Chips Act II proposed – much like Chips Act 1

The EU has now acknowledged that Chips Act I will not double Europe’s world market share by 2030 as intended.

Chips Act II is looking at a spend of $139 billion in public-private investment by 2035 by which time TSMC, at its current level of capex of $50+ billion a year, will have spent over $500 billion on capital investment.

At this level of disparity the EU’s chances of taking world market share from Taiwan look slim.

“80% of our technologies come from outside Europe, so it won’t be happening overnight that we build our capacity in these sectors,” said EC evp for tech sovereignty Henna Virkkunen, adding that significant results won’t be visible until 2030 at the earliest.

“Everybody has really realised how important it is that we are not dependent on one country or one company when it comes to critical technologies,” reckons Virkkunen.

There are many bureaucratic hurdles before Chips Act II sees implementation. After going through this process, Chips Act I handed money to chip companies without requiring them to meet targets.

The other part of thr EU’s tech sovereignty push is to build datacentres under a plan called CADA (Cloud and AI Development Act) to teipke EU datacentre capacity in the next 5-7 years.

Currently AWS, MS and Google supply 70% of the EU’s datacentre requirements. CADA would require governments to store critical data on EU-owned cloud services.

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