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ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026

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saddat · 1790105271 · focus · HN ↗
But luckily Germany saved the world by shutting down their power plants for good
1. ekjhgkejhgk · 1790105610 · focus · HN ↗
  Tinfoil hat, I know, but I'm convinced that Germany hating nuclear power was a Russian influence operation.
  1. JodieBenitez · 1790106803 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe... but let's not forget the 1986 event.
    whynotmaybe · 1790110012 · focus · HN ↗
    And we mustn't compare it with the ecological impact of using gas in a democracy instead of nuclear under a communist regime
    JodieBenitez · 1790141049 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure, but it had a catastrophic impact on the german opinion.
    jstummbillig · 1790504982 · focus · HN ↗
    One uncomfortable position being, that opinion is a dangerous beast, and what is popular is not necessarily in the best interest of the people.
    GuestFAUniverse · 1790488382 · focus · HN ↗
    The one where you couldn't safely eat anything from the Bavarian woods for a decade. And that was during years without major droughts. People are fast to forget. Nowadays loosing a harvest to a nuclear plume during a drought would be devastating.
    Also, even the nuclear plants near the coast are often shut down during the summer. E.g. France's Gravelines was running only half it's generators due to jellyfish nearly shutting down the cooling system (at least) the second year in a row.
  2. ExpertAdvisor01 · 1790106815 · focus · HN ↗
    It was already decided in 1998 to phase out nuclear power under the SPD–Green coalition. They passed the Nuclear Exit Law in 2002.
    It’s mostly the Green Party’s fault, as they have been vehemently anti-nuclear since their inception(1970s).
    RcouF1uZ4gsC · 1790111296 · focus · HN ↗
    Ok. Soviet influence operation.
    ekjhgkejhgk · 1790161675 · focus · HN ↗
    You know people love rUsSiA iS nOt ThE sAmE aS uSsR.
    But having read "Stalin" by Stephen Kotkin I've concluded that the USSR was nothing more than a legal construction to increase Russian control over its neighbors.
    brnt · 1790118287 · focus · HN ↗
    Why do you think that in 1998 Russia was not influencing Germany to use its gas?
    Moreover, Russia and its coopting of the German Left and Greens is well documented.
    ahartmetz · 1790165038 · focus · HN ↗
    Gerhard Schröder, chancellor 1998-2005, is well known to be best buddies with Putin and later (three weeks after leaving office!) worked for Gazprom. He is nicknamed "Gas-Gerd".
    Schröder also famously called Putin a "true democrat".
    gunslinger_meta · 1790593076 · focus · HN ↗
    > Schröder also famously called Putin a "true democrat".
    I do not get why you're mentioning this as an ironic thing. Dictatorship is the culmination of the democratic process. There are tons of historical examples at hand throughout history, just to name a few: Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pinochet, Fidel Castro, they all channeled the democratic power of the masses to increase and consolidate their own power.
    ekjhgkejhgk · 1790672230 · focus · HN ↗
    Just because it has happened in the past doesn't mean it's good for "the masses".
    So yes, it's ironic because "the masses" normally want democracy, but the person you're responding to is conflating two things one which is good for "the masses" and the other one is bad.
    DrBazza · 1790504152 · focus · HN ↗
    The road to gigatonnes of CO2 is paved with the good intentions of the Greens in every country.
  3. bauruine · 1790107009 · focus · HN ↗
    It would have been a USSR operation. Germanys anti nuclear movement goes back to the 1970s.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germany" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...
  4. anticodon · 1790496415 · focus · HN ↗
    I always wonder how western population is so brainwashed that you always explain everything using two mutually exclusive ideas:
    1. "Russia is insignificant infinitely small nothing. It's economy is less than economy of Texas!"
    2. "Putin and russians are controlling all the world. They bought every world leader, everyone from Trump to Xi is controlled by them! Anything bad that happens in the world from USA to Africa is directly staged by Russia!"
    Marha01 · 1790506135 · focus · HN ↗
    There is nothing contradictory about a country that is a relative shithole having a very effective propaganda machine. Russia puts a lot of their resources into foreign propaganda, and it shows. It is still a shithole when it comes to economy and standard of living.
    IMHO, democratic countries should do the same. I want pro-Western, democratic, liberal propaganda bots to flood the internet, just like the Russian ones do. But I guess liberal governments are just too good to use the same weapons. It could be their downfall.
    b345 · 1790508154 · focus · HN ↗
    Reminds me of this joke: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42963542">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42963542
    anticodon · 1790576939 · focus · HN ↗
    > But I guess liberal governments are just too good to use the same weapons. It could be their downfall.
    Western governments are spending billions on propaganda. There's so-called "Russian opposition" - a clique that receives millions from western funds such as NED (CIA proxy fund).
    If you open YouTube from a freshly created Russian google account, the whole home page will be filled with videos from Radio Liberty, BBC News Russian, DW Russian, Khodorkovsky Live, and other channels. The theme of all these channels is the same: "You must surrender and bow to the great western overlords".
    Even though my google account is ~15 years old, I still get such recommendations on my main YouTube page daily.
    There was an interview with a former Russian lady that works for Google in London and her job is to pick such videos to push to Russian audience.
    Marha01 · 1790607671 · focus · HN ↗
    > Western governments are spending billions on propaganda.
    Perhaps, but my point is that the money could probably be spent more effectively: instead of funding high-brow videos on YouTube to preach to the choir (such longform videos are watched mostly by liberal intellectuals), just flood social networks with propaganda bots to convert the IQ-bottom of society that is increasingly addicted to social media; just like Russia is doing.
    We have a saying here: "Russian propaganda is not making idiots from people. Russian propaganda is targeting the idiots." Perhaps western liberal propaganda should more effectively target the idiots, too.
    anticodon · 1790667016 · focus · HN ↗
    If you'd be able to speak Russian, you'd already know that there's western propaganda for all levels of IQ. From highbrow to lowbrow in all the media you can find. And it's there for decades already.
    Also, you can find in the Snowden's documents lots of evidence that there are entire departments in CIA and MI-6 working on this propaganda and ways to deliver it.
    And it's quite effective, too. CIA managed to instigate many coups in the world using their propaganda approaches. Arab Spring, Ukraine coup in 2014. In Russia they had almost succeeded, there was (and partially is) large percent of population that believed propaganda despite that we already succumbed once in the recent history (in 1991) and results were absolutely catastrophic.
    Marha01 · 1790692522 · focus · HN ↗
    > And it's quite effective, too. CIA managed to instigate many coups in the world using their propaganda approaches. Arab Spring, Ukraine coup in 2014
    Ah, I see you are one of the IQ bottoms that believes the Russian propaganda which is targeting the idiots... Sure, all those hundreds of thousands of people on Euromaidan were there because of some nebulous CIA manipulation, and not simply because they saw the much higher standard of living in the EU and wanted the same for themselves (which Yanukovich the traitor abruptly refused).
    > In Russia they had almost succeeded, there was (and partially is) large percent of population that believed propaganda despite that we already succumbed once in the recent history (in 1991) and results were absolutely catastrophic.
    Russia changed its whole economic system from Socialism to Capitalism. What did you expect, immediate improvements? Of course there will be a period of chaos. I am from Slovakia. It took my country almost 10 years to regain the previous standard of living after the same drastic change. But then we finished the needed reforms, joined the EU and witnessed massive economic growth. Now we are better than ever. In the end it was all worth it.
    What was catastrophic for Russia is electing autocrats and warmongers. No country thrives as a dictatorship, and comparison of standard of living of our two countries shows that. Enjoy your burning refineries.
    dragonwriter · 1790692888 · focus · HN ↗
    > Russia changed its whole economic system from Socialism to Capitalism.
    No, it didn't. It tried to change from state capitalism (the system the Soviet Union had, not the ideology it presented) to private capitalism but ended up veering off into kleptocratic corporatism.
    crazybonkersai · 1790665637 · focus · HN ↗
    Could you provide a link to this interview? I am genuinely interested.
    anticodon · 1790666491 · focus · HN ↗
    I suppose it's this video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6tLCevZjHo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6tLCevZjHo
    Can't open it now myself to confirm. Here Alfred Koch stats that his daughter worked for Google in 2014 and her job was to pick so-called "opposition" media that would be pushed to users with Russian ip addresses or probably with Google account language set to Russian.
    But actually you don't even have to listen to interview. If you're Russian you already know how aggressively this propaganda is shoveled down our throats on YouTube. You have to ban channels for months to minimize the amount of the recommended propaganda videos.
    And you still get it because there're like millions of NED funded channels of all sorts in all languages. E.g. in the last three days YouTube aggressively pushes to my recommendations some video in English about how "Russian missiles are all hitting ukainian toilets instead of military targets" which is even from the title sounds like some nonsense propaganda for low IQ watchers.
    xienze · 1790511484 · focus · HN ↗
    You have to remember that people on the left side of the political spectrum fancy themselves as the intellectual elite. They've never been wrong about anything, and if in hindsight it appears that way (like shutting down nuclear plants), well, surely that was because of a highly sophisticated brainwashing operation by Russia.
    wiseowise · 1790581217 · focus · HN ↗
    You just need to use a little brain, that’s all, no brainwashing needed.
    > "Russia is insignificant infinitely small nothing. It's economy is less than economy of Texas!"
    It is insignificant on a large scale war against united West, short of using nukes. At the same time it doesn’t mean they can’t terrorize Europe for decades or slowly chip it bit by bit.
    Think of it as a delinquent, poor neighbor constantly throwing shit to your back porch, and alternating between threatening you with a knife and a grenade (nuke). Constantly trying to bride, and recruit citizens of your home for its goals.
    > Putin and russians are controlling all the world. They bought every world leader, everyone from Trump to Xi is controlled by them! Anything bad that happens in the world from USA to Africa is directly staged by Russia!
    I don’t think anyone in their right mind thinks that Xi is bought by Russia. On the contrary, it is widely believed that modern Russia is China’s vassal.
  5. xyzsparetimexyz · 1790502941 · focus · HN ↗
    Right, I bet Russians are also why Deutschebahn is a disaster and the beurocracy of the country still runs on fax machines.
    Get real.
  6. falserum · 1790506413 · focus · HN ↗
    It does not need to be 100% Russia operation. Some people did actually want nuclear shutdown (greens), Russia then just needs to help a little (in completely unrelated Mr. Gerhard S. has comfy chair at Rosneft)
    uecker · 1790518831 · focus · HN ↗
    Most of the population wanted to get of nuclear power (including me - as nuclear is a waste of money). The greens never had enough control over the government to do it alone.
    Lumich · 1790580165 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  7. phatfish · 1790511696 · focus · HN ↗
    They didn't manufacture it (Chernobyl did that), but they certainly help an issue along when it is in their interest.
  8. uecker · 1790520333 · focus · HN ↗
    Considering that nuclear is expensive and in no scenarios part of a minimal-cost power system, it was a rational decision. This is also the reason nuclear isn't build anywhere else without government intervention. This should be entirely obvious to anybody looking at the economics. As a physicist, I am not scared of nuclear, but I am also understand numbers... while the nuclear fans here apparently need to resort to conspiracy theories to make sense of the world.
    throwaway473825 · 1790525903 · focus · HN ↗
    The countries with the cheapest electricity in the EU all have nuclear:
    <a href="https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_average_map/chart.htm?l=en&c=EU&interval=year&year=2025" rel="nofollow">https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_average_map/char...
    Furthermore, old nuclear is already paid for, and hence often the cheapest option where available:
    <a href="https://www.reuters.com/graphics/EUROPE-ENERGY/NUCLEARPOWER/gdvzwweqkpw/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/graphics/EUROPE-ENERGY/NUCLEARPOWER/...
    uecker · 1790528532 · focus · HN ↗
    Market price does not necessarily imply cheap to produce, especially in France where EDF was renationalized. And yes, old nuclear is very cheap, but this does not mean it makes sense to build more nuclear.
  9. hax0ron3 · 1790526020 · focus · HN ↗
    ChatGPT could be wrong, but according to it Germany has had an unusually strong anti-nuclear movement since the 1970s.
    German post-WW2 distrust of anything seen as related to war, plus the fact that Germany has large coal reserves and so less need for nuclear than many other countries, are likely to have contributed to the phenomenon.
2. wewxjfq · 1790491823 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah, that's exactly when all the semiconductor industry left Germany! And why France - the only country that's close to fully nuclear - is the industrial power house of the world. Stay shallow, HN.
  1. petcat · 1790500172 · focus · HN ↗
    France the industrial power house of the world? No.
    It does well for itself and Europe but there are several US states that have a larger GDP and industrial output than France does.
    IsTom · 1790501667 · focus · HN ↗
    That's the point. France has 70%+ nuclear energy in the mix, but isn't the economic miracle that nuclear power is supposed to bring.
    Marha01 · 1790506263 · focus · HN ↗
    > France has 70%+ nuclear energy in the mix, but isn't the economic miracle that nuclear power is supposed to bring.
    Cheap energy is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for "economic miracle". France has relatively cheap energy, but it has other problems. It would be worse off without nuclear, though.
3. sajithdilshan · 1790508970 · focus · HN ↗
  Also they are going to save the world by going carbon neutral next decade or so. According to them the world’s carbon emission would be zero as soon as they become carbon neutral.
  1. tremon · 1790516012 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
4. pfdietz · 1790610204 · focus · HN ↗
  > But luckily Germany saved the world by shutting down their power plants for good
  No, the big contribution was the large renewable subsidies that kicked off the subsequent rapid descent of their costs by experience effects.
bsoqk · 1790205152 · focus · HN ↗
> So far, however, the law has done little to spur the construction of new semiconductor factories in Europe. The European Court of Auditors concluded last year that the EU is unlikely to achieve its goal of doubling Europe’s share of the global chip market by 2030.
They should make another law and probably a few more commissions of auditors.
1. philipallstar · 1790426025 · focus · HN ↗
  I think that's ridiculous. You need more than one law to make it work! And start regulating for growth[0].
  [0] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260308224411/https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/regulation-for-growth" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260308224411/https://www.gov.u...
  1. irishcoffee · 1790426597 · focus · HN ↗
    First time I saw that. The phrase “regulate growth” seems like the definition of an oxymoron. That’s a hell of a thing.
    philipallstar · 1790426817 · focus · HN ↗
    Every ridiculous thing Labour does in the UK is a hilarious slap in the face to the Tories who are still not preferable to all this stupidity.
    holbrad · 1790428130 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, we're stuck between a left-wing party and a left-wing party, both of whom, despite what they say, hate economic growth and try to restrict it at every opportunity.
    And that's largely because the average Brit has terrible beliefs that actively make them poorer. A shockingly high percentage of people believe that building more houses won't lower costs.
    skew-aberration · 1790428553 · focus · HN ↗
    Left-wing in what sense? Who is opposing building houses?
    dgellow · 1790429179 · focus · HN ↗
    Home owners
    skippyboxedhero · 1790429343 · focus · HN ↗
    For left-wing governments in Britain, building houses is putting yourself out of a job.
    Scotland is a good example: every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences so they attempt to build council houses, it is impossible for the government to build enough council houses to make up for multiple decades of underbuilding (this problem has accelerated significantly whilst they have been promising to build housing, had explicit targets, etc.), but at the next election they make the same promises (and people vote for them because there is no alternative).
    The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.
    The politics of this topic are very strange. The public is still at the stage where they think in vague terms that the problem is a lack of housing.
    p_j_w · 1790433445 · focus · HN ↗
    > every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences
    This doesn’t add up. Promising to get more housing built is getting these people elected, but they can’t make good on this promise because then they will lose their election?
    skippyboxedhero · 1790434095 · focus · HN ↗
    It depends what you mean by add up. Logical? No. Reality? Yes.
    Politicians continue with the lie that they will build council houses. Voters continue with the lie that voting will change the outcome.
    tolien · 1790450616 · focus · HN ↗
    > The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.
    That's a conspiracy theory and a half!
    A lot of the new student accommodation being built is privately owned. They're chasing the (pre-Brexit/pandemic) overheating market for student accommodation that resulted from the universities targeting international students for the inflated tuition fees they can charge, and in some cases have features explicitly advertised to international students as positives (e.g. some of the ones in Nottingham have built in rice cookers as standard).
    However, some of the properties are at risk of becoming unviable (i.e., lying empty or having to be turned over to housing non students [0]) because of a combination of Brexit and tightened immigration rules reducing international student numbers.
    If they're being built as some kind of social engineering it would be a really convoluted way of going about it.
    0: <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3l09p664ro" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3l09p664ro
    HPsquared · 1790428591 · focus · HN ↗
    A shockingly high percentage of people don't want house prices to fall.
    Toynbeeidea · 1790428898 · focus · HN ↗
    I live in amerifatland. They're building new houses all the time, everywhere I look, entire complexes of them. "McMansions," we call them.
    I make average US wages, have my entire adult life. I cannot afford a house in my city unless I buy a literal ruin in the ghetto. The suburbs are far more expensive, and that's where the McMansion complexes are. I don't know who's buying them, but it isn't me and likely never will be.
    Schiendelman · 1790431218 · focus · HN ↗
    That's because we regulate growth. Seriously. It's exactly the same root cause. Have you heard about why zoning drives up housing prices?
    irishcoffee · 1790444027 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you want a strip club or a dispensary to open up next door to where you live? Or maybe a glue factory down the street? There are reasons zoning laws exist, and it isn’t to regulate growth in the sense you’re implying.
    Very disingenuous counterpoint.
