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EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
- Roritharr 6y agoSo, we're getting an Airbus for Chips? Or will it more be like our Ariane missiles?
- rapsey 6y agoI am sure most of the money will somehow get into the hands of Airbus, Siemens and so on
- ahartmetz 6y agoAriane has / had a similar reputation to Airbus, the only problem with it is that SpaceX lapped everyone. There were some really bad European projects in IT though, like that big search engine project, Quaero, that didn't deliver any end-user product in eight years and was then cancelled.
- m4rtink 6y ago>Or will it more be like our Ariane missiles? It's rude to call it a missile just because they launched one on the wrong azimuth recently. ;-) Also given the success rate of the related Vega rocket, it would not be a very dependable missile anyway.
- andi999 6y agoYes, isnt it normally called a launcher?
- nikivi 6y agoAre there any companies in EU who are developing chips now? I only know ASML but that only makes the wafers. I ask as I can't imagine the government doing this. So there must be some company behind this deal.
- xiphias2 6y agoThey could get into chip dev for that amount of investment money. But of course EU will just waste the money as always.
- bayindirh 6y ago> But of course EU will just waste the money as always. As someone working in HPC and EU projects related to this subject, I don't think they'll waste it. Current HPC and processor push is very real now.
- xiphias2 6y agoEU’s decreasing GDP share in the world shows that EU is wasting lots of money by trying to pick winners. Just having low tax for small tech companies like in Shanghai would incentivize people to work on new great ideas, but I don’t see it happening.
- tsimionescu 6y agoTechnology is always pushed by states, not small companies. Small companies can figure out how to market and reduce costs, but have never successfully created new, advanced technology.
- nickpp 6y agoSaying this while waiting for the new savior vaccine with a brand new mRNA technology pushed by two startups: Moderna & BioNTech is just... funny.
- tsimionescu 6y agoNo, that's a great example of what I'm saying. The vaccine is payed for by states - they had a 100% guaranteed worldwide market. Whether they invested their own money (like BioNTech) or were explicitly financed by a state (like Moderna and Pfizer), the money for that research will ultimately be payed almost entirely by the state.
- jononor 6y agoArticle says this is for 2-3 years? Seems crazy. Semi-conductor R&D is something where I would expect commitments to be 10 years or more, not just a couple of years...
- corty 6y agoJust pork. Commitment is irrelevant because no real results are expected. Also, election terms make any real commitment unlikely, because results will