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Comment by Caius-Cosades | Hacker News Reader

What other options are there for Nvidia? EU as a whole is largely non-viable due to the schizophrenic nature of EU regulations. AI development has been made de-facto illegal in EU, auto industry is being ran to the ground, so there are hardly any customers for GPU's. Now mainland China certainly would be an interesting option, but State Department would throw a shitfit.

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> due to the schizophrenic nature of EU regulations.

You mean like having to read the new tariffs you're subjected to every monday?

The problem they are alluding to is environmental regulations - it's outright impossible or very very expensive to do certain manufacturing processes, especially silicon and medicine, due to the substances involved. And that is valid for both the US and EU actually, there's a reason Silicon Valley is the densest concentration of Superfund sites in the US, and there is a reason why most of SV production has left for China and Taiwan.

An additional problem is, both the US and EU have been pretty happy to just ship off the environmental damage to Asia to the tune of "out of sight out of mind". We got cheaper products (especially in medicine, our healthcare systems would outright collapse if it weren't for Chinese and Indian generics and precursors), but the total amount of environmental damage in the world hasn't shrunk, it has grown.

> it's outright impossible or very very expensive to do certain manufacturing processes, especially silicon and medicine, due to the substances involved.

I think you're, er, exaggerating this a little; Intel and GlobalFoundries both have large fabs in Europe. Given that Intel is going to be fabbing some nVidia chips, some of those will quite likely be made in their "Intel 4" (ie 7nm) fab in Ireland. And GlobalFoundries has a big (albeit older-tech) fab in Germany. Bosch also has a big 40nm fab in Germany for car stuff; old process, but high volume.

It's only fairly recently that the most advanced fabs have been outside the US or Europe; until late last decade the most advanced process was usually either made at Intel's Irish plant, or one of their US ones. And GlobalFoundries was also competitive at one time.

As for medicine, the world's largest drug exporting countries are Germany, Switzerland, the US, and Ireland, more or less in that order, though it shifts around a bit. Besides the US, _all_ of the top ten exporters are in the EU or EFTA. Germany is also one of the largest, if not the largest, exporters of medical _equipment_.

> I think you're, er, exaggerating this a little; Intel and GlobalFoundries both have large fabs in Europe. Given that Intel is going to be fabbing some nVidia chips, some of those will quite likely be made in their "Intel 4" (ie 7nm) fab in Ireland. And GlobalFoundries has a big (albeit older-tech) fab in Germany. Bosch also has a big 40nm fab in Germany for car stuff; old process, but high volume.

The thing is, the old GlobalFoundries fab has been constructed decades ago. Building something like this from scratch nowadays involves so much more paperwork than back then, it's a massive hurdle to overcome.

> As for medicine, the world's largest drug exporting countries are Germany, Switzerland, the US, and Ireland, more or less in that order

Finished medicine yes. But the precursors and "active pharmaceutical ingredients" (APIs)? 40% China, 20% India... and that's the total market share. For some ingredients, you got 95% (vit B) to 98% (Chloramphenicol) of the entire world's supply being made in China [1]. And of the APIs made in the EU or US, quite a lot depend on precursors made in India and China, or filler materials.

Medicine isn't about curing patients any more, it is about making money first and foremost, and that's why everyone and their dog went to India and China - India first because India is more cooperative with international audit teams than China is. And even then, there have been quite the amount of scandals [2][3][4].

(Side note re [4]: wtf is that banner "Democrats have shut down the government"?! Yes, everyone knows about the government shutdown, but ... isn't it illegal to blatantly engage in partisanship for government agencies?!)

[1] https://chinaobservers.eu/how-to-address-europes-dependence-...

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/20/health/fda-medications-pr...

[3] https://www.statnews.com/2024/08/12/fda-withdraw-approval-40...

[4] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/indian-cancer-drug-m...

> The thing is, the old GlobalFoundries fab has been constructed decades ago. Building something like this from scratch nowadays involves so much more paperwork than back then, it's a massive hurdle to overcome.

The big Bosch fab was built in 2021 (they previously had a smaller one, I think). The latest Intel fab in Ireland was finished in 2023.

Meanwhile the BASF complex exists, which is basically Mordor-on-the-Rhine.

You can't pack up a chemical factory and ship it overseas in a matter of weeks... in any case, BASF has let go hundreds of people last year and shut down part of said plant [1], partially due to staff cost but also due to a move to China planned to be finalized in 2030 [2]. They're aiming for 50% of gross income to come from China... utter madness if you ask me.

[1] https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/rheinland-pfalz/ludwigshafen/w...

[2] https://www.wiwo.de/technologie/wirtschaft-von-oben/wirtscha...

I mean, like having to hire hundreds of lawyers and assessors to just MAYBE get a construction permit within 2 or 3 years, if you want to build a gigafactory. Or any factory for that matter.

Just adding to the other commenters pointing out the unstable genius:

What do you think would have been the reaction of the angry TACO-lord if NVIDIA had announced that they're investing in the EU and not the US?

We know by now how weak his self-esteem is. He'd probably send some ICE agents in there and stopped all government contracts or something stupid like that.

At this point, decisions in this mafia country are not following (economical) logic anymore. It's utter, unstable madness.

Most of the monopolies in the GPU supply chain (ASML, Zeiss etc.) are European companies. The “EU has no AI” narrative is mostly pushed by VCs so they can keep raising funds from European investors.

ASML and Zeiss however are by far not reflecting being part of the "AI shovel sellers" in their stonk market charts as is NVDA.

We may have a lot of exposure via our "hidden champions" but we don't even come close in actually getting financial share out of that bubble.

> the schizophrenic nature of EU regulations

Wait until you hear about US regulations. Are tariffs on or off again in the last five minutes?

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