    Toynbeeidea · 1790449434 · focus · HN ↗
    Actually, yes. I would unironically like the first two things, and what's the issue with the glue factory?
    irishcoffee · 1790460968 · focus · HN ↗
    Smell
    Schiendelman · 1790631255 · focus · HN ↗
    We already regulate bad smells separately. You can't operate a new glue factory without capturing it.
    Dylan16807 · 1790489612 · focus · HN ↗
    When people talk about zoning ruining things, they're talking about restrictions on housing. A good system would get rid of 95% of those.
    Also corner shops should be allowed everywhere.
    Schiendelman · 1790631321 · focus · HN ↗
    99.9% of the work done in zoning is about restricting housing. And no, you shouldn't be allowed to stop any of those things, you can regulate any negative impacts directly if you like.
    holbrad · 1790722796 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, all those things are fine.
    People should be able to build where they want.
    We can have reasonable restrictions around noise and pollution, but not on the land use itself.
  2. Grimburger · 1790427706 · focus · HN ↗
    I get its sarcasm but TSMC has done so much to try to get the Americans getting some decent yields in their new factories and it's failing so hard, there's real questions about whether they can ever meet their targets. They've sent thousands of existing Taiwanese workers to help at this point and from anecdotal things I hear it's not going well. (I live in Taiwan)
    This stuff is all blood, sweat and tears to get it done, and to be honest a culture.
    You can't just buy it off the shelf. If that was possible everyone would have gone paid for it like an Ikea product years ago.
    0l · 1790428018 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-24/tsmc-s-arizona-chip-production-yields-surpass-taiwan-s-a-win-for-us-push" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-24/tsmc-s-ar...
    Older article, but seems like things are going pretty ok?
    Grimburger · 1790428283 · focus · HN ↗
    They've got huge monetary losses, if you're ok with that sure but its not like any other chip fab on the planet is losing cash.
    The Taiwanese are doing a lot to try get it up but all the reports on the ground level are rough.
    <a href="https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/tsmc-arizona-struggles-to-overcome-vast-differences-between-taiwanese-and-us-work-culture" rel="nofollow">https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...
    petcat · 1790428854 · focus · HN ↗
    > They've got huge monetary losses, if you're ok with that
    USA passed the CHIPS Act and is spending close to a trillion dollars to strategically re-home all of TSMC's most advanced fab technology to Arizona as a matter of national security. Monetary losses don't matter when the point is to not be reliant or China in the event of South China Sea conflict.
    I think the point of this article, and the warnings from ASML, is that Europe is not making the same effort.
    Grimburger · 1790429819 · focus · HN ↗
    But that's sorta of hits to the heart of my comment, it's not particularly working well. TSMC has 2 fabs in China and yields+costs are a fraction of whats coming out of Arizona, let alone in Hsinchu.
    Like are you really going to buy a chip that costs 70% more out of national pride? Might work on some but think that very few else will sign up for that.
    petcat · 1790430136 · focus · HN ↗
    Pride has nothing to do with it. It's about being able to get the chips at all when an adversary controls the supply.
    Grimburger · 1790431096 · focus · HN ↗
    Will you buy a computer chip with the same specs that costs 70% more? Please be honest with us all.
    You'll do that because of national adversity?
    tom_ · 1790432042 · focus · HN ↗
    Security-conscious, price-insensitive projects are probably more the target market.
    jimmydorry · 1790436486 · focus · HN ↗
    People are spending more than 70% more on memory because that's all that is available. Everything seems to indicate that people will pay a lot more.
    sampullman · 1790437767 · focus · HN ↗
    70% extra on top of a trillion or two in investment is a relatively small price to pay when faced with the possibility of that being your only option at some point in the future.
    stefanfisk · 1790428933 · focus · HN ↗
    I'll admit that I haven't followed the chatter about TSMC Arizona at all. But how does what you say square with <a href="https://semiwiki.com/forum/threads/tsmc-overseas-fabs-see-profit-flip-in-1h26-arizona-surges-663-yoy.25771/" rel="nofollow">https://semiwiki.com/forum/threads/tsmc-overseas-fabs-see-pr...?
    Grimburger · 1790430498 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't want to speak bad about them but it's just general demand for semiconductors at this point, everyone is just buying it all up because they can. The Arizona plant still doesn't seem to be pumping out and the self-sufficiency target for the US looks probably not all there, Im sorry to be the bearer of bad news but honestly it's a culture that's hard to replicate. The 2030 target for the states surely isn't happening, it's way too ambitious.
    Once upon a time chips went down in value but I don't think that's happening anymore for a very long time and a lot of other people seem aware of that. The semiconductor talent is getting eaten up like pancakes everywhere.
    dgellow · 1790429087 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you have local sources we can look at? I’m not familiar with Taiwan but would be interested reading more about the issues
    skippyboxedhero · 1790430205 · focus · HN ↗
    Investment is risky and uncertain. If you did not do anything because it might fail, you would do nothing at all.
    The inability to cope with failure is a culture that is common in Europe. Failure is so personally devastating, so destructive to social and cultural standing that not only must you not take risks but other people must be actively prevented from taking risk.
    Maybe the US investment doesn't work, but the US will have tried at least. Taiwan is, ironically, the perfect example of where the initial impetus came from the government because there was no culture of risk-taking. Parts of Europe have a savings culture that is very similar to Taiwan and led to very poor growth and very high inequality.
    If the US keeps trying, they will succeed. On here, the view was that China could never build out this capacity, they did. The only way to guarantee failure is to never try.
    mitxela · 1790433788 · focus · HN ↗
    There are businesses and business failures and government project failures in Europe all the time.
    skippyboxedhero · 1790434134 · focus · HN ↗
    From neglect, not enterprise. The level of failure is also too low.
    charlieyu1 · 1790436634 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s more about not being able to hire PhDs for $50k a year, tell them it’s a lot of money and make them work Asian hours and efficiency
    361994752 · 1790440590 · focus · HN ↗
    then just hire them in asia.. and stick to globalization...?
    nixon_why69 · 1790441684 · focus · HN ↗
    That's part of the culture OP was referencing. Another part is not having ad tech jobs easily available paying 5-10x as much for easier work. A big part of Asian success at hard tech fields is just not having better options.
    throwaway2037 · 1790488980 · focus · HN ↗
    There are probably zero STEM PhDs working for TSMC making 50K USD total comp per year. The bonuses are enormous at TSMC these days.
    Grimburger · 1790610073 · focus · HN ↗
    The amount of supercars and high end vehicles in Hsinchu is unreal. Probably all anyone needs to know here, until you've seen it firsthand you wouldn't understand.
    throwaway2037 · 1790613507 · focus · HN ↗
    Great point. I read about this a few times. Here is a juicy quote that I found: "Ferrari sales in Taiwan doubled over a four-year period." Yikes! Hello, new money!
2. peri-cl · 1790426728 · focus · HN ↗
  It's like reading about Yegge's GasTown experiment and its sociology of agents running around in circles, reviewing each other in a loop.
3. Epa095 · 1790431691 · focus · HN ↗
  I get the sarcasm, but its not like e.g. TSMC popped up in a environment of pure libertarian free market capitalism. It was, from the beginning, a project of the Taiwanese state, and without significant public influence there is no way it would have become what it is. Are the EU laws what's needed? IDK. But without a proper public industrial policy besides "low taxes and few regulations" there is no way Europe will be able to get significant semiconductor-production up, the rich-get-richer phenomenon is just to strong.
  1. brookst · 1790432613 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the point is that laws alone mean nothing. As you note, Taiwan was more active than just having commissions and signing papers.
    Airbus proves the EU can do this. It remains to be seen if they still have the ability to take constructive action, or if “add more bureaucracy” is the only tool remaining in the toolbox.
    egorfine · 1790433348 · focus · HN ↗
    > Airbus proves the EU can do this
    *could.
    Airbus has been grandfathered into the current legal situation. Today a future Airbus would not be able to even start collecting data for its initial Environmental Impact Study.
    overfeed · 1790443962 · focus · HN ↗
    > Airbus proves the EU can do this
    And Boeing's rampant carelessness proves European laws can be beneficial.
    lm2s · 1790444138 · focus · HN ↗
    I’ve seen someone explaining why it’s not as easy with semiconductors: Airbus can spread several different factories for different components around the EU. For semiconductors that’s not as feasible. Thus countries would fight which one would have the semiconductors factory. I think it was more or less this argument, which seems to make sense.
    brookst · 1790521165 · focus · HN ↗
    But why one factory? TSMC has fabs in Taiwan, China, Japan, and the US.
    And there’s a supply chain, with packaging often separate from fab.
    It seems like a reasonable objection but not a showstopper.
  2. thesmtsolver2 · 1790439992 · focus · HN ↗
    > I get the sarcasm, but its not like e.g. TSMC popped up in a environment of pure libertarian free market capitalism.
    Nobody said that. That is a strawman
  3. AdamN · 1790441881 · focus · HN ↗
    Another interesting fact is that Che-Chia Wei (the man who made TSMC what it is) received zero equity. Everything he has he bought himself at the market rate.
    throwaway2037 · 1790488798 · focus · HN ↗
    Don't you mean Morris Chang/張忠謀? He was the founder. Also, this near-meme level phrase "received zero equity" is meaningless when you are paying senior executives millions per year. They just buy shares with their earnings. He was one of the highest (if not highest) paid executive in Taiwan for more than a decade.
    AdamN · 1790502487 · focus · HN ↗
    You're right - I was a little too fast looking it up. I was basing it off of the interview for the Acquired podcast which was awesome.
    throwaway2037 · 1790613619 · focus · HN ↗
    Hat tip for the Acquired podcast episode reference.
    For those unaware, Mo Chang rarely gives interviews, let alone to English language media. This Acquired podcast episode is pretty incredible: <a href="https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/tsmc-founder-morris-chang" rel="nofollow">https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/tsmc-founder-morris-chang
  4. microtonal · 1790501018 · focus · HN ↗
    It was, from the beginning, a project of the Taiwanese state, and without significant public influence there is no way it would have become what it is.
    Fun fact in this context: (Dutch) Philips was a major initial investor that made TSMC possible:
    Only Philips was willing to sign a joint venture contract with Taiwan to put up $58 million, transfer its production technology, and license intellectual property in exchange for a 27.6 percent stake in TSMC.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#History" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#History
rurban · 1790218658 · focus · HN ↗
Untrue. TSMC is just building a state of the art chip factory in Dresden, and they are certainly using ASML.
1. ahartmetz · 1790238841 · focus · HN ↗
  That fab unfortunately seems to be quite far from state of the art at 12 nm feature size. Source: <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Semiconductor_Manufacturing_Company" rel="nofollow">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Semiconductor_Manufac...
  1. rurban · 1790244063 · focus · HN ↗
    Uh, so they are lying to us constantly. First the said the new BOSCH fab in Dresden is for AI, with 28nm - ha!
    flohofwoe · 1790427446 · focus · HN ↗
    Bosch never said that though, the "AI" stuff was about the production methods used in the fab, Bosch never claimed to produce AI chips in the fab. Instead these are fairly simple controller chips going into cars.
    moooo99 · 1790428516 · focus · HN ↗
    Can you share any official communication where somebody claimed this fab was for AI?
    It was pretty clear that this fab - much like the other Bosch facilities - is going to be for automotive and industry ICs, not for high end node sizes in CPUs or GPUs.
    ahartmetz · 1790430124 · focus · HN ↗
    I think I've read "power management chips for AI" somewhere. Probably technically correct, but also a somewhat gratuitous reference to the current thing for silly PR reasons.
    eternauta3k · 1790434522 · focus · HN ↗
    Not gratuitous, Infineon's stock price rose because of the AI datacenter demand.
    moooo99 · 1790436988 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think this is merely a gratuitous reference given the fact that AI demand is probably - among EVs - a key driver for the sales of power related ICs.
    rurban · 1790441225 · focus · HN ↗
    Every local Dresden newspaper article and Bosch press release said so.
    randomhacker123 · 1790433046 · focus · HN ↗
    You probably mixed it up with the Infineon Smart Power Fab.
    The Infineon Smart Power Fab was opened some months ago and builds power ICs for the energy market. Probably something like ACDC and DCAC converter ICs. This is also needed in AI data centers. <a href="https://www.infineon.com/de/regional/dresden/smart-power-fab" rel="nofollow">https://www.infineon.com/de/regional/dresden/smart-power-fab
    European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC), the TSMC fab in Dresden is still under construction and will produce logic chips in 28nm or 16nm. Bosch, Infineon, and NXP each have 10% share in this fab. I assume that it will mostly produce products which will be sold by these 3 companies, probably just the next generations from what they already sell. This fab was 50% subsidized by the German government.
    GlobalFoundries also has a big 20nm Fab in Dresden.
    The most advanced logic fab in the EU is the Intel fab in Ireland.
    bcrl · 1790619761 · focus · HN ↗
    It is somewhat disappointing that Global Foundries basically stopped participating in the leading edge process node race around the time of the split with AMD. The world is in a rather precarious place with virtually all eggs in the TSMC basket.
    [ Intel has yet to prove that it can sustain itself as a foundry for third parties, and until they do, I have a hard time believing the massive culture shift required across the whole company can be achieved without splitting the company up into separate parts. Samsung has fallen behind, but at least they have diversity across a variety of markets including HBM. Neither have leading edge fabs in Europe, so everything continues falls back on TSMC. ]
  2. flohofwoe · 1790427654 · focus · HN ↗
    The fab itself can still be "state of the art" even when the product isn't (Germany needs chips for its industry, not for gaming PCs or AI data centers).
    dgellow · 1790429467 · focus · HN ↗
    We actually need both
  3. gregorygoc · 1790427777 · focus · HN ↗
    There will be 2nm in Ireland
    petcat · 1790428502 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you talking about Intel? That's the 7nm class and I've never seen anything about plans for the 20A/2nm generation at that fab.
    leoc · 1790429859 · focus · HN ↗
    Intel has committed to bringing "Intel 3" to Leixlip <a href="https://www.idaireland.com/latest-news/press-release/intel-announces-5-billion-investment-to-expand-european-manufacturing-output" rel="nofollow">https://www.idaireland.com/latest-news/press-release/intel-a... , so below 12nm or 7nm but still above 20A/2nm IIUC.
  4. fulafel · 1790430212 · focus · HN ↗
    Current state of the art is 20 / 45 nm feature size (metal pitch / gate pitch).
    ahartmetz · 1790447155 · focus · HN ↗
    We both know that feature sizes became marketing names over a decade ago. The "12 nm" for that fab are of course the marketing name. In any case, it's a seriously old process at this point.
    [deleted] · 1790494415 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    fulafel · 1790503905 · focus · HN ↗
    Directionally correct, but rather: process moniker became disconnected from the feature size.
    kimixa · 1790545560 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it's still /somewhat/ close to feature size - I think the fin pitch of the "N3" tsmc process was about 5nm, which gives a "minimum feature size" of ~2.5nm to ensure the "gap" between them.
    I think one of the big differences is that the "Gate Contact Area" simply isn't the smallest "feature" anymore - but the ITRS that defined those names called it "feature size", not "gate size" from the beginning intentionally.
    You probably could make a transitor with a gate size of a similar order to the "feature size", it'll just perform awfully to be completely useless.
2. d2kx · 1790429806 · focus · HN ↗
  No, ASML is not lying about ASML's business developments.
  1. usrnm · 1790431751 · focus · HN ↗
    That would make it the only company in the world not doing that
3. petcat · 1790429830 · focus · HN ↗
  > Untrue
  So you seem to know more about ASML's business than the ASML executive quoted in this article.
  1. fn-mote · 1790431638 · focus · HN ↗
    To be fair:
    1. They provided evidence (construction of a fab in Dresden).
    2. Executives lie all of the time.
    Aside: after all of the denunciations of AI companies claims of danger, I expected comments here to be denouncing this as a “ASML shill article trying to get the government to buy more of their product”. Not that I believe, but the contrast is striking.
  2. dathinab · 1790431660 · focus · HN ↗
    since when are executives statements meant to produce more investment into them trustable?
    even more so it is reasonable to assume their statement was a simplification ignoring small overall for the statement irrelevant exceptions
    like ignoring there being a factory build which is overall small and only meant for older nodes producing embedded chips for the car industry only
    because honestly while the factory does matter for Bosh, it doesn't really make much difference for the larger picture of chip production in the EU
  3. blitzar · 1790502546 · focus · HN ↗
    > lithography giant calls on EU to help create demand
    Will lie for billions of taxpayers money.
  4. rsynnott · 1790505035 · focus · HN ↗
    I think there's potentially confusion around timing; the order for this facility would probably have been a year or so ago, so fits with not selling anything in 2026.
4. amelius · 1790436652 · focus · HN ↗
  Yes, so TSMC is buying the machines, and they are based in Taiwan. This is not about the physical location of the machines.
  1. AdamN · 1790442072 · focus · HN ↗
    Most of their fabs are also in Taiwan.
    baobabKoodaa · 1790448278 · focus · HN ↗
    The claim in OP is that "ASML currently sells no chipmaking machines in Europe". A single chipmaking machine purchase into a fab in Europe would be enough to prove that claim wrong. The number of fabs in Taiwan is irrelevant to this claim.
5. Fordec · 1790461204 · focus · HN ↗
  Since you know the truth, and on what date was that order put in? Why did it have to be in 2026 and not during the planning process in previous years?
Kim_Bruning · 1790344641 · focus · HN ↗
So currently europe is exposed to russia-ukraine, us-iran, and shortly china-taiwan. This is not a great place to be in.
1. bilbo0s · 1790345453 · focus · HN ↗
  Not really much of a consolation, but it's pretty obvious that the standing committee is perfectly happy to sit back and chuckle while watching the rest of the world burn from that nice safe distance. So at least there won't be any china-taiwan issues.
