Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
Once again EU taxpayer money bankrolling US tech dominance. When will we ever learn to build up our domestic tech industry?<p>And before the chip hipsters crawl all over my back to prove we <i>ackshually</i> have a powerful domestic semi industry, please name me another EU company, other than ASML (a company 90% of people here never heard of before the chip shortage), that has the same margins, dominance and ability to shape the market, as much as the US based Intel, Quallcomm, AMD, Nvidia, Apple. I&#x27;ll wait.<p>The thing is, other than ASML, most of our domestic semi companies  (NXP, ST, Ericsson, Nordic, Infineon, Bosch, AMS, etc.)  are only competing for relatively low margin chips with high competition, therefore bring home relatively little money, compared to their US counterparts which have monopolized high margin sectors (general compute, AI, graphics, etc) and rake in the big bucks.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, it&#x27;s great we have our own semi industry, and we make great chips to boot, but I wish we could do more high margin products, as Chinese companies are hot on our heels with massive support from their government.<p>Remember the failed attempt from the merger of ST-Ericsson to take on QUALCOMM&#x27;s ARM Snapdragon SoCs and modems in the mobile space 10 years ago? I was talking to a former Dutch manager who had a stint there and his reply dropped my jaw: &quot;Yeah, that merger was never meant to ship any chips that can beat Quallcomm, it was just a vehicle designed to suck up as money as possible and funnel it into the right pockets, while some managers pad their resumes so they can move up at other companies later.&quot;<p>Source: Former EU semi engineer.