorrr »

saveduaclick wrote: post #32
neximo64 wrote: post #9

As long as the principal idea behind the decision is statecraft (we need this to be onshored) vs lets make a genuinely better chip for customers it'll never work. There's a graveyard of EU decisions like this, having a non American owned AWS type company, etc, etc.

Europe is good at funding 1980s ideas, with stillborn well-connected development teams, using hard-earned tax payer money, with no results expected, just for bureaucratic self-service. Europe is not good at promoting growth on the other hand. Living standards have fallen in the last 20 years.

Then I must have been flying onboard of a bureaucratic self-service. Airbus is a huge success resulting from coordinated European political will, funded by tax payer money in the form of qualified and talented workforce

Re: Europe Is Trying to Reclaim Its Lost Chipmaking Glory

#110

Post by tremon »

gman83 wrote: post #17

Can someone explain to me why the knowhow that European companies like ASML have can't be used to build these foundries. Why do they need Intel or TSMC?

As several siblings have said, this is mainly about willingness/opportunity to invest. Many technical universities have their own fabs for research (I know of DIMES in Delft, IMEC in Gent/Leuven, NanoPhab in Eindhoven), so the capability is there, just not the scale.
Post reply on HN