  But that's little consolation I understand. I get that when there are two elephants sitting on you, someone telling you how fortunate you are to not have a third one on top of you as well, is a little annoying.
2. soco · 1790345670 · focus · HN ↗
  The brainless policies continue as we speak: traditional parties keep you exposed to financial masters because money talks, and extremists keep you exposed to their masters because, again, money talks. So: money talks and Europe is still a good milking cow.
3. HPsquared · 1790345829 · focus · HN ↗
  The beatings will continue until morale improves.
4. vconnor · 1790346261 · focus · HN ↗
  No, but it is in times like this that one needs to look forward and invest in the future.
  1. HPsquared · 1790346648 · focus · HN ↗
    "Investing" here tends to mean either buying up real estate, or US stocks.
5. sajithdilshan · 1790346355 · focus · HN ↗
  It more due to the fact that the politicians are on a moral kow-it-all high horse than being pragmatic and putting national interest first. As an example all EU leaders absolutely refused to talk with Russia/Putin on putting an end to the war and they were hell bent on militarily defeating Russia. I remember the previous German Chancellor had a phone call with Putin to discuss it and everyone was shitting on him for doing that.
  But now Trump is inviting Putin to G20 and I'm sure sure all those EU politician would be all smily and act like no war is going on and gladly talk with Putin. If you think about it the war could have ended years ago and all the Ukranian/Russian lives lost could have been avoided if EU leaders were not so arrogant.
  1. kettleballroll · 1790346557 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a weird stance to take. If someone invaded a other territory next to yours and some of your unions members fear they're next, business as usual is the wrong strategy, imo
    sajithdilshan · 1790346805 · focus · HN ↗
    That's why diplomacy is important. There is no scenario that Europe, let alone Ukraine can militarily defeat Russia (a country with nuclear weapons). I understand defending the territory. But what is the end game? fight forever? or mutual destruction?
    rcxdude · 1790346888 · focus · HN ↗
    Kick them out so they gain nothing and have a credible enough deterrent they don't try again. This is also well below the stated threshold for Russia escalating to nukes but well above the threshold of military defeat.
    sajithdilshan · 1790347165 · focus · HN ↗
    what if they cannot be kicked out? fight forever till Ukraine runs out of men to send to war?
    rcxdude · 1790349708 · focus · HN ↗
    Then that is a loss, yes. It is an attritional war: whoever runs out of resources or will first loses. I don't think most of Europe has internalised how big of a loss that would be.
    bar8uyr · 1790520307 · focus · HN ↗
    Ukraine is winning. Defending your own territory is natural. Ukraine don't want a war, Russia can stop whenever they want it to stop. What is Russia's end game? look weak and easy to beat and have to threaten to use nukes to feel like a big man?
  2. bpodgursky · 1790346620 · focus · HN ↗
    Sorry this is a crazy interpretation of events.
    Europe has 15x the GDP of Russia. If they were "hell bent" on militarily defeating Russia, they could have made even tiny sacrifices to the social welfare system, diverted industrial production to military aid, and drowned Ukraine in help. That was a very achievable goal, and they didn't do it.
    Instead, the vacillated on importing US natural gas, continued shutting down nuclear power plants, and paid Russia MORE CASH FOR OIL than they ended up giving Ukraine in military aid! They did not in fact, dedicate themselves to this war in any way shape or form.
    PorciiVorbesc · 1790346985 · focus · HN ↗
    > they could have made even tiny sacrifices to the social welfare system, diverted industrial production to military aid, and drowned Ukraine in help. That was a very achievable goal, and they didn't do it.
    We already did that. Welfare and funding to social services, elderly care, etc is significantly reduced and with higher bar to get than before 2022 where I live. Plus we're also paying the price in higher housing costs thanks to housing millions of Ukrainians.
    It's easy to want a higher reduction on welfare services when you're not the one needing them. It's easy to write cheques that other people have to cash.
    gib444 · 1790347606 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    PorciiVorbesc · 1790375189 · focus · HN ↗
    >All because they aren't retirement age yet
    Have you told them to jump on a small inflatable boat, throw away their passports and enter the EU via the Mediterranean? They'll get first class treatment for all their needs on the taxpayers' dime. Because if they don't get it, there's a dozen NGOs paid from your taxes that will sue their government for breaking their human rights for not providing them with the housing and care they need.
    gib444 · 1790422251 · focus · HN ↗
    Mhmm it's hard not to feel aggrieved with people who get certain basic care no-questions-asked when there are so many reports of questionable claims of what they're fleeing from/age/origin etc and given the numbers (~220k asylum seekers in the system as of 2024, and conveniently a 'transition to a new caseworking system' has prevented any newer figures being published)
    But I think we have bigger taxation/spending and economic issues in the UK. Nobody really cares about asylum seekers/immigrants when the economy is booming, jobs are plentiful and inflation is low.
    We do seem have a defective system in which people who suddenly need help after having a job and paying lots of tax are more-or-less ignored, but life-long welfare claimants are already so entrenched in the system, it's just a continuation.
    Job Seeker's benefit is £408/mo for a maximum of 6 months and only if you had paid sufficient tax in the 2 years prior – basically just a small tax refund but only if you follow the rules imposed upon you by your 'job coach'. And that benefit doesn't then entitle you to any other discount/benefits unlike certain other benefits. It's designed to make you to take any job that turns up – indeed your work 'coach' will likely force you to do that.
    Rant over lol
    bar8uyr · 1790519377 · focus · HN ↗
    Then go private and get the same treatment as the USA. Or wait 16 weeks and get it for free.
    bpodgursky · 1790348015 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you for real? Look into France's pension situation. The median pensioner has HIGHER INCOME than the median working adult. And retirement was at 62!
    No, there have been absolutely no real cuts to elderly care, the UK's triple lock ensures that the situation gets monotonically worse until the system collapses.
    PorciiVorbesc · 1790374217 · focus · HN ↗
    >Are you for real?
    YES.
    I don't live in France or the UK.
    >No, there have been absolutely no real cuts to elderly care
    Yeah they have. My city is short 30 million Euros on disability care this year despite increases in taxes. I (non retiree) now need to wait 6+ months for a surgery when it used to be 2, and pay from my taxes for money and weapons to Ukraine and housing to Ukrainian refugees in my city while they have nicer cars than me. I don't necessarily mind that per se, but I do mind being berated as if I'm not sacrificing enough. Please set an example and sacrifice yourself and your family for Ukraine before lecturing us.
    Scoundreller · 1790472133 · focus · HN ↗
    > because they leave them on UA plates
    which EU country permits non-EU plates (and insurance?) indefinitely?
    hunterpayne · 1790461114 · focus · HN ↗
    That was always going to happen. The war just makes that worse. The demographics and lack of economic growth were always going to break those welfare systems. How much they break and who loses out were the only real questions.
    sajithdilshan · 1790346993 · focus · HN ↗
    > If they were "hell bent" on militarily defeating Russia, they could have made even tiny sacrifices to the social welfare system, diverted industrial production to military aid, and drowned Ukraine in help
    Why do you think an entire continent with multiple and (sometimes even conflicting with each other) culture, priorities, national interest would do that? EU is an economic union. Not a federation like US
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790353487 · focus · HN ↗
    Because NATO article 5 demands it.
    European support started out slow, but has ramped up as the US has backed away.
    Germany will spend 20% of it's federal budget on military in 2027, planning to increase that to 30% by 2030. "We cannot defend ourselves against Putin with a balanced budget".
    dns_snek · 1790355767 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790357112 · focus · HN ↗
    The parent was talking about the disunity of Europe in standing up to Putin.
    What would come next after Ukraine may be the Baltic states or Poland.
    sajithdilshan · 1790362285 · focus · HN ↗
    > What would come next after Ukraine may be the Baltic states or Poland.
    According to your YouTube sources? NATO has nothing to do with Ukraine. NATO countries can defend themselves if one of those countries actually are being attacked. That happened in 9/11 and NATO countries supporting militarily the US wars that preceded.
    They have no such obligation towards Ukraine.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790365496 · focus · HN ↗
    They have no NATO obligation towards Ukraine, but I'd say they do have a moral one, and they also have their own self-interest.
    sajithdilshan · 1790413140 · focus · HN ↗
    There is no such thing as moral obligation when it comes to politics and national interest. If it’s your country, then it’s your job to defend it or whatever. So far it doesn’t seem to be serving their self interest supporting an endless war.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790445384 · focus · HN ↗
    Their self-interest is in keeping Putin at arms length and avoiding WW III. Putin is already threatening Lithuania, sending drones into Poland. If Putin wasn't prevented from taking Ukraine, do you really think it would end there?
    CamperBob2 · 1790471426 · focus · HN ↗
    There is no such thing as moral obligation when it comes to politics and national interest.
    There is if you ever want to negotiate a nuclear arms-control deal again. None of this would be an issue if Ukraine had kept their nukes.
    bar8uyr · 1790519764 · focus · HN ↗
    They had that treaty that they kinda forgot about already..
    sajithdilshan · 1790355856 · focus · HN ↗
    Ukraine is not a NATO member
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790347588 · focus · HN ↗
    Europe has been stepping up a lot recently, given Trump's reluctance to push back against Putin - looks at UK/France supply of missile and anti-missile systems and IP to Ukraine, stepped up air defense based out of Lithuania (anticipating Kaliningrad as the first front of the war), etc.
    bpodgursky · 1790348148 · focus · HN ↗
    No, they have not been "stepping up" relative to the existential threat at their door. They are still doing 10% of the minimum you'd expect from someone whose literal lives and civilization are at risk from a barbarian threat literally murdering their neighbors (and playing games with their own sovereignty more recently, with drone incursions).
    bar8uyr · 1790520019 · focus · HN ↗
    Measured response. Remember that you don't want all out war. Support your allies, don't kill everyone in the entire world.
  3. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790347098 · focus · HN ↗
    The only way to stop Putin is with military force.
    Europe is of course well aware that war with Russia seems increasingly inevitable, and have been preparing for it.
    sajithdilshan · 1790347480 · focus · HN ↗
    > Europe is of course well aware that war with Russia seems increasingly inevitable, and have been preparing for it
    What is the source for this? I have seen some news articles with this narrative, it was more on the line of fear-mongering rather than providing evidence.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790348689 · focus · HN ↗
    Ukraine is only Putin's first step, and Europe is well aware of that, so look at all the advanced weapons systems Europe is now giving to Ukraine (Storm Shadow, SCALP, SAMP/T etc), as well as the statements they are making. They are well aware this has made them a target for Putin, with UK missiles having been used against Black Sea targets etc, but are doing it all the same.
    Europe is not tolerating Russian drone incursions, and has been shooting them down, have been on air combat footing patrolling the finish border and Kalinograd region (operating out of Lithuania), boosting defense of the Suwałki Gap, etc.
    YouTube is perhaps one of the best sources of information, since US MSM is not interested.
    sajithdilshan · 1790349771 · focus · HN ↗
    > YouTube is perhaps one of the best sources of information, since US MSM is not interested
    You lost me at this. If your official source of information is YouTube, then good luck.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790350122 · focus · HN ↗
    Try googling for information and use whichever news sources you prefer - just don't expect to find Fox News talking about it.
  4. brokencode · 1790347217 · focus · HN ↗
    How exactly do you think the war could have ended? With Ukraine’s surrender?
    Not such an easy thing to say if you’re the one facing that threat. Nobody wants their own country to be invaded and conquered.
    And Russia would take that as a green light to keep on conquering other former Soviet states. Where do you draw the line?
  5. MobiusHorizons · 1790347427 · focus · HN ↗
    > If you think about it the war could have ended years ago and all the Ukranian/Russian lives lost could have been avoided if EU leaders were not so arrogant.
    How exactly is Europe to blame for Russia continuing its war in Ukraine? Russia has clearly demonstrated a lack of interest in peace on any terms that could be acceptable to Ukraine.
    andersonpico · 1790516294 · focus · HN ↗
    the geopolitical takes on this website are something else man. I would say don't bother, but letting this type of rhetoric go would also be unfortunate
    MobiusHorizons · 1790737466 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, there are a lot of similar bad takes everywhere, not just on this website. This particular one seems to be reasonably common in finance type spaces. I think it presuposes a "correct" outcome to the war and then just tries to take shortcuts to that outcome despite that outcome not being desireable for the parties that get a vote. Its especially frustrating when it ignores the instability of the outcome, which is true in this case. After all both sides have already demonstrated a willingness to fight to try to change the outcome.
  6. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790352633 · focus · HN ↗
    > But now Trump is inviting Putin to G20 and I'm sure sure all those EU politician would be all smily and act like no war is going on and gladly talk with Putin
    Putin is deathly afraid of being assassinated and is avoiding air travel in favor of trains, has identical office to film in at multiple locations to hide his location. There is no chance he is getting on a plane to Florida.
    > If you think about it the war could have ended years ago and all the Ukranian/Russian lives lost could have been avoided if EU leaders were not so arrogant.
    How so? By Europe rolling over and not supporting Ukraine?
6. odiroot · 1790346559 · focus · HN ↗
  Our car industry (among others) showed we're quite capable of shooting ourselves in the foot. No need for external "big events".
  1. scotty79 · 1790350991 · focus · HN ↗
    It's all because of protectionism. Business got lazy.
  2. mdp2021 · 1790352012 · focus · HN ↗
    > We
    Get out of Belgium, then - if it was you and your people.
    There are clear ideological, decadent faults in the eu administration. They are responsible for the destruction of one of the main continental industries, transferring (even reduced) pollution to Africa, where old cars go (with again no effect on global warming), and transferring the enterprise to China.
    "The swan's shriek".
  3. Markoff · 1790353160 · focus · HN ↗
    Don't forget the airlines taking the longer more expensive route!
7. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790346799 · focus · HN ↗
  European defense industry seems pretty strong
  1. PorciiVorbesc · 1790346860 · focus · HN ↗
    Compared to who? The US?
    mahmoudhossam · 1790347737 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah yes, the only country that matters /s
    cromka · 1790347797 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes. The US defense industry depends on European one. Take a look at F35 and where the components are made.
    PorciiVorbesc · 1790374247 · focus · HN ↗
    Where are they made?
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790348950 · focus · HN ↗
    If it comes down to European vs Russian manufacturing capacity for missiles and hi-tech weaponry, etc, I'd put my money on Europe. Europe also has the advantage of seeing 5 years of Russia throwing their best at Ukraine, having their air defenses repeatedly breached by Ukraine, even deep into Russia using slow low-tech drones - they know many of Russia's weaknesses.
    PorciiVorbesc · 1790381950 · focus · HN ↗
    >If it comes down to European vs Russian manufacturing capacity for missiles and hi-tech weaponry, etc
    Well duh, EU GDP is like 3000x Russian one, Italy alone is richer than Russia, so ofc EU military combined is greater than Russia.
    Russia is broke gas station with nukes, not really a benchmark for military supremacy.
    barrenko · 1790456256 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure are holding their own against the supposedly much richer Europe at this moment.
    wsng · 1790513127 · focus · HN ↗
    That is because contrary to what Russia claims, it is not a war between EU and Russia, but between Ukraine and Russia. EU support is there but still minuscule compared to what EU could do.
    bar8uyr · 1790518935 · focus · HN ↗
    Ukraine isn't in the EU and the USA has a duty to help Ukraine but doesn't because they (choose your favourite) [have been compromised by Russia] [are too weak] [can't afford it] [don't have enough weapons left because they used them helping Israel commit genocide] [are scared of losing votes for a pedophile] [all of the above]
    citrin_ru · 1790460500 · focus · HN ↗
    The US GBP is 100x large than Iranian one and yet the US cannot open the Strait of Hormuz and even defend own bases in the region from cheap drones (52 aircraft lost, most on the ground). GDP is not the only factor when it comes to military capabilities.
    PorciiVorbesc · 1790464951 · focus · HN ↗
    >The US GBP is 100x large than Iranian one and yet the US cannot open the Strait of Hormuz
    The US regime has no support from its voters and taxpayers to get deeper into the IRan war because the US is the one who started it, it's not an existential threat for Americans in the US to spend more of their money or die intervening in the middle east.
    But for EU what happens in Ukraine is an existential threat and they also didn't provoke the war there, so Europeans are more motivated to support the war against Russia than AMericans are to support military intervention in Iran.
    EdiX · 1790509502 · focus · HN ↗
    Yemen, one of the poorest countries on earth, closed an important EU trade route for over a year and we couldn't fix it. Defending your land vs protecting your trade interests are different things.
8. kvgr · 1790346978 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah, weakness and appeasement gets that.
  1. gib444 · 1790347440 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    kvgr · 1790773593 · focus · HN ↗
    I would not build nordstream 2. I would not turn off nuclear reactors and build pan EU 1 type nuclear reactor project. I would put sanctions on Russia the moment they invaded ukraine the first time. Build armies and heavy industries before second invasion. Make EU PRO business. MOre interesting tax incentives and reformed retirement plans and social services, because this is what will drag most countries do ground. 0 consequences when we look back Def would try to get off russian gas - Schröder is basically traitor to the whole EU.
9. w4yai · 1790464869 · focus · HN ↗
  Tell me a better place to be in ? Please don't tell me the US.
  1. mciancia · 1790468069 · focus · HN ↗
    US. Or China if you are Chinese
    Both in longer term ofc
    alexfortin · 1790474492 · focus · HN ↗
    China perhaps... but US? really? personally I can't think of any single person who grew up (like me) in Europe and would choose US as a destination.
