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Comment by jdiez17 | Hacker News Reader

EU chip industry: best I can do is supply chips that are in 99% of industrial equipment and vehicles. Also supply the only machines in the world that enable leading edge lithography processes.

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No comment on the second part, but the first part is wrong. EU doesn't have a moat in process technology anymore (since 2010s). They have a bunch of legacy fabs, like 350, 180 and 130 nm but Taiwan, US, and China (and others like Israel, or Singapore) have these too. EU is severely lacking behind chip design, production and packaging capabilities for industrial, automotive, and space kind of niche applications since the heavy divestment from semiconductors after 2008 financial crisis and 2015 Euro crisis.

On top of this, once European giants like NXP (formerly Philips semiconductors), Infineon (formerly Siemens semiconductors), and ST are actively reducing their footprint in Europe and moving to India or SE Asia.

In short: No, EU has no future in those markets as designer or producer of chips.

I can't speak for the others, but ST has six fabs in Europe and only one in asia. ST's smallest process node is 18 nm and made in their fab in Crolles, France. In any case trying to compete at the cutting edge of process technology seems to be too expensive to be worth it.

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I upvoted the post because they make a valid point and 99% is indeed factually incorrect hyperbole.

This is actually at the core of our (EU) problem. Instead of thinking, "here is this new technology, how can we build new markets/products out of it", our industry leaders always think, "here is this new technology, how can we apply it to our existing industries".

You can see it a lot in AI, right now. AI4industry is not where the gains are right now. We should be competing on training foundational models. Once the foundational models from US/China are strong enough, they will do AI4industry and we wouldn't have any edge on them anyway because their tech is more vertically integrated and they have better insight in how AI works under the hood.

There's no moat to AI models so it doesn't really matter who develops it first. If AGI happens none of it matters since it won't be controlled anyway. If there's an exponential wall then everyone will be at it within 12 months of the first person hitting it and then it's better not to have spent the cash pioneering the path.

The long-term idea that the we have to compete claim is based on is like AGI and it's gonna really care what Elon tells it to do. This is a dumb idea regardless of how it fails.

AI models are seeming the ultimate in fungible commodities at this point, why spend on R&D?

If you don't have the capability to train these models, then there's almost no chance of you having enough GPU power to run inference at a large scale on these models (assuming the weights for such a model are ever released or leaked in the future). And that's ignoring the fact that you won't have cultivated a sector that can continue to learn about and improve on said models.

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