Hacker News Reader

Comment by newdude116 | Hacker News Reader

Intel builds, TSMC builds and nobody builds in the EU market.

Der letzte macht das Licht aus....

Intel’s bringing 7nm to Kildare https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/intel-to-crea... and it’s promised to make a further announcement about Europe later this year. ASML is no small thing, either: https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-becam...

> Intel builds, TSMC builds and nobody builds in the EU market.

A few months ago there was a newspiece posted here in HN about a strategic billion-euro EU program that was aimed at subsidizing chip production capacity.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/member-states-...

While being very pro-market, I don't mind strong government action and strong government action is needed here an can work (see Airbus). But I am skeptical the EU has the will and is willing to spend the amount of money needed to pull this off.

There is still the brain power, knowledge and money to compete with the US and China, the will and foresight is lacking. It is totally unclear that the EU could still pull this off in 30 years.

Arguably the EU already has the brain power and knowledge, and more importantly the industry to supply the pick-axes to the chip gold-rush miners.

For example, ASML is an european company.

Jump-starting a manufacturing hub might be all it takes to be self-sufficient throughout the whole process.

Bosch is building a chip fab in Dresden...

Perhaps the EU should threaten to restrict exports of AMSL tech to only companies with fabs in Europe.

Is anything with future value being build by European companies?

AI, Crypto, VR, Robots ... not a single market leader is located in the EU.

I find it amazing that after missing the internet there is no discussion in Europe on how to avoid the same fate with artificial intelligence. There is only one European website in top 100 websites. And that is an Hungarian porn site.

AI will be 10x bigger than the internet. Yet it seems Europe does not even have it on the radar.

AI = DeepMind

Cypto = Switzerland basically the home of crypto if it has one

VR = Improbable. Multi $B from softbank

Robots = Europe is far ahead of the US in robotics, ABB / Universal robotics etc.

Deepmind is owned by a US company (Alphabet) and located in the UK.

Universal Robots is owned by Teradyne, also in the US.

ABB I don't know. How are they market leaders?

Also, looking at ABB it seems this are those old industrial robots with few degrees of freedom. The future will be less specialized robots with more degrees of freedom. Powered by AI, not by explicitly coded motions.

To your original point. Broadly I would say Europe creates enormous value. Which is then captured by the US. DeepMind being a good example.

Captured? Enabled. DeepMind runs at big losses, only a company with enough firepower and vision such as the GAFAMs could (and luckily did) save DeepMind.

DeepMind was never a business (and never will be), it's an AI R&D toy for a trillion dollar tech company. It was always going to end up in the belly of a larger tech company, and the US has all the dominant tech companies outside of China.

Besides, it's fair game. The US had one of the two global leaders in AgTech in Monsanto, which was captured by the Germans. That repeatedly happens in biotech as a prominent example, most of the European biotech industry was built up on the back of acquiring US biotech companies.

Even ARM Holdings was originated heavily by US companies. There is hardly a piece of the global tech market that wasn't directly financed or made possible by the US tech industry and its mountain of profits and VC money, from SoftBank to China's tech companies to Shopify or Atlassian.

AI will not be owned by companies, but it will be democratized and owned by the people.

Well, Kuka was competitive but sold to China.

If something is lacking in Europe it is:

* Scale

* The idea to dream big

Europe also has little capital and massive amounts of regulation. France is starting to unwind some of it but it will be a long time before capital is wiling to risk European regulation again.

Most of the things you mention are associated with the hype cycle peak and have not found their big use-case yet.

VR has only a few niche applications in entertainment. Crypto is a solution in search of a problem, and a gambling platform in the meantime.

AI isn't driving our cars, handling our customer service, or analyzing our business data. Good old fashioned algorithms written by humans are now being branded by marketing as "AI" which demonstrates we don't know what AI really is and we can't fend off its redefinition.

Robots is a tricky one because it's such a broad topic. Is an arm on an assembly line a robot? What about complex farming machinery? Does it have to look anthropomorphic?

From my bearish perspective on the first three industries, Europe and the EU (these are not interchangeable terms) have a pretty good track record this last decade compared to SV

"Is anything with future value being build by European companies?"

Ehhhhh, the machines that are going to be in the chip factories mentioned here for example (ASML).

Why would you produce chips in Europe? To send the chips to the US so they can do something meaningful with them?

> Is anything with future value being build by European companies?

Aren't the EUV lithography machines that all advanced semiconductor manufacturers are dependent on made by a Dutch company?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding

Reply on news.ycombinator.com