    From my point of view is as awful as it can get: stark inequality, literally hundreds of thousands of homeless people roaming, no basic health care, but to be honest just the number of guns pro capita is enough to keep me and most of other Europeans away for good, it's just insane for what we're accustomed to. And I'm not even referring to the dystopian situation worsened daily by the current administration.
    Unless you're the kind of person who confuses absolute numbers (e.g. money you can spend per month) for actual wealth / quality of life / freedoms / rights protection / etc. Then perhaps USA is the right place, I guess?
    aidenn0 · 1790477020 · focus · HN ↗
    Homeless:
    FWIW, FEANTSA estimated over 1.2MM homeless in Europe in their most recent report[1]. That's over a population of 515MM so ~23 per 10k population. Us 746k homeless is roughly 22 per 10k population. I suspect that differences in methodology will overwhelm that 1/10k difference, but the order of magnitude seems similar.
    1/3 of the US homeless are unsheltered ("Living Rough" in the FEANTSA terminology). A quick skim of the FEANTSA report did not show any countries breaking out their rough-sleepers from the rest of the data. I do suspect that this number is higher than in the EU.
    1: <a href="https://www.feantsa.org/files/Themes/Overview/2024/Rapport_-_EN.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.feantsa.org/files/Themes/Overview/2024/Rapport_-...
    alexfortin · 1790485382 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps in USA is very much unevenly distributed? I visted a couple of big cities in California and the situation is abysmal, I don't know of any place in Europe even close to that, still have to see campings in the middle of a big city. I could't see the same in other cities I visited, e.g. Las Vegas and Miami.
    The numbers seem to say it's the same in theory, in practice my experience is that it very much doesn't _feel_ the same.
    mciancia · 1790505011 · focus · HN ↗
    > still have to see campings in the middle of a big city
    I saw that in London, in Rome and afair in Berlin
    Not to the same extend as camping villages in LA but still. But I also didn't go that much inside those bad parts of cities in Europe, in US I drove through them
    EdiX · 1790509115 · focus · HN ↗
    Brussels too. There's some US cities that seem to be exceptionally bad, in a league of their own, but that's probably still a small fraction of all the homeless.
    alexfortin · 1790660755 · focus · HN ↗
    It's actually the extent which is the measure here. I don't think a population with 0% homelessness ever existed nor is even possible, it is just endemic to human societies, like e.g. nomadism is.
    More in general, the feel you get as an European visiting the US is that either you're in, or completly out of the society. There's not much of a grey area, more like a quantum leap.
    mciancia · 1790504801 · focus · HN ↗
    > I can't think of any single person who grew up (like me) in Europe and would choose US as a destination.
    I can and all of them are from EU.
rvz · 1790344866 · focus · HN ↗
Europe has no money.
1. yomismoaqui · 1790346046 · focus · HN ↗
  And yet, more USians move to my "poor" country than the other way around. Make of that what you will.
  1. TMWNN · 1790346489 · focus · HN ↗
    That well-paid Americans like to WFH on Malaga beaches is not a testament to the Spanish economy, but to its weather and (more importantly) low cost of living.
    In any case, don't be too sure about your claim. According to <<a href="https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-were-they-born?migrationCountry=Spain" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...>, 170K Spanish-born live in the US. By contrast, 69K US-born live in Spain <<a href="https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-were-they-born?migrationCountry=United+States" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...>. Given that the US (341 million) has 7.25 times Spain's population (47 million), this means that a Spaniard is 17-18 times more likely to move to the US, than an American is to move to Spain.
    gib444 · 1790347026 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    yomismoaqui · 1790347287 · focus · HN ↗
    And healthcare, better food, better public transport, security, human relations, lifespan... and above all, happiness.
    The american dream is dead, US is a country for working, not for living.
    ar0 · 1790347594 · focus · HN ↗
    This is… a mathematically correct but practically useless way to compare migration flows. Using this approach, Singaporeans are more likely to move to China than Chinese to move to Singapore. Mathematically true, and tells us much about the relative sizes of these two countries, but very, very little about relative attractiveness as a place of living.
    TMWNN · 1790348317 · focus · HN ↗
    >Using this approach, Singaporeans are more likely to move to China than Chinese to move to Singapore.
    Using the Our World in Data figures, a Singapore-born person is about four times more likely to move to China than a China-born person is to move to Singapore.
    That does not seem like an unreasonable ratio, given that a) Chinese are not nearly as free, whether economically or politically, to emigrate, and b) those Chinese who have the money and connections to leave are likely going to be in the large cities that offer good living standards. Put another way, if Chinese were as free to move around the world as Singaporeans, there would surely be many more China-born people in Singapore ... perhaps four times more than the current 530K.
    By contrast, the US and Spain are going to be roughly equal in terms of their citizens' freedom to move about, so that factor can be eliminated from the comparison.
  2. marky1991 · 1790346687 · focus · HN ↗
    If we were to take all preceding arguments seriously, couldn't that be explained by americans going to live in a low-cost-of-living country once they've earned their living?
    (Don't know your country to know if that's true or not, but it's a possibility)
    yomismoaqui · 1790347096 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you looking for money or are you looking for a good life?
    My country offers them both, people from lots of countries como here looking for money and also for a better way of living.
    The lesson explains itself.
  3. PorciiVorbesc · 1790346787 · focus · HN ↗
    >more USians move to my "poor" country than the other way around.
    Retirees and people who already made money to outbid the locals on housing and purchasing power.
    Why would they move to a more expensive country where they'd feel poor?
    yomismoaqui · 1790347587 · focus · HN ↗
    Emigrating is not an easy task (even with money), think why they do it and why the don't want to live on the country they were born.
    Think about it... a hint, it's not about money.
    PorciiVorbesc · 1790374304 · focus · HN ↗
    Emigrating is super easy when you have a lot of money and a strong passport. Money solves most problems that are not related to the soul.
    By comparison, try emigrating as a poor person from a poor country with a weak passport. Americans are playing life on easy mode but they complain the most.
  4. pb7 · 1790347130 · focus · HN ↗
    The demonym is American, not whatever you wrote. Unless your poor country is New Zealand, that's not the case.
    yomismoaqui · 1790347422 · focus · HN ↗
    Being pedantic America is the continent. So a chilean should be as "American" as Donald Trump.
    pb7 · 1790347573 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it isn't. Everyone knows exactly what "American" means and it's never a Chilean.
    gib444 · 1790433740 · focus · HN ↗
    You know English is defined by its usage right? If people start using a new term such as USAian, or American to refer to everyone from the continent...that's what will be. There is no central authority to tell us how to use English correctly.
    Anyway. New world order. USA hegemony is going way.
    I guess USAians are beginning to find out how we in the UK felt about the loss of our empire.
2. __m · 1790346911 · focus · HN ↗
  It’s all invested in American companies
3. prerok · 1790347256 · focus · HN ↗
  It's actually the other way around. All we have is money that we stole from the colonies.
  If the car companies actually go down the drain I have no clue what products of note we would still be producing that would continue to bring money in. So, I think our goose is cooked here in Europe.
  1. piltdownman · 1790351897 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean this is just such FUD.
    In Ireland alone we manufacture:
    * Cardiovascular Stents (80% of Global Supply)
    * Orthopaedic Knee Implants (75% of Global Supply)
    * Acute Hospital Ventilators (50% of Global Supply)
    * Contact Lenses (World Leader)
    19 of the world's top 20 pharmaceutical companies operate manufacturing, R&D, or biopharma facilities in Ireland; this compromises over 50% of all physical goods exported from Ireland, totaling well over €100 billion annually. Needless to say it's also the pivotal manufacturing hub for high-demand GLP-1 weight-loss and diabetes treatments (like Mounjaro).
    Ireland is among the top global exporters of antisera, blood fractions, and complex cell cultures, making it indispensable to global healthcare infrastructure.
    Ireland is the absolute world leader in dairy science per capita, and produces roughly 10% to 15% of the entire world's infant milk formula, with estimates indicating that roughly one in ten to one in seven babies globally consume formula manufactured in the country.
    That's an Island of less than 5 million people, 1/8th the size of Texas, that was basically bypassed by the Industrial Revolution and had no colonial benefit. Now extrapolate for a second and imagine what Germany is manufacturing.
    teruakohatu · 1790454678 · focus · HN ↗
    > That's an Island of less than 5 million people,
    The Republic of Ireland has more than 5 million people. The Island has well over 7 million.
    <a href="https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2026/0824/1588997-cso-population-and-migration-estimates/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2026/0824/1588997-cso-popul...
    piltdownman · 1790604935 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm referring to the countries borders consisting of sea, not neighbouring countries. More to the point, all industries I'm referring to were established prior under the constraints of the stated population.
    The population of the 26 counties only hit 5 million in 2021, in the midst of lockdown. It then surged massively with global instability, with a 2.2 per cent increase in 2022 alone with the first round of Ukrainian refugees forming the majority of the 117,000 added to the population count.
4. piltdownman · 1790351460 · focus · HN ↗
  The average salary (not including RSUs/Bonus) in Dublin's Silcon Docklands is north of €130k+, with sick pay, 23 days leave, and the sort of employee protections which would be an utter fantasy in the US (defined redundancy payments, mandated collective bargaining, governance processes around mass redundancy handling at state level).
  This was hugely evident during the recent spate of tech layoffs - employers planning collective dismissals are obliged to hold a mandatory 30-day consultation with employee representatives and notify the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment beforehand. Issuing premature "done deal" announcements before meaningful consultation breaches Irish law.
  Even at the micro level, non-collective or individual restructuring must still rely on objective selection criteria and fair procedures. Failing to do so exposes employers to Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) claims for unfair or constructive dismissal.
  There's also very very strict regulations around work/life issues. A famous case this year in 2023 where a Customer Care Team Lead at the Dublin office of Israeli software company Wix was dismissed after posting comments on LinkedIn. In her posts, she described Israel as a "terrorist state" and referred to Zionism as "the root of violence" while expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people. In July 2024, the WRC ordered Wix to pay Carey €35,000 in compensation after Wix acknowledged that the dismissal was "procedurally unfair" under Irish employment law.
  In short, we're not that poor and have significant societal safety-nets that make up the delta in direct wages.
  1. jiggawatts · 1790464003 · focus · HN ↗
    > employee protections which would be an utter fantasy in the US (defined redundancy payments, mandated collective bargaining, governance processes around mass redundancy handling at state level).
    This can be compared to protectionist policies such as tariffs.
    If employees are hard to fire, then companies hesitate to hire them.
    If employees on-shore are protected, then un-protected employees overseas are more competitive, eventually gutting local industries.
    Etc.
    This came up in Australia recently where a liberal government proposed loosing some employee protection laws with the idea that it would encourage hiring.
    It did. It worked.
    Then the policy was swiftly reversed by a more left-wing party, and a lot of new employed people lost their jobs because they turned from an asset to a liability.
  2. kube-system · 1790473004 · focus · HN ↗
    > The average salary (not including RSUs/Bonus) in Dublin's Silcon Docklands is north of €130k
    That's quite a bit short to buy an EUV machine.
5. bar8uyr · 1790520618 · focus · HN ↗
  <a href="https://www.usdebtclock.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.usdebtclock.org/
Culonavirus · 1790345003 · focus · HN ↗
They don't call us Europoors for nothing
1. okokwhatever · 1790345940 · focus · HN ↗
  So true it hurt mate...
bethekidyouwant · 1790345304 · focus · HN ↗
What is perhaps more important from ASML's standpoint is that none of the ongoing fab projects in Europe are leading-edge fabs set to use EUV and eventually High-NA EUV lithography scanners. The tools that European fabs use today and that new facilities are set to use in the future are mature tools that cost considerably less than advanced EUV or immersion DUV scanners. This is perhaps a concern for ASML, as the company is naturally interested in selling its more sophisticated and expensive equipment.
Missing from article is where they are selling which I assume is mostly Taiwan and America.
1. cl42 · 1790345535 · focus · HN ↗
  Bloomberg[1] has a breakdown based on ASML filings. For Q2, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan made up 77% of ASML's orders, with China representing another 14%. Given China is on the list, I imagine this includes non-EUV tech as well given the sanctions.
  The fact that Europe has incredibly limited frontier chip making capability is the issue, though. Even if they can produce other chips, its position is not at all resilient.
  [1] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-22/asml-executive-says-europe-s-biggest-firm-has-no-sales-in-europe" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-22/asml-exec...
  1. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790346644 · focus · HN ↗
    The US isn't in a whole lot better position. We've got Intel and Micron, but otherwise dependent on TSMC (and ASML).
    I guess the US chip designers could switch to Intel as a fab if they had to, but there are not even any US-made DUV machines, so far from self-sufficient.
2. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790345960 · focus · HN ↗
  US is only 10-15% of ASML's sales
  1. AdamN · 1790502689 · focus · HN ↗
    And without the CHIPS act that would probably be closer to zero.
3. hn_submit · 1790353157 · focus · HN ↗
  Europe is mostly interested in supporting its car industry. But soon they won't have to worry about that either.
  There are no companies in Europe designing high-end semiconductors because the wages are much lower than in the U.S. The best European talent is moving Stateside and raking in ten times what they can get at home without having to build up seniority first.
  1. bar8uyr · 1790514694 · focus · HN ↗
    Lower wages but worth a lot more. Most CPUs are European designs. No one wants to be in the USA at the moment.
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 1790345456 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
1. functionmouse · 1790345579 · focus · HN ↗
  They did, they just didn't allow themselves to get paid for it.
tehjoker · 1790345562 · focus · HN ↗
I can't imagine it is cheap to get EUV machines these days. Maybe they don't want to get into a bidding war with America and Taiwan and are waiting for things to cool down?
1. [deleted] · 1790346450 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
yomismoaqui · 1790345839 · focus · HN ↗
I'm european and I would buy an ASML t-shirt, will this move the needle enough?
1. trvz · 1790346410 · focus · HN ↗
  Best I can do is half a pair of ASML socks.
  1. aaronbrethorst · 1790346529 · focus · HN ↗
    Very Red Hot chili peppers of you
2. m00dy · 1790346561 · focus · HN ↗
  I would wait for its regulation before the buy :D
3. wvbdmp · 1790346885 · focus · HN ↗
  I would buy that Lego set.
  1. andy_ppp · 1790347101 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh man… a whole fan would be good <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bReWaZz5Grg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bReWaZz5Grg but the actual did it already :-)
4. adrianmonk · 1790462916 · focus · HN ↗
  I bought an ASML t-shirt but the logo was so incredibly tiny that nobody could even tell I was wearing designer clothing.
okokwhatever · 1790345908 · focus · HN ↗
Amusement Park continent. And yes, I'm European and know what I'm talking about.
1. Tade0 · 1790346374 · focus · HN ↗
  You must be living in one of those nicer parts where tourism is present.
  1. PorciiVorbesc · 1790346734 · focus · HN ↗
    High tourism doesn't make a place more livable for teh locals.
2. nwatson · 1790346515 · focus · HN ↗
  Sounds interesting. Now go make me a cappuccino before my next ride.
3. barrenko · 1790456381 · focus · HN ↗
  With a lot of flavours of the socialism gelato.
HPsquared · 1790346004 · focus · HN ↗
Semiconductor fabs involve a lot of hazardous chemicals, process changes and high energy consumption. Exactly the kind of thing European regulations tend to deter or slow down. Which is somewhat fine if there is nowhere else to build it, but if other places are easier, well...
1. Zagitta · 1790346116 · focus · HN ↗
  Everyone loves a good race to the bottom with the environment
  1. alephnerd · 1790346406 · focus · HN ↗
    Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the US all share comparable living standards to Western European states yet are able to maintain and expand semiconductor manufacturing.
    The issue is with policymaking - coordination between the EU, national, and local governments is weak so high capex projects become risky.
    Edit: can't reply
    > Your first 3 countries are also incredibly poor comparisons for living standards as they have horrendous work/life balance.
    Their hours worked are comparable to most Western European states as well now [0]. Germany is unique in Europe based on hours worked, and is why German industry is pushing to bring back the 40 hour work week.
    [0] - <a href="https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html
    throwaway132448 · 1790347412 · focus · HN ↗
    > comparable living standards
    So vague as to be utterly meaningless.
    And slow moving regulation literally incentivises high capex long-horizon investment.
    alephnerd · 1790347555 · focus · HN ↗
    HDI is a good metric for gauging living standards [0]
    And slow moving execution and creation of relevant legislation is a hindrance for capex in high risk projects like those in the semiconductor segment.
    The Draghi report was published 2 years ago, and remains largely unimplemented.
    [0] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
    barry-cotter · 1790507419 · focus · HN ↗
    > HDI is a good metric for gauging living standards
    A country with living standards at Bill Gates levels with perfect good health until 200 where everyone is illiterate has a lower HDI than South Sudan. Even if we fix it by setting the minimum education value at 0.1 billionaires with perfect health land would have a HDI lower than 180 countries. HDI has a 90%+ correlation with GDP. It’s not a worthwhile measure.
    upupupandaway · 1790347975 · focus · HN ↗
    >And slow moving regulation literally incentivises high capex long-horizon investment.
    What?
    CamperBob2 · 1790460111 · focus · HN ↗
    No one wants to invest a lot of money into something that might be illegal tomorrow. (Do you?)
    karahime · 1790348272 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think it's that vague. I've lived in both Europe and the US, in several places, and both have a wide range. What I will say is that I don't think Europe is better off for the times that it has thrown up roadblocks.
