They could get into chip dev for that amount of investment money. But of course EU will just waste the money as always.
As someone working in HPC and EU projects related to this subject, I don't think they'll waste it. Current HPC and processor push is very real now.
One of the main ways that states fund technological advances is exactly by promising to buy the results. This was one of the most important things in early IT - the fact that the US army was buying it at all. If the companies in that space would have had to live by selling their tech on the free market, no one would have been crazy enough to invest in it.
Both Moderna and BioNTech were funded and working on the mRNA technology before governments came with large orders for the vaccines.
And yes, while BioNTech and Moderna had been investing in mRNA before this, governments had been investing in mRNA research for many years. BioNTech itself has received significant investments from the EU, at least since 2019.
Not to mention, there is no way to take this vaccine without specialized medical care, so even if people could buy it, they would still need medical care as well, which most people in most of the world get from the state anyway.
- obscure software and programming paradigms/libraries
- one-off's
- projects that create only reports, papers and recommendations
- endless recreations of the same software over the years and decades
- plain dumb projects
- attempts at recreating other people's software (e.g. U.S.)
There is also a large amount of overlap in work/content between projects, and lots of time is appropriated for unrelated work e.g. employees working on their PhDs.
On the other hand the industry takes a lot more money and plays similar games.
Project partners do not take the right path, because it's not conducive to fulfilling a grant, getting the next grant or increasing your citation count. The incentives are wrong.