    Also, slow moving, stable regulation can be better than arbitrary flippancy, but that doesn't mean it directly incentivizes investment, it just means the investment already incentivized by demand can proceed with more confidence that it won't have the rug pulled out from under it, assuming the regulations didn't discourage a tentative proposal in the first place.
    Zagitta · 1790349810 · focus · HN ↗
    So now we're suddenly talking about living standards and not environmental regulation?
    Your first 3 countries are also incredibly poor comparisons for living standards as they have horrendous work/life balance.
2. piltdownman · 1790346576 · focus · HN ↗
  I mean Ireland has some of the most strenuous regulations in this regard, with dozens of data centres blocked over planning and environmental impact assessments. Despite this Intel still put €30 billion in turning a 360-acre former stud farm in Kildare into a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility, powered entirely by green energy, and acting a key location for production of Intel’s 14nm process technology. They currently pull 1,677,197 MWh/year from our grid.
  More to the point, from 2019 they built €17 billion new fab development which doubled the manufacturing capacity available in Ireland and enabled the production of Intel 4, the company’s most advanced process technology.
  1. mikeyouse · 1790347250 · focus · HN ↗
    For better or worse, Ireland’s extremely lax tax rules resulted in a ton of multinational corporate cash ‘stuck’ there with companies having the option of spending there roughly tax free or repatriating back to the US at some rate higher than that. It also really helps sell the ‘of course an Irish subsidiary owns all of our IP’ tax claims if there is actual spending there, hence you got all the pharma investment and the capital projects from others like Intel and Apple.
    alephnerd · 1790347694 · focus · HN ↗
    "Trapped capital" is not why Intel has doubled down on Ireland.
    It's because whenever Intel asks for anything, the Taoiseach, IDA, and Invest Ireland will move mountains to do it.
    Ireland is extremely business friendly because their leadership actually listens to industry.
    piltdownman · 1790348200 · focus · HN ↗
    LMAO. This is where the actual 'Inside Tennis' knowledge of the Irish Tech industry from someone working within it comes in handy. Enter the 21st Century Luddite, Thomas Reid.
    Thomas is an eccentric, independent bachelor farmer whose family has owned a 72-acre farm next to Intel's Leixlip manufacturing campus for generations.
    Ireland’s State Industrial Development Agency (IDA) attempted to use a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) to buy Reid's land so that Intel could proceed with a multi-billion euro expansion of its microchip production plant. The land was valued at €5 million. During the negotiations that followed, the farmer was reportedly offered in the region of €10 million. He turned it down. Reid had no interest in being a millionaire. Instead, he continued to live on-site without a telephone or modern amenities while taking on Intel and the state alone.
    The battle culminated in a landmark legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Ireland, where Reid ultimately won a historic victory against corporate overreach and protected his property rights
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Battle_of_Thomas_Reid" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Battle_of_Thomas_Re...
    <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/3s4bg1/how_a_farmer_took_on_ireland_inc_and_won/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/3s4bg1/how_a_farme...
    <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/business/commercial-property/intel-requests-dismissal-of-vexatious-appeal-by-farmer-to-its-leixlip-expansion-1.3985237" rel="nofollow">https://www.irishtimes.com/business/commercial-property/inte...
    <a href="https://www.rte.ie/culture/2020/1102/1003311-the-lonely-battle-of-thomas-reid-one-mans-struggle-to-fight-th/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rte.ie/culture/2020/1102/1003311-the-lonely-batt...
    HPsquared · 1790348523 · focus · HN ↗
    They certainly tried!
    Dylan16807 · 1790487500 · focus · HN ↗
    Overreach? Annoying one guy and making him rich in exchange for such a huge buildout isn't overreach in my book. When I think of the overreach of eminent domain the examples have a lot more people and a lot less free millions of dollars.
    Lio · 1790495571 · focus · HN ↗
    > Enter the 21st Century Luddite, Thomas Reid, from stage left.
    How does any of this make him a Luddite?
    Luddites weren’t anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers that actually wanted to be involved with it.
    They wanted technology to serve them not crush them.
    This just doesn’t to sell his farm. That’s not the same at all.
    piltdownman · 1790348483 · focus · HN ↗
    Rather the US lax rules regarding their own enforcement.
    The Double Irish (& Dutch Sandwich) where Companies routed profits through two Irish-registered subsidiaries, attributing intellectual property royalties to a management seat in a tax haven like Bermuda, is closed since 2015.
    Subsequent sequential mismatch structures (the "Single Malt" tool) that replaced the Double Irish for certain firms using non-EU residency loops were also banned. Finally there's a 12.5% charge on unrealized capital gains when a company moves its assets or tax residency out of Ireland.
    The headline tax rate and the effective tax rate are also very different things. France's effective corporate tax rate was actually lower than Irelands - but France is an absolutely brutal place to do business in for employers and they've comparatively no english-language tech FDI to speak of.
    maxlamb · 1790479973 · focus · HN ↗
    France corporate taxes are not that bad, but the corporate paid social charges are massive (40-45% of employees gross salary)
    bdangubic · 1790480435 · focus · HN ↗
    I pay similar in the USA and get literally nothing in “social” or otherwise return. I’d trade with french anytime
    gib444 · 1790487158 · focus · HN ↗
    Just to be clear, the employer first pays ~40-45% of the original salary, then the employee pays ~32-38% of the original salary.
    i.e. a 100,000 EUR annual salary, the employer pays ~40,000 EUR to the government, then the employee gets their wage slips with additional deductions of ~38,000 EUR.
    = total of ~78,000 EUR tax on a 100,000 EUR salary.
    I don't think anything like that level of taxation exists in the US?
    jandrewrogers · 1790526059 · focus · HN ↗
    The tax loading in the US on the equivalent of a 100,000 EUR salary is much lower than this.
    At 100,000 USD (a bit lower than EUR) the combined tax load on income for both employee and employer is typically ~30-35% depending on locale. In the US, $100k is pretty close to the median household income.
    If you have extremely high incomes (e.g. 1,000,000+ USD) the gap closes a bit but even in the highest tax locales the marginal tax loading maxes out at ~60% of top-line income.
    US Federal tax rates are some of the most progressive in the world. Only ~20% of households are net taxpayers after transfer payments and subsidies. Ironically, this is why it is so difficult to significantly increase income tax revenue in the US. It would require the middle-class majority to vote to raise their own taxes.
    ido · 1790487798 · focus · HN ↗
    I understand your frustration, but it's not literally nothing - just less than it should be. The US still has Medicaid/Medicare, public schools, welfare services, emergency services, etc (even if you don't use them yourself you benefit from a reduction in the number of desparate people around you if they were cut back even further than they already have).
    If you are completely broke and go/are brought to a hospital in the US with an immediate life threatening medical issue, they will still try to save your life.
    bdangubic · 1790535685 · focus · HN ↗
    it is literally almost nothing :)
    I am too young for M&M, public schools are the worst and I pay ridiculous amount of money for private education. welfare services? depending on where you live (I live in urban area) welfare services would make sure I am just as homeless as if I didn’t get any welfare service…
    and yes, the ER will take me to save my life but that about as low of a bar as one could come up with.
    lotsofpulp · 1790490911 · focus · HN ↗
    Which jurisdiction?
  2. upupupandaway · 1790347898 · focus · HN ↗
    >construction kicked off in 2019 on a €17 billion new fab development which will double
    I think what the OP wanted to highlight is right here: in China or Taiwan etc. this would not have taken 7 years.
    piltdownman · 1790350729 · focus · HN ↗
    I mixed up a tense or two there. It was done in 4 years, even accounting for Covid. The timeline looks like this
    2019: Kick-off
    2020: Construction in Ireland basically halted due to Lockdown for 18 months
    Q3'2023: Fab 34 begins running a ‘First Full Loop’ of silicon
    Q4'2023: Fab 34 completed. Doubles the manufacturing capacity available in Ireland, enabling the production of Intel 4 and Intel 3, some of the company’s most advanced process technologies, and the first to incorporate EUV lithography
    2024: Intel sold 49% stake to Apollo GM for $11.2bn
    2026: Intel buys back stake for $14.2bn
    Q2'2026: Intel announce a further $5.7bn investment to upgrade existing capacity for server chips, slated for completion by late 2027
  3. PowerElectronix · 1790524389 · focus · HN ↗
    That's just low taxes pushing against everything else in the Irish regulation.
3. l5870uoo9y · 1790347111 · focus · HN ↗
  > high energy consumption
  Just to address this separately: there is effectively energy rationing in several European countries, where the government intervenes to prioritize who should receive energy first (e.g., the Netherlands and Denmark).
  1. alephnerd · 1790347246 · focus · HN ↗
    Most fabs build their own separate power grid.
    And Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are also energy poor states that have been able to maintain capacity.
    The energy excuse is true for some manufacturing processes like automotive in CEE which were pants that were built in the 1990s to 2000s and leveraged Russian ONG, but is a red herring for a lot of other manufacturing processes in Europe.
    European states have a coordination problem as Draghi pointed out 2 years ago.
    peri-cl · 1790348374 · focus · HN ↗
    TSMC alone uses 1/8th of Taiwan's electricity (and rising). They make it work.
    <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/taiwan-semiconductor" rel="nofollow">https://spectrum.ieee.org/taiwan-semiconductor
    <a href="https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/tsmc-could-account-for-24-of-taiwans-electricity-consumption-by-2030/" rel="nofollow">https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/tsmc-could-accoun...
    Panoramix · 1790499653 · focus · HN ↗
    Also, if you start now you would not compete with TSMC in the coming 20-30 years, so the energy requirements won't be that high off the bat
  2. vovavili · 1790349337 · focus · HN ↗
    A consequence of a totally self-imposed handicap.
    vanviegen · 1790491515 · focus · HN ↗
    I get the feeling you're suggesting it's due to government regulation or 'socialist' policies.
    But no, this failure is due a mixture or privatisation and politicians looking no further than the next election, leading to structural underinvestment.
    Oh, and the energy transition going faster than even the most forward looking scenarios anticipated.
    FooBarWidget · 1790504535 · focus · HN ↗
    Going faster... until now. It's screetching to a halt. And they want us to get off gas in a few years while also being unable to handle the electrical load. I'm gonna buy a gas boiler thank you very much.
  3. radicalbyte · 1790463043 · focus · HN ↗
    AFAIK the problem in NL is due to chronic underinvestment in the grid infrastructure since the big privatisation wave. Combined with the heavy subsidy of industry causing the issues.
    Solvable but we need to be much smarter and redirect the fossil subsidies to reducing risk for grid-scale batteries and adding more grid capacity.
    rapnie · 1790469123 · focus · HN ↗
    I wonder. Had any privatisation in NL any net benefits for the population? Not talking shareholder revenues.
    vanviegen · 1790491076 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course not. The whole concept just doesn't make sense.
    microtonal · 1790493501 · focus · HN ↗
    In most areas it made things worse. One could argue that the only exception are ISPs/cellular operators. But for public transport, healthcare, energy, etc. I can't say it was an improvement.
    But yeah, we have one party that is most often in government that just loves privatisation, taxing workers more and the rich less, etc. and engages in a lot of short-term thinking. Apropos short-term thinking, one of them was a prime minister for 14 years and cut defense spending and did not even consider increasing spending when Russia invaded Crimea. And now he is the secretary general of NATO. Talking about failing upwards. Though he is probably primarily chosen for being able to communicate with Trump.
    radicalbyte · 1790530435 · focus · HN ↗
    Rutte can't even speak English properly.
    radicalbyte · 1790530394 · focus · HN ↗
    There's a possibility that the postal and telecoms systems did but I can't give you a counter. For everything else it has not been particularly effective; but a lot depends on what is privatised and how it's actually ran.
    Water. Energy. Public transport (which is partially privatised). Healthcare has been a disaster.
    Same thing for the UK but the results there were much much worse, especially the water (Brexit made it 10x worse). It was driven by the actions of the Unions in the 1970s (where they were taking the mickey) but of course went way way way too far. What was needed was to tweak the system such that the unions couldn't blackmail the Labour governments. Not to break it all up and sell it off for pennies on the dollar.
    crote · 1790529361 · focus · HN ↗
    Even worse: the right-wing politicians blocked all preemptive grid investments, as it would lead to "needlessly high" grid transport fees.
  4. nikanj · 1790492234 · focus · HN ↗
    We can’t let industry be built, because the power infrastructure is so shabby, because the state can’t afford to improve it, because the economy is in tatters, because there is no industry, because we can’t let industry be built
4. cromka · 1790347637 · focus · HN ↗
  This is some ridiculous speculation, we do plenty of such critical manufacturing in EU. Regulations is not why we don't make highly-integrated chips here.
  1. scotty79 · 1790349854 · focus · HN ↗
    Why then?
    mdp2021 · 1790351518 · focus · HN ↗
    A probably non negligible weight is that decadence is bearish.
    Those alive invest in long term planning, those with a dead drive get conservative in their action.
    mdp2021 · 1790503566 · focus · HN ↗
    Again, the sniper seems to prove the point. Decadence and non effort are strictly related.
    RGamma · 1790552080 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    mdp2021 · 1790630650 · focus · HN ↗
    No, humanity needs to actively (actively) rediscover human Values, to correct the proportion in the run towards technological growth vs Human growth - condition that has been noted for centuries and it substantially amounts to giving power to monkeys.
    This does not counter that an idle, decadent mentality will have curbed growth everywhere.
    cromka · 1790409793 · focus · HN ↗
    Lately specifically because of Intel having financial issues, they already started building their fabs in Dresden and Wrocław when they cancelled last minute.
    This was strategically planned with EU as part of bringing back production locally, similar to CHIPS Act in the US.
    isbvhodnvemrwvn · 1790499360 · focus · HN ↗
    So you are fully dependent on US companies anyway.
    cromka · 1790505419 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a different problem than discussed here.
5. tgsovlerkhgsel · 1790459697 · focus · HN ↗
  What is so energy consuming around fabs? The light source? I always thought of these as high-precision, not-too-high-volume processes and would have expected energy requirements to be lower than e.g. a car factory (or similar to e.g. a mall) and completely negligible on a national grid scale or compared to something like a smelter or lignite mine.
  Edit: AI claims HVAC and air filtering/handling can be 40-50% of energy usage. Plus a megawatt per EUV scanner (ok, the latter matches what I would have guessed, but compared to the 16 MW of a single large bucket wheel excavator or estimates I've seen for large shopping malls, that's not that insane either).
  1. tyre · 1790463142 · focus · HN ↗
    Check out asianometry on YouTube for deep dives into many parts of semiconductor manufacturing, including the lithography processes ASML uses.
  2. whateverboat · 1790463974 · focus · HN ↗
    TSMC's Arizona fab needs 200MW of electricity.
    But even more importantly, they need 2 separate completely independent substation feeds, since a 15 second interruption can cause 0.1B Euro of losses.
    Finally, and here is where Europe really really suffers, generally you need these things to be planned, approved and built within a year.
    selestify · 1790490330 · focus · HN ↗
    Why would the turnaround time need to be so small?
    tormeh · 1790518833 · focus · HN ↗
    Why suffer worse bureaucracy than you absolutely have to? As long as there are no trade barriers companies will go where circumstances are the most favorable. What's the argument in favor of settling in Europe?
    pfdietz · 1790522802 · focus · HN ↗
    The decision loop needs to be faster than the market shifts. Otherwise, you are fighting yesterday's war.
    vanviegen · 1790490814 · focus · HN ↗
    > Finally, and here is where Europe really really suffers, generally you need these things to be planned, approved and built within a year.
    I think that is not even possible in China, let alone in the USA.
    alphabeta3r56 · 1790500028 · focus · HN ↗
    Not the OP and 1 year is too much. But eu is still much slower than Arizona. See <a href="https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/intels-german-fab-faces-construction-delays-due-to-unsuitability-of-land/" rel="nofollow">https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/intels-german-fab...
    wewxjfq · 1790491636 · focus · HN ↗
    And what's so special about 200 MW? Many factories in Europe use these amounts and they run their own power plants. The only edge here is that the US has cheaper fossil fuels, which it amounts to.
    > Finally, and here is where Europe really really suffers, generally you need these things to be planned, approved and built within a year.
    Like the offshore wind farms in the US? I think Europe and China are building these things much faster. ;)
    loglog · 1790506960 · focus · HN ↗
    There are plenty of locations with redundant power supply, and even building a new power line from another substation would generally not be too expensive given the short distances (unless NIMBYs block it, which they do).
  3. alightsoul · 1790485561 · focus · HN ↗
    They have hundreds of machines that use microwaves, turbo molecular pumps, idk what else? I'd say it's just the sheer density of equipment within. An average fab has 2000 tools aka machines for wafers alone
  4. eric-hu · 1790485565 · focus · HN ↗
    Large shopping malls would fail the air purity requirements for semiconductor manufacturing.
    EUV lithography and etching rooms require ISO class 1 clean rooms. Those can have a maximum of 10 particles of size 0.1 microns per cubic meter.
    While a shopping mall can get away with 2 - 4 air changes per hour, an ISO class 1 clean room requires 400-600 an hour, or about 10 a minute. Airflow needs to also be controlled: vertical and laminar. Every human entering the cleanroom needs to undergo an air shower with speeds of 60-90 mph to shear off loose skin flakes, hair and lint. This area needs to maintain constant positive air pressure to repel outside dust as humans move in and out.
    In the EUV lithography systems, temperature control is measured in milliKelvins (0.001 C). If a wafer stage has a temperature variation of 0.05 C, the silicon expands by a few nanometers and the multimillion dollar batch is toast. Meanwhile in the same room, the EUV machine is generating extreme ultraviolet light using a plasma light source that gets to above 200,000 C. That's 40x hotter than the surface of the sun.
    > I always thought of these as high-precision, not-too-high-volume processes
    EUV rooms are churning out about 150 wafers an hour, 24/7. That sounds like not too high of a volume, but each wafer is about 500 cpus. So 75,000 cpus an hour.
    cwbriscoe · 1790491688 · focus · HN ↗
    I doubt I could even work in a fab having psoriasis.
    bob1029 · 1790524666 · focus · HN ↗
    It is mandatory to wear a bunny suit, mask and goggles in every fab I've been inside of.
    They have special security guards who make sure you do the procedure correctly.
    fnord77 · 1790499978 · focus · HN ↗
    seems like doing this in a vacuum would be more economical
    falserum · 1790505091 · focus · HN ↗
    Laymens guess what problems it could introduce:
    Vacuum does not dissipate heat well (extra engineering in that department)
    Vacuum is never 100% vacuum. If you have some dust in the air, it will mostly flow to the direction of the airflow, but in vacuum dust particles will do random walk thing and settle on surfaces.
    tatjam · 1790510022 · focus · HN ↗
    Plus the fact that then you need the everything to be structurally strong to be able to support 1atm of pressure differential, keep the vacuum sealed, and keep material degassing under control, so you end up with some heavy duty, expensive stuff. Pretty sure a lot of steps in the chip fab are done under very very high vaccums tho!
    tremon · 1790515528 · focus · HN ↗
    In general it's easier to control the air you're blowing into a room than what you're extracting, so I'd expect it would be more economical to keep the fabrication rooms under high pressure than low pressure. Also, in case of a leak, air and contaminants will flow out of the room instead of into it.
    magimas · 1790520354 · focus · HN ↗
    I worked a lot with and built up ultra-high vacuum systems during my PhD. At least for that level of vacuum, you introduce a lot of headache.
    You can't use normal plastic or any kind of lubricant anymore because it starts degasing inside the vacuum, pump down after opening to air is a multi-day process that involves heating everything up to 150°C to get rid of the water that will settle on basically every surface when you pull the vacuum, every electricity feedthrough is a potential point of failure, transfering objects between different stages is a huge hassle etc. pp.
    I'm sure there's still lots of UHV and HV systems in a chip fab, but there's no way that's easier on a full factory scale than clean room operation.
    pfdietz · 1790522696 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think he meant UHV, just vacuum good enough that dust particles are not suspended.
    Heat dissipation would be the obvious problem.
    pletnes · 1790502854 · focus · HN ↗
    Exactly this. The process is super complex and expensive. The result, a cpu, is sold for a few dollars. To be profitable, the scale / volume has to be absolutely massive!
    daedrdev · 1790526491 · focus · HN ↗
    Most clean rooms would fail the standard, to say nothing of outside air
6. varispeed · 1790463532 · focus · HN ↗
  If something needs to be done, then these rules are a bit pointless if corporation can just do it in another country. It means the EU simply assists in poisoning poorer countries. If they were serious, then they would have banned chips made using those processes altogether. If they cannot do that, then that regulation is pointless virtue signalling.
7. whateverboat · 1790464221 · focus · HN ↗
  Life cycle of the fab is 3-5 years, an opimistic estimate of slow down in europe due to all the paper work is 2-3 years, so then you would rather not build the plant.
  1. Dylan16807 · 1790487271 · focus · HN ↗
    How? I thought there was still tons of demand for every node that has launched in the last 15+ years.
    eternauta3k · 1790489147 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, and many applications don't need / work on the latest node.
    crote · 1790530254 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem is that constructing a cutting-edge fab is stupidly expensive, and you can only pay for it by selling chips at quite a premium - and nobody is paying a premium for 5-year-old CPUs.
    So that brand-new fab has to pay for itself within the first 3-5 years, or it'll simply never pay for itself. But indeed, once it has paid off its initial construction costs it'll happily keep running for another 10+ years, churning out pure profit.
    An additional problem here is that the costs have been rapidly increasing as the nodes have gotten more advanced. The tech for something like, say, the 40nm node is now mature enough that building new fabs isn't too expensive, so there's a decent market for building new ancient fabs for cheap mass production. But with EUV everything has gotten so complicated that there's no reasonable way to make it cheaper as it matures, and scale-wise you're well into the diminishing returns for everything which isn't logic. It is very much doubtful whether building brand-new 7nm-and-smaller fabs for mass production will ever make economic sense.
    Dylan16807 · 1790551567 · focus · HN ↗
    CPUs and GPUs a node or two old aren't really cheap compared to the cutting edge, though. If the fab's selling price has dropped a ton, are Intel and Amd and nVidia all making an extra big profit on the older models they're still selling?
    whateverboat · 1791016119 · focus · HN ↗
    yes, hugely so.
8. alightsoul · 1790485450 · focus · HN ↗
  There is a whole niche in semiconductor called abatement which usually involves burning fluorine based gases used for etching, in order to make them less hazardous before releasing them into the environment. They use natural gas for combustion. The chemicals are not liquids anymore just gases because they are easier to control and manipulate with plasma via e.g. dry etching, CVD, ion implant
9. raffraffraff · 1790521557 · focus · HN ↗
  We have a politician putting up very obviously hand drawn (because we need to be fucking certain that AI didn't do it right?) posters for an anti-datacenter meeting. I'm pretty sure that if you were to talk to the actual humans in our society they'd talk about housing, employment, public transport. Not datacenters. If datacenters even feature in their real world outcomes it's 3rd hand, but the usual lefty crowd will turn up to any vaguely lefty protests with their bizarre mix of rainbow flags and keffiyehs.
joinHNtheysaid · 1790346112 · focus · HN ↗
Cultures that make, europe has lost that,imported a ton of culture that takes. Same as the us, empire might might be a ressource curse in disguise.
1. 468854259853 · 1790347818 · focus · HN ↗
  Are you saying the surgeons and phamacists practicing their trade on the streets are not an enrichment?
petcat · 1790346387 · focus · HN ↗
> Another concern is that even advanced silicon produced in Ireland or at ESMC is then shipped to other regions for packaging, meaning that European companies have largely lost their ability to produce sophisticated chips entirely in Europe. In turn, this means that, for now, there is hardly any strategic point for European authorities to create demand for chips that are 'Made in Europe' because they are either not assembled in Europe, not produced in Europe, or not developed in Europe. We have no idea whether this is eventually going to change, but there are currently no signs that it will.
This is just such a dire situation to be in. Even USA has seen the writing on the wall regarding China-Taiwan which is why it has been strategically re-homing all the most advanced chip fab technology to Arizona [1].
[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC_Arizona" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC_Arizona
1. alephnerd · 1790346799 · focus · HN ↗
  This was a major flaw that I and others brought up a couple years ago when the EU was consulting industry about making its own CHIPS Act.
  While bleeding edge backend processes got the bulk of reporting, the major push for the American CHIPS Act was the rebuild packaging capacity in the US (Samsung is working on this in Texas).
  This was also the same approach Taiwan, Malaysia, and China used to climb up the semiconductor value chain.
  The EU also failed to tie design capacity together as well, as semiconductor design capacity is almost nonexistent in Europe.
  1. piltdownman · 1790348556 · focus · HN ↗
    Semiconductor design capacity is a massive issue almost always overlooked in these conversations. Spot on.
    hn_submit · 1790352908 · focus · HN ↗
    There's certainly semiconductor design capacity in Europe, but it's mostly geared towards low-end semiconductors, like the ones used in automotive and industrial.
  2. gregorygoc · 1790462140 · focus · HN ↗
    Is EU chips act 2.0 any good?
2. cameldrv · 1790372356 · focus · HN ↗
  They can create demand for "Made in Europe" semiconductors that aren't packaged there, and then they can create demand for "Made in Europe" semiconductors that are packaged there and try to get a packaging plant to open up.
  If you have a two step problem, the strategy of "I can't do two things at the same time so I'll just give up", is not a good one.
ChrisArchitect · 1790346619 · focus · HN ↗
Earlier: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49804613">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49804613
t43562 · 1790347718 · focus · HN ↗
It seems to be "dump on Europe" day which I'm sure is popular but lets just stop for a second and ask what the sales of ASML machinery to the US would be without the CHIPS act .... a massive subsidy. Aren't subsidies supposed to be a bad European thing??? I'm confused. Are we free market proponents or planned economy proponents?
1. upupupandaway · 1790348103 · focus · HN ↗
  I don't think this is the main point (subsidies). ASML sold nothing in Europe because Europe is not a factor in semi manufacturing, primarily due to regulations and bureaucracy.
  1. elric · 1790487876 · focus · HN ↗
    > primarily due to regulations and bureaucracy
    Or, more likely, due to energy prices.
    logicchains · 1790489502 · focus · HN ↗
    The energy prices in Europe are also up due to regulations and bureaucracy, without which the continent would be full of nuclear plants.
    wewxjfq · 1790492907 · focus · HN ↗
    Europe is the only continent where some countries are close to fully nuclear and they aren't close to being the industrial powerhouses HN commenters would make you believe. Tell my why are the US (gas) and China (coal) are beating France (nuclear)?
    The whole world essentially stopped building nuclear power plants at the end of the 1970s and there's one obvious answer which you guys just can't accept, so you keep inventing one stab-in-the-back narrative after another for why nuclear energy failed.
    logicchains · 1790501980 · focus · HN ↗
    >The whole world essentially stopped building nuclear power plants at the end of the 1970s
    China has over 30 nuclear power plants currently in development, the only way nuclear "failed" is the industry's failure to convince dumb boomers not to regulate it out of existence in the west.
    dv_dt · 1790512355 · focus · HN ↗
    Nuclear failed and will fail because it economically doesn't pay off without large government subsidies for everything from the power purchase agreement, to security and long term waste management. Its also centralized, and more difficult to defend in a world that is threatening to descend into at least regional conflicts. If one were seeious about industrial progress, you would avoid nuclear, avoid fossil fuels, and install and develop renewables and battery techs
    dalyons · 1790516352 · focus · HN ↗
    And yet their % share of nuclear is declining and will continue to decline every year. Because nukes are too expensive, even for a single party state
    microtonal · 1790494167 · focus · HN ↗
    Energy prices are up in Europe because Europe was too dependent on Russia for gas (and now the US) and the Middle East for oil, not regulation. We are too dependent on fossil fuels because (mostly right wing) politicians tried to block/underinvest in wind/solar/geothermal for too long.
    TrickyRick · 1790498512 · focus · HN ↗
    Almost correct, except it's the green/left that forced a shutdown of nuclear and sold the gas as "green". At least in Germany/Scandinavia, might be different in the rest of Europe.
    IsTom · 1790501374 · focus · HN ↗
    > During the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder, the social democratic-green government decreed Germany's final retreat from using nuclear power by 2022.[1]
    The Gerhard Schröder that
    > Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom.[2]
    [1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
    [2]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der
    uecker · 1790519298 · focus · HN ↗
    And yet, Germany does not import gas from Russia anymore. Did nuclear industry in other countries stop importing from Rosatom already?
    IsTom · 1790532141 · focus · HN ↗
    If the Nord Stream didn't get blown up it could have been different.
    uecker · 1790620041 · focus · HN ↗
    The nord stream pipeline was not carrying gas when blown up. But other pipelines were.
    Lumich · 1790631792 · focus · HN ↗
    > Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies
    People often cite this fact as if there were a problem to it. (Not sure it is your case though.) Is it that Germany is not allowed to have national interests? Who is the judge on this? Our "friend", the remaining exceptional occupation power?
    By the way, chancellor Merz, before taking office, had worked for (and owes his personal wealth to) Usanian financial company Blackrock, thus creating a (rarely cited) allegiance problem at the highest level of the state apparatus.
    microtonal · 1790511499 · focus · HN ↗
    Different in the rest of Europe. Many countries have kept mostly the same number of nuclear power plants.
    daedrdev · 1790517087 · focus · HN ↗
    For example, the Netherlands are currently pouring cement down their oil derricks to try and prevent a future government from re opening them, over absurdly minor earthquakes, despite the energy crisis.
    autuni · 1790580092 · focus · HN ↗
    which regulations and bureaucracy are you talking about specifically?
    there are several nuclear plants operation in Europe, some countries also just announced to restart some of their old power plants. There are no regulations that prevent any of the countries from doing it, each country makes that decision for themselves and has their own reasons to do it or not to do it
    hermanzegerman · 1790620273 · focus · HN ↗
    They're also up thanks to corrupt politicians like Katharina Reiche in Germany which sabotages Renewables and Battery Storage in favor of Gas Plants
  2. wewxjfq · 1790492426 · focus · HN ↗
    The same regulations and bureaucracy that doesn't stop ASML from producing these machines? Makes sense. Also it's funny how in the US/China/EU threads, you'd never guess that China is state-run. You'd think they are a capitalist heaven like the US.
    Could the "EU has too much bureaucracy" users even say how much more bureaucracy EU is producing compared to the US and China? I doubt it. The US Congress has produced some insane behemoths of laws where the glossary is bigger than your average EU directive, so please put some numbers behind your claims.
    Lastly, I think the average HN user just doesn't understand that the EU streamlines regulation across 28 countries, which is almost the opposite of coming up with new regulations. It makes things easier. But that would already require an iota of knowledge past the HN kneejerk worldview.
    bcrosby95 · 1790520446 · focus · HN ↗
    ASML is selling $300 million dollar machines that are fairly small for it's price point. Regulation is going to have very little impact on producing something like that vs mass produced widgets or cars.
  3. goobatrooba · 1790496942 · focus · HN ↗
    I dont think there is any hard fact behind your statement. EU has a number of semiconductor companies and fabs, though they tend to focus on embedded/industrial applications. Some went bankrupt (e.g. a big German RAM manufacturer) and the number dwindled, but it's not like there's nothing.
    Like in anything high tech you need either massive subsidies or network effects, this is why things have built up in Taiwan, Shenzhen and South Korea, with remnants in the US, EU and a bit more Japan as all three thought they can let the market play out, fell a bit behind, and then the network effects won out.
    Similarly the car industry - Germany (and Japan) rose due to massive investment and network effects, then the shareholders put in CEOs with a clear mission just to milk the cows and get wealth out of the system; this gave China a chance to go all in on investments and overtake them on innovation and price. This has nothing to do with regulation, just with short-termism and the inherent diseases of a "pure" capitalism.
    That there are few new innovative companies coming up is probably more due to regulations (need to figure out how to make the product work and be legal in various regimes). In turn that they don't scale is due to less financing options and a much more fragmented market (to sell in France and Spain and Poland you need to translate everything and adapt it to local expectations and payment standards.. to sell in Florida, Minnesota and Texas you just need to throw a single English version up.
    A shame that the national governments keep blocking any real integration of the financial and regulatory regimes at EU level, this would solve the startup and scale up issues to a large degree. The EU just proposed "EU Inc" as a solution, not sure this will not be ground up in 27 regimes...
    benjiro29 · 1790514260 · focus · HN ↗
    To give a idea of fun regulations. This is one regarding imports that my partner is dealing with recently.
    A new regulation when importing into Europe, is that you need to show that import materials do not have toxic substances, ... on ... shipping labels (meaning the physical labels are free from harmful chemicals like BPA, PFAS, or PVC).
    You need from every company that ships from China, they need to provide certificates that their shipping labels are toxic free.
    Pulled from AI because i hate summarizing this...
    * EU Ecolabel: The gold standard in Europe. It officially guarantees that a product has low aquatic toxicity, a reduced environmental footprint, and strictly limited hazardous substances throughout its life cycle.
    * EN 13432 Certification: If using compostable labels (like those from Better Packaging Co.), this mandatory European standard ensures the label, liner, and adhesive break down safely in industrial composting without leaving toxic chemical residues.
    * FSC (Forest Stewardship Council): Certifies that the paper backing and label face stock are sourced from sustainably managed, non-destructive forests.
    * Phenol-Free / BPA-Free Declarations: Thermal printing labels must formally declare compliance with EU Regulation 2016/2235, which legally restricts bisphenols in thermal paper across the European Economic Area.
    Its a mess of paperwork ... We have not talked about a ton of others, and those are on the import side.
    We had some fun discussions about vitamine pill manufacturing, where importing materials made it "made in China".
    But if we imported the raw material, and the capsules are made in Europe, and its mixed / bottled here. Well, made in Europe. But the prime materials that goes into your body is from China ... Does not matter.
    But wait, if the capsules are made in China and mixed / bottled here in Europe, then its still made in China. Because the capsule somehow made the difference?! I do not remember the details but the amount of easy customer cheating that can be done with "Made in EU / Germany / France"..
    I can go on with some of the insanities i get told about ... There are good rules but a lot are like this mix that make no sense, and you can almost hear that somebody pushed for exceptions when the rule was designed. So you get this odd crap that half the time makes no sense.
    Hard to do business when the rules are often a issue.
    foobarian · 1790515230 · focus · HN ↗
    This almost reminds me of the Ancien regime mess with a million different taxes and fees on everything
    pillefitz · 1790521243 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm glad we're not importing hundreds of tons of toxic labels that, when touched, mess with your endocrine system. What's your point?
    benjiro29 · 1790539365 · focus · HN ↗
    The fact that the issue as described is such a small problem, that pales into the other issues.
    One of the issues mentioned is PFAS, ... ignoring the fact that we have tons of PFAS pollutions already in our soils and not a darn thing is done.
    We live very close to one of those sites, but its always excuses after excuse to solve. But PFAS on labels, panic, panic, ... The whole label issue can easily be solved by random sampling at import and a fine system. That automatically puts backpressure to fix it. No need for certificates left and right.
    My point is that we keep making bureaucratic rules, that make every step more difficult for entrepreneurs here in Europe, instead of having a proper compliance setup. There is a entire industry around yearly audits (that cost 10.000's), like people who do it non-stop suddenly forget how to do it.
    That is the issue ... Its not about rules but about barriers that make often setup in such a way to be barriers of entry/working, then compliance.
    Tell me, how many times do you go to have your car checked. Yearly or every two years? That is one of those example where in some countries its yearly, other twice. Do the countries with two years have issues with their car park. No ... The result is the same but some people get to be inconvenienced twice (and pay twice). Do you understand it a bit more now?
    There are rules and there are rules that add little beyond making everything difficult, when it can be solved in a better way.
    hermanzegerman · 1790620187 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe don't dump some AI Bullshit about many things that don't apply to shipping labels or are mandatory at all. Like 3 out of the 4 are completely irrevelant at all.
    to11mtm · 1790529423 · focus · HN ↗
    FWIW I view Japan as still a player, just more specialized (although yes, TSMC is often still involved.)
    Specifically, imaging sensors. Canon still makes their own sensors in Japan, and Sony makes all sorts of sensors that are used both by competitors in the camera space as well as Phones, (e.x. Apple after over a decade is only now starting to diversify with Samsung US Fabbed sensors,) Dashcams and Security Cams(Even a lot of the Chinese built ones, if you see STARVIS it's a Sony sensor)
    That said, Imaging sensors do hit a curious level of 'needing bleeding edge but is not necessarily as complex as a cpu'. i.e. you're striving for precision and quality but the part itself is a lot more 'repetitive' across the silicon area compared to a CPU.
  4. AdamN · 1790501954 · focus · HN ↗
    They're making the point that you're wrong. The CHIPS act under Biden is a big subsidy to bring modern fabs to the US and without it there wouldn't be any orders in the US either (which has less regulation). The EU came up with a competitor to that subsidy but it wasn't generous enough to compete (neither regulation nor bureaucracy at play here).
    On a side note, none of the TSMC fabs in the US are cutting edge. They're all at least a generation behind.
    petcat · 1790510072 · focus · HN ↗
    > none of the TSMC fabs in the US are cutting edge. They're all at least a generation behind.
    TSMC Arizona is a "gigafab" built in phases. The 4nm fab is already built and in volume production of chips for Apple and Nvidia. The 3nm fab construction is complete, and the 2nm (current SOTA) is under construction slated to start chip production in 2028.
    crote · 1790529101 · focus · HN ↗
    TSMC is starting A16 mass production this year. Its 2nm process entered mass production in their domestic fabs in 2025.
    In other words: TSMC Arizona isn't SOTA - it is lagging 3 years (~1.5 nodes) behind.
    Taiwan isn't stupid. It knows that keeping SOTA domestically is the only way it can rely on the US for protection. The second their fabs aren't absolutely crucial for cutting-edge chips anymore, the US will drop them like a brick - and China will happily devour the country.
    AdamN · 1790842968 · focus · HN ↗
    Drop them like a brick is overblown. The US defended Taiwan long before TSMC became singular and will continue to even if SOTA is available elsewhere. Of course Taiwan is smart enough to know that the US isn't a monolithic decision-maker and just having companies like Apple on your side inside the US administration is important for long term security.
  5. rowanajmarshall · 1790509593 · focus · HN ↗
    No, Europe is not a factor in cutting-edge chip assembly. That is a tiny fraction of the overall supply chain to manufacture a finished, compute-ready semiconductor. There is sense in not trying to compete with the "sexy" part of chip manufacturing, and instead concentrating on the steps of the supply chain you are already good at.
    PowerElectronix · 1790524811 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd say being able to compete instead of trying. I bet a lot of euro companies would love to compete against nvidia, amd, intel or tsmc, globalfoundries, etc. They just can't.
    liquidpele · 1790531750 · focus · HN ↗
    USA just can’t compete at banana production, film at 11.
    PowerElectronix · 1790538267 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, but it's not for lack of talent in tech, investemnt money and support from lawmakers. Just a climate that doesn't help bananas grow, unlike chip design and manufacturing in europe.
    cemkum · 1790587829 · focus · HN ↗
    If banana production was such an important cornerstone of world economy, a competent team of engineers would be able to create the perfect indoor plantations to raise bananas.
    The plantation described above is less complex than the ultra-cleanrooms used by semiconductor producers like TSMC.
    unparagoned · 1790723318 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s completely useless. The point is that we need full control over the full pipeline for security.
    If China invades Taiwan 70% of noting is still nothing.
  6. dools · 1790512603 · focus · HN ↗
    Isn’t ASML a European company?
    cenamus · 1790513946 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, but but but evil regulations and bureaucracy
2. aidenn0 · 1790477183 · focus · HN ↗
  The US has had tariffs and government subsidies for literally its entire existence.
3. DrBazza · 1790504386 · focus · HN ↗
  In a different reality, the UK government didn't allow 90% of ARM to be sold to Japan/SoftBank, and ARM expanded into chip fabrication in Europe.
4. carefree-bob · 1790507948 · focus · HN ↗
  All nations have tariffs and subsidies, we need to move beyond restating these basic facts like "Governments exist to impose taxes and provide subsidies" but move to analyzing how effective they are at promoting industrial policy.
  With Europe, I have no idea what they aim to achieve. They are losing their auto industry. Energy is so expensive they are losing their chemical and metallurgy industries. They are not moving to tech. They are not, as far as I know, investing heavily in any area at all other than spending money on stuff made elsewhere.
  What is the plan for Europe's economy? Tourism?
5. joenot443 · 1790518799 · focus · HN ↗
  > Aren't subsidies supposed to be a bad European thing??? I'm confused.
  Are you earnestly confused or are you being rhetorical? The US has a long history of subsidies across nearly its entire catalogue of exports.
  1. t43562 · 1790620731 · focus · HN ↗
    It's rhetorical because I see that complaint about the EU too often and I just want to point out what you have said but in my case I'm ridiculing the moralising lecture about the dire consequences of anti-free-market behaviour.
hn_submit · 1790348088 · focus · HN ↗
Europe is continually complaining about its dependency on Chinese steel, cars, electronics and semiconductors yet their carmakers are buying cheap Chinese steel instead of European steel and European semiconductor manufacturers are preferring cheap Chinese semiconductor equipment over ASML gear.
The European Commission wanted to put hefty tariffs on dumped Chinese steel but the carmakers sought an exemption. They don't care about European sovereignty, only about their profits. Penny wise and pound foolish. I doubt there will still be a European car industry in two decades or so.
Europe is a lost continent.
1. DarkNova6 · 1790349383 · focus · HN ↗
  > Europe is continually complaining about its dependency on Chinese steel, cars, electronics and semiconductors yet their carmakers are buying cheap Chinese steel instead of European steel and European semiconductor manufacturers are preferring cheap Chinese semiconductor equipment over ASML gear.
  You clearly have no idea about the value creation chain. Steel is a commodity, why shoot yourself into the foot by buying expensive one. And semiconductors are not commodities.
  But I guess this logic only makes sense to a country that insists on using its own overpriced steel to save a couple jobs.
  1. hn_submit · 1790352222 · focus · HN ↗
    How are you gonna fight a war when you can't make the steel for your bullets and artillery grenades? Yes, that's the scary logic we need to take in account these days.
    Steel is not a commodity, it's a basic ingredient in any industrial base.
expedition32 · 1790349271 · focus · HN ↗
The Netherlands has always put its economic chips on America and Asia.
Europe is just a geographic accident as far as the Dutch are concerned.
1. bar8uyr · 1790515089 · focus · HN ↗
  Not an accident, sell to the needful.
skeledrew · 1790353953 · focus · HN ↗
China is where the demand is. Sell to China and stop being an ass and US's puppet.
cmiles8 · 1790356168 · focus · HN ↗
With all the regulations nobody in their right mind would build a fab in Europe.
Europe is increasingly relying on the rest of the world to supply it with critical things. It’s FAFOed with regulations that have driven these things elsewhere and now is heading into a “FO” world of hurt as the tables are turned and they desperately need things and have to pay the price. This will likely define the next 20 years in Europe.
1. simonask · 1790492954 · focus · HN ↗
  Europe, like the US, is rich because it outsources lower-value production and focuses on higher value targets.
  Chip production is not nearly as high in value as all the things you can build with those chips.
  Local production is about supply chain security, not profit. Europe doesn’t mind one bit paying for chips produced somewhere else, but it does mind a world order where global trade is unreliable.
  1. EdiX · 1790508473 · focus · HN ↗
    If we did mind a world were global trade was unreliable we have a military to match that concern, but we don't. The Houthi close the red sea for years and we can't do anything about it. Iran, attacked by the US, retaliates against us by closing the strait of Hormutz and we sit in the monitoring chair.
    It is what it is.
    simonask · 1790514537 · focus · HN ↗
    Don’t buy too much into the propaganda. Back when the US was a reliable partner that still understood how much it was gaining from global trade, it would have been idiotic to focus on building European military capability.
    The thing that seems to have changed is that both the US and Russia are determined to destroy their own future.
ramshanker · 1790428677 · focus · HN ↗
Happy to hear India got mentioned by the same executive during that conversation. We are just started buying from them. I went to Semicon India 2026, held in delhi last week. The energy was amazing. Really pleasant. all big names including ASML.
1. roenxi · 1790431375 · focus · HN ↗
  It's is heartening looking at a country like India and thinking that it only seems to be a little behind China on the same trajectory. The little flashes of news as they start settling in to more interesting and high tech industries. Whatever good or evil comes out of their growing geopolitical power at least that is another billion people with a clear enough path to wealth and prosperity.
  1. soulofmischief · 1790431967 · focus · HN ↗
    India's caste system ensures by design that wealth and prosperity will not be evenly distributed.
    brookst · 1790432454 · focus · HN ↗
    Is it evenly distributed in China or the US?
    soulofmischief · 1790476496 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    brookst · 1790521245 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes. You implied that the caste system was somehow unique to India. Reality is that every country has its own way of sorting wealth to the most favored.
    soulofmischief · 1790529720 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    kryogen1c · 1790432485 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you mean all systems by design do not distribute wealth and prosperity evenly. Thats actually not a thing.
    soulofmischief · 1790476478 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    irishcoffee · 1790432861 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t understand why people replying to you are defending a caste system like it’s an ok thing. This site blows my mind sometimes.
    mitxela · 1790433713 · focus · HN ↗
    Could be because they're used to it. Every country has a caste system of some sort.
    irishcoffee · 1790444159 · focus · HN ↗
    “Of some sort” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. How many countries have a legal caste system?
    Comparing the lack of a legal caste system because “of some sort” to a legal framework is quite the leap.
    mitxela · 1790445111 · focus · HN ↗
    The USA, for example, has one based on money and connections.
    CoastalCoder · 1790462501 · focus · HN ↗
    It's a civil hierarchy, but I doubt that's what GP meant by "caste system".
    jiggawatts · 1790463093 · focus · HN ↗
    The USA has historically had a two tier system enshrined in law: one for "whites" and one for "coloreds". (There are two sets of bathrooms in the Whitehouse!) Just because the laws were technically repealed, doesn't mean that the system evaporated overnight.
    Coloreds are still hugely overrepresented in the criminal justice (lol) system, they're still much poorer on average, are still disenfranchised en-masse through gerrymandering and voter ID requirements that accept shooters' club membership cards but not ID cards poorer blacks might possess, etc.
    For all intents and purposes, the USA has a caste system that has evolved from an earlier system that was apartheid in all but name.
    Danox · 1790468566 · focus · HN ↗
    But India has a problem. India is one-third size of the United States or China, and they have 1.4 billion people and growing 2 billion or 2.3 billion is not going to work.
    Scoundreller · 1790471616 · focus · HN ↗
    Bangladesh is already at ~3x the population density as India
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
    anon291 · 1790433933 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm from what would have been considered a low caste in India. The moment people mention India, people bring up the caste system as if it's the cause of every issue there or as if other countries don't have similar problems. Unequal wealth distributions are common. While it makes sense for Indian nationals to want their government to do better than other countries and eliminate social inequality (a feat no other country has ever accomplished), outside observers comparing ought to benchmark countries against one another fairly. All countries have social inequality. If India were to eliminate social inequality it would become superior to most countries on the planet. That seems to me a utopian dream, but I understand why someone living there might want that.
    For the rest of us, I think we need to be reasonable in our assessments, especially when the other country under discussion is China.
    tosapple · 1790435370 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    irishcoffee · 1790437437 · focus · HN ↗
    I guess the difference is social mobility in the US exists, a lot of successful founders in the US come from poor beginnings. In India you cannot legally change your caste for your entire life, if I’m not mistaken.
    Seems like it isn’t a system worth defending. China has so many issues, it also blows my mind that people around here defend and praise China like they’re doing good things. They aren’t.
    __rito__ · 1790438886 · focus · HN ↗
    Caste is mostly irrelevant in India outside of liberal arts department of so-called elite universities.
    There are some pockets where this is not true, but they are exceptions.
    And those comments aren't defending it.
    Upward mobility is available in India, too. But remember that to have "upward mobility", there needs to be place at the top. For a country which has been under hundreds of years of regressive colonial rulers, there is not much place at the top.
    Global wealth is much more in the US than in India right now, so it is not wise to compare rags-to-riches of the US with those of India.
    India's government jobs, elite engineering and medical seats have a legal 50%+ quota for "lower" castes people. Did you know that? So, I am saying, 50%+ students graduating ALL elite engineering and law and medical and nursing schools, etc. are from these "lower" castes. Did you know that?
    eldaisfish · 1790439271 · focus · HN ↗
    This is complete and utter horseshit.
    Caste is very much alive in India and this sort of blanket denialism reeks of upper caste privilege.
    If caste is all that irrelevant, please go ahead with changing your surname to an obviously lower caste one. We will see how quickly you come crawling back to your so called “irrelevant” caste privilege.
    __rito__ · 1790440582 · focus · HN ↗
    Why do you assume I am so called higher caste? My caste is under a bucket in India called "Other Backward Classes".
    Honestly the caste never comes up. In almost any conversation. And I also grew up far away from megacities.
    I only heard a couple of priests blabber about the glory of their caste, but they were piss poor and had nothing else to be proud of. And they were bad as priests as well. That is, you wouldn't call them if you care about pure Sanskrit pronunciation, carefulness and seriousness during rituals, etc.
    soulofmischief · 1790478334 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you considered that you, like many economic classes, might exist in a bubble?
    conmod278 · 1790444795 · focus · HN ↗
    Reservation in education institutions and government job which is used to solve caste system are just doing Eugenics in disguise. Only gene pool of rich lower caste people benefit.
    The people who suffered are dead. The people who committed discrimination are dead. Yet the whole nation has to accomodate. Reservation must be done on Pro-Rata basis. If one state like Kerela is advanced, doesn't do caste discrimination and another like Bihar is very much into it. Then only Bihar state should reservation, not whole of India.
    anukin · 1790465480 · focus · HN ↗
    Reservation is one of the easiest way to play vote bank politics. It does not benefit anyone other than the politicians and the rich lower caste people.
    irishcoffee · 1790439509 · focus · HN ↗
    An yet legally, you are born and die in a bucket you have no say in whatsoever. From the outside looking in, seems wrong. Not dissimilar to Brave New World in some aspects.
    __rito__ · 1790440749 · focus · HN ↗
    What if it becomes irrelevant?
    I have always been taught that greatness is in work (karma), and not in birth (janma), and honestly I have seen it practiced.
    A "lower" caste High School teacher gets visibly much more respect in our society than a random priest from "higher" caste.
    irishcoffee · 1790442456 · focus · HN ↗
    Your counterpoint is “what if” ? What if a caste system didn’t exist?
    shash · 1790443136 · focus · HN ↗
    Actually, legally, caste doesn’t exist. It’s been abolished, except for schemes for socially eradicating it (which are controversial but conceptually no different from any other affirmative action).
    Not to say it isn’t a problem. But race is still a problem elsewhere too.
    dd8601fn · 1790465208 · focus · HN ↗
    Racial discrimination is bad and we should say that out loud, too.
    soulofmischief · 1790478238 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    anon291 · 1790444426 · focus · HN ↗
    There is no bucket. There is affirmative action. If you can prove you're a part of a group for which affirmative action has been granted they'll give you a certificate saying you're part of that group. This is in no way tying you to that group. It's just a scheme to give affirmative action.
    This is like saying America's racial quotas (or former ones) put you in a 'bucket'. Caste is essentially race / genetics. You are not bucketed, it is simply a reality of your ancestry. Of course you can't change it.. you cannot change your genetics. This is a ridiculous goal post.
    soulofmischief · 1790478275 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    soulofmischief · 1790477965 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    malshe · 1790439199 · focus · HN ↗
    If Indians could change their caste officially, everybody would be lower caste. In fact there are often protests and agitations by members of certain upper castes to label them lower caste. See this for an example: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_reservation_agitation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_reservation_agitation
    anon291 · 1790444276 · focus · HN ↗
    It's a catch 22. India tracks caste because they're trying to get rid of it. America doesn't track race or social status or whatever. Legal status means nothing really. Especially in urban India, it's becoming very irrelevant what your background is. Are there bigoted regressive people? Yeah of course, but I mean... Those are everywhere. Are there more in India than elsewhere? Probably, compared to urban western nations. But India is like a century behind on social progress id estimate. Still ahead of China where your status is literally tied to your place of birth though.
    soulofmischief · 1790478416 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    soulofmischief · 1790477550 · focus · HN ↗
    I appreciate your response.
    > people bring up the caste system as if it's the cause of every issue there or as if other countries don't have similar problems
    This is a straw man; The US is a shit show. China has major problems. The topic is wealth distribution in India.
    > While it makes sense for Indian nationals to want their government to do better ... outside observers comparing ought to benchmark countries against one another fairly
    I am allowed to study and comment on the state of any government I please. Being from the US doesn't change my ability to think critically and again, the topic of my comment is not "a benchmark of all countries fairly", it's a discussion on future wealth distribution in India.
    > All countries have social inequality
    Sure! Doesn't change a thing.
    > If India were to eliminate social inequality it would become superior to most countries on the planet.
    Besides the point. No one here is arguing about where India fits into some arbitrary ranking of countries.
    > For the rest of us, I think we need to be reasonable in our assessments, especially when the other country under discussion is China.
    China has massive wealth distribution issues as well. We all remember the recent bank runs. That doesn't mean India doesn't have its own problems, which I have brought up.
    drTobiasFunke · 1790460435 · focus · HN ↗
    Nobody is defending caste system. Its bad, and its already illegal as it should be. People are just calling out the hypocrisy when its implied that this kind of stratification is unique to India and unheard of elsewhere. I mean, the west had literal human slaves ffs.
    zdragnar · 1790476812 · focus · HN ↗
    > I mean, the west had literal human slaves ffs.
    So did India until 1843 (legally) and, like the rest of the world, still has many people in forced labor and human trafficking in essentially slave relationships.
    drTobiasFunke · 1791042203 · focus · HN ↗
    Absolute lies. The 1843 act was to prevent the east India company from keeping slaves. Thats a western entity. There are clear records of actual Indian history where slavery was explicitly banned.
    Even if there was something, like I said, its nothing different than what others had at that time. So this whole obsession about stratification in Indian society seen as something unique is baffling.
    numpad0 · 1790463860 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    soulofmischief · 1790476972 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    blackoil · 1790470932 · focus · HN ↗
    Toxic Nationalism.
    soulofmischief · 1790476719 · focus · HN ↗
    What's funny is how many of them jumped to compare India to the US or China... two very corrupt nations each with their own wealth distribution problems... as if that has any bearing at all on India and its caste system. "Hey, I beat my wife, but so does my neighbor! At least I do it with style!"
    All I see is cultural and national biases coming out. I simply did not comment on China's own economic and democratic issues, but everyone assumed I either was ignorant or am playing favorites.
    roenxi · 1790432933 · focus · HN ↗
    I remember when China was poor and everyone was talking about how their communal society guarenteed poverty. Then they started getting wealthy and the story became their communal society was what allowed them to be wealthy. The US is similarly either propelled by or crippled by their individualism depending on whether they've had a good year or not. India will no doubt be similar.
    IMO the evidence suggests it is mostly tax policy and whether people are allowed to start and run businesses. Culture is important insofar as it affects those areas of policy. Getting wealthy is literally as simple as being able to create new wealth and keep it, plus lots of time. People don't choose to stay poor unless someone with a gun forces them to be poor.
    winter_blue · 1790462209 · focus · HN ↗
    > Getting wealthy is literally as simple as being able to create new wealth and keep it, plus lots of time. People don't choose to stay poor unless someone with a gun forces them to be poor.
    Yes, that sums it up. The biggest problem is government officials who get in the way of starting or running a business, ask for bribes, and generally make it impossible to do any non-software non-backoffice business work. Plus taxes.
    spaqin · 1790473873 · focus · HN ↗
    Their communal system hasn't been relevant since the mid 80s when Deng Xiaoping got inspired by Thatcher and opened up the economy. The name remained, though.
    soulofmischief · 1790476401 · focus · HN ↗
    - China has nothing to do with India's cast system, so this is a straw man that attempts to replace the argument with something you're more ready to defend; however, I was talking about India and it's caste system, not China. China also has extreme issues and their people live under oppression, just like in India and the US.
    - As another commenter has noted, modern China is Communist only in name.
    - Your analysis of how simple creating new wealth is, or how people only stay poor when a "gun forces them to" makes it painfully obvious that you and I grew up in different wealth classes. It's not that simple to acquire wealth, and poverty is a massive feedback loop. Wealth compounds, and so does poverty. This is the nature of capitalism.
    Aromasin · 1790432948 · focus · HN ↗
    You could say the same of the aristocracy of Europe over the last few hundred years, but that has effedtively crumbled. There's remnants of "old money" families that were upper-class, but for the most part the merchant class took control of the system that held them down. It took many generations, but the blue blooded dynasties are a dying breed.
    Arguably India has the class system tied to the prevailing religion, but religion too has faded with modernity. Systems have a habit of breaking under strain and time.
    mitxela · 1790433657 · focus · HN ↗
    Isn't every country like that?
    anon291 · 1790433808 · focus · HN ↗
    I am a critic of Indias caste system but China has a state sanctioned caste system while the caste system is condensed by the Indian state and the state takes explicit (many think it over does it) steps to try to mitigate the effects of the caste system
    China on the other hand defined your government benefits and the jobs you may get based on where you were born. People born rurally have to fake documents to work illegally in cities.
    India has a ton of problems, but china is much worse when it comes to human rights. It's not even right to compare the two countries. India is a flawed somewhat liberal democracy (especially for the region of the world, India is a shining beacon on a hill surrounded by repressive regimes), while China is essentially a dictatorship
    anon291 · 1790444566 · focus · HN ↗
    Sorry I mean condemned*
    tancop · 1790445209 · focus · HN ↗
    The hukou system is nothing like that. It's an internal migration thing that works like moving to another country, you can gain "citizenship" of a different area and live there with full benefits.
    It was also designed for a clear purpose (slowing down migration into cities that weren't ready to accept it) and was pretty successful, it just outlived its usefulness and became corrupt. Not the same as something based on ancient class divisions that was probably never that useful in the first place.
    People work illegally because getting a stamp legally is hard if you don't have money or contacts in the local administration. Same reason as illegal immigrants anywhere else. The central government has been pushing to raise registration quotas and make the process easier but it's clearly not enough.
    drTobiasFunke · 1790460327 · focus · HN ↗
    Well.. caste based discrimination is illegal. But caste based handouts are legal. So a reverse discrimination based on caste is legal and state supported. The only reason caste exists in 2026 is because there are state sponsored incentives if you belong to certain castes.
    rayiner · 1790462760 · focus · HN ↗
    China has a legal caste system in the form of birthplace registration and limits on internal migration.
    throw28273r · 1790577305 · focus · HN ↗
    People can still move and apply for residency in different provinces. Those from rural provinces also get more perks and handouts from the government.
    Does India's caste system work like that? Can a lower caste person apply to be in a higher caste?
  2. brazukadev · 1790432798 · focus · HN ↗
    > a little behind China on the same trajectory
    I'm hoping for India development but that is quite far from the truth yet.
  3. insaneirish · 1790436514 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's is heartening looking at a country like India and thinking that it only seems to be a little behind China on the same trajectory.
    Depends on what you mean by "a little behind". Reading Patrick McGee's "Apple in China" (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China) made me think otherwise.
  4. malshe · 1790438907 · focus · HN ↗
    > a little behind China on the same trajectory
    In my opinion, India is around 30 years behind China. This is unlikely to change for several reasons. However, the primary reason is that no Indian government ever had a manufacturing policy that comes close to China's. The service economy is strong but employs a tiny percentage of the population.
    Most of Indian government spending is on welfare followed by endemic corruption. It leaves very little money for nation building.
    shash · 1790442941 · focus · HN ↗
    Thirty? Try more like 10, and that’s only for the advanced nodes. Everything else, we will have capacity coming online soon enough.
    Design, the gap is nonexistent in terms of talent deployed (though we have some way to go to have homegrown product companies). Which puts us roughly where Europe is.
    Also consider, a tiny percentage of the Indian population is a ridiculous number of people. Dwarfing pretty much any other country except China.
    Your last point on welfare and corruption is also false; 35% of government spend is on interest payments (which is kind of normal for most countries?) and 30% is on infrastructure and other capex. Defence is 8% and central welfare schemes plus co-sponsored schemes with the states are only 26%. The point being, while corruption is definitely a problem, it doesn’t significantly come out of the central budget. And welfare is smaller than infrastructure spending even if it’s quite significant (and it better be, in a country like this).
    anukin · 1790458561 · focus · HN ↗
    The infrastructure spending is where and how the corruption happen. The cases of bridge collapses in bihar gujarat, the mp 90 degree bridge etc should be obvious cases of corruption.
    dnautics · 1790461191 · focus · HN ↗
    it's not like bridges don't collapse in china. There were two major ones last year.
    malshe · 1790464598 · focus · HN ↗
    The point is to learn good practices from China.
    malshe · 1790464529 · focus · HN ↗
    If India is 10 years behind China, that would mean in 2036 India will be where China is today. What's the chance of that happening?
    Only an estimated 6 million Indians work in IT and tech services where the money is. India's working age population is approximately 950 million. India had the golden opportunity to bring manufacturing to India when Western companies wanted to reduce their dependence on China. But it wasted it.
    I don't know where you are getting that 30% spending on infrastructue.
    newsclues · 1790465756 · focus · HN ↗
    Indeed look at manufacturing and realize that it takes more than 10 years to change a culture.
    shash · 1790478103 · focus · HN ↗
    The 30% spending is from government numbers in the last budget, so let’s get that out of the way.
    How many people do you think could conceivably work in manufacturing? And who buys all those manufactured goods? The social problem isn’t solved by quotas.
    SpacePortKnight · 1790498702 · focus · HN ↗
    China has over 100 million people working in manufacturing and India has only about 20 million. <a href="https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab8d391-e4e4-83eb-bddd-efd9338e7106" rel="nofollow">https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab8d391-e4e4-83eb-bddd-efd9338e71...
    India's data collection is much worse than China's but we can also look at other metrics like exports. India exports less in total value than a resource-starved, tiny nation like South Korea.
    <a href="https://www.perplexity.ai/search/3aba98a3-cba1-49d8-bcb4-869e049f60c3" rel="nofollow">https://www.perplexity.ai/search/3aba98a3-cba1-49d8-bcb4-869...
    Thus, India could at least add another 100 million manufacturing jobs, along with an additional 100 million service jobs to support manufacturing in logistics, trade, maintenance, customer support, insurance, and food service.
    Given the structure of Indian constitution which gives very little power to local governments to raise revenue and build infrastructure, India is structurally limited as of now from ever becoming as developed as China, let alone western countries.
    I see India becoming more like Brazil than China. That's not necessarily a bad thing since even Brazil is 4-5x richer in per capita than India.
    Scoundreller · 1790471053 · focus · HN ↗
    For whatever reason, India had quite a lead on pharma manufacturing and still runs carries its own pretty well
    fooker · 1790501840 · focus · HN ↗
    India's lead in pharma manufacturing is because of their willingness to ignore US patents for simple drugs , not a technological reason.
    That’s great, but does not translate well to ..say.. manufacturing modern chips or jet engines.
    graemep · 1790514181 · focus · HN ↗
    > India's lead in pharma manufacturing is because of their willingness to ignore US patents
    US patents are only valid in the US. India is not "ignoring" anything by not following foreign laws.
    fooker · 1790521458 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Cooperation_Treaty" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Cooperation_Treaty
    graemep · 1790523652 · focus · HN ↗
    From your first link:
    "A PCT application does not itself result in the grant of a patent, since there is no such thing as an "international patent", and the grant of patent is a prerogative of each national or regional authority."
    So, actually, No.
    hbd-investor · 1790610177 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    logicchains · 1790489375 · focus · HN ↗
    Indian GDP per capita is predicted to reach $13k (China's current level) around 2050, so closer to 20 years behind.
    Shaanie · 1790502673 · focus · HN ↗
    India will as far as I'm aware get hit pretty hard by climate change too, which will be an additional hurdle for them to clear.
  5. maxglute · 1790442664 · focus · HN ↗
    > another billion people with a clear enough path
    The opposite, all historical clear paths i.e. manufacturing/export led model is closed/closing (geopolitics + being automated away). Less clear service export also closing. The growth path that employs 100s of millions and 10s of millions are not available to Indian.
    Reality is even PRC with most favorable conditions still left behind ~400m people because there's only so many opportunities. It's one thing to have ~1B who made it supporting ~400m who didn't vs India trending towards 1.7 B... and if they end up with 500m that makes it, and 1.2B that doesn't, then things may get very ugly in terms of governance. Now that 500m middle/upper class is large enough that India will in aggregate "make it" as geopolitical power, as in climb the tech tree, but due to sheer population and opportunities that looks now foreclosed, most of Indian's statistically, simply, won't. And when numerator/denominator of haves/have not too skewed, there's nothing haves can do (redistribute) even if they wanted to, which lbh, they won't. IMO this pretty much baked in dynamic for India for next few generations, unless we discover abundance.
  6. gosub100 · 1790458974 · focus · HN ↗
    with generations of parents forcing thier children to either be doctors or engineers, I would have expected India to lead the world in both of those categories.
  7. rayiner · 1790461083 · focus · HN ↗
    India is more than a little behind China. Which is depressing, considering that the two countries were equal in GDP per capita as recently as 1990: <a href="https://m.thewire.in/article/economy/from-1960-to-1990-india-and-china-were-at-par-how-did-it-then-overtake-us" rel="nofollow">https://m.thewire.in/article/economy/from-1960-to-1990-india...
    pixelatedindex · 1790468361 · focus · HN ↗
    They kinda did that to themselves, but it's slowly changing. My partner's iPhone 16 is made in India. They really do lack waste management infrastructure though, and it's pretty crucial for this type of manufacturing. They should also borrow the regional concentration of industries that China has done, it really does make things more efficient.
    dlisboa · 1790472165 · focus · HN ↗
    You can't just "borrow" some of the things from China without China politics. Regional concentration there is directly tied with their hukou system. No democratic government is able to implement that system without collapsing.
    Most of China development is sui generis and not replicable elsewhere.
    Terr_ · 1790493424 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    logicchains · 1790501469 · focus · HN ↗
    You're mixing up Hong Kong and Singapore; Singapore is the one with the massive sovereign wealth fund and subsidized housing.
    Terr_ · 1790524360 · focus · HN ↗
    > You're mixing up Hong Kong and Singapore;
    I lived there, Mister Confidently-Incorrect!
    It sounds like you're saw Singapore Fun Facts once, and in your mind it permanently excluded any other place from having similar features.
    * Like I said, Hong Kong does have a significant sovereign wealth fund that ranks in the top 10. [0]. It doesn't stop mattering just because Singapore runs a bigger one.
    * Here's a article from 2021 with a nice stacked-graph showing 45% public housing [1], close to the half I mentioned.
    [0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund
    [1] <a href="https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/249172" rel="nofollow">https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/249172
    usrnm · 1790499078 · focus · HN ↗
    China is very much repeating the history of Japan, and while we can argue how democratic Japan was in the second half of the XX century it definitely wasn't totalitarian.
    christkv · 1790503307 · focus · HN ↗
    Its part Japanese and Koreas model and part British Empire Mercantilism.
    dv_dt · 1790501761 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think the important part is actually one for one replication of the system in China. I think the key parts to deliver progress are diversity of investment decisions, competitiveness in markets, and stable long term goals & fiscal support.
    It's too easy to get tied up in political labels, when any hybrid of public and private support for those helps growth. At this point, I really don't think any political system guarantees the development outcomes, there are examples of all labels which fail one to all of those progress factors.
    roenxi · 1790473953 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    thenthenthen · 1790487228 · focus · HN ↗
    This happens ‘naturally’ but in China’s case I would say the majority is planned, see Shenzhen were 90%(?) of the worlds electronics are coming from. The basically send the engineering corps there, flattened the land with explosives and build a special economic zone.
    roenxi · 1790498549 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    thenthenthen · 1790506845 · focus · HN ↗
    Its a pretty complex topic. There are some hints in the book Extrastatecraft by Keller Easterling, also the Great Leap Forward by Rem Koolhaas and a dozen more urbanism books. But these only highlight specific aspects, of which there are still many to be talked about.
    thenthenthen · 1790510469 · focus · HN ↗
    The success is also not equally distributed. Living in factory campusses is very brutal etc.
    yorwba · 1790513194 · focus · HN ↗
    Guangdong had a pre-existing agglomeration of black-market capitalists because the proximity to Hong Kong made smuggling viable. From <a href="https://andrewbatson.com/2020/10/20/the-upcoming-westad-chen-book-on-chinas-long-1970s/" rel="nofollow">https://andrewbatson.com/2020/10/20/the-upcoming-westad-chen...:
    "One example we use is the No.3 Memory of Lenin Tractor Repair Factory in Zhuhai, which already in 1973 had started repairing tractors outside the plan. It would take tractors that needed to be repaired from other units, repair them on the side of the plan, and then get payment in kind. That payment in kind was then either bartered further within Guangdong, or smuggled downriver to Hong Kong. By 1973 this unit had a Hong Kong bank account. If this had been discovered at the central level, these people would have been shot."
    Turning Shenzhen from an off-limits border area into a special economic zone made it easy for those businesses to go legit and grow, but they were already waiting in the shadows to seize that opportunity.
    There are a few more SEZs <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_China#List_of_SEZs_and_open_coastal_cities" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_Chin... but none did as well as Shenzhen, probably because of location factors.
    thenthenthen · 1790560267 · focus · HN ↗
    Nice reference, thanks! And yeas, for sure proximity to Hong Kong was a big part of this! It is a financial hub, was a production hub, smuggling, triads, international hub, tax haven, the list goes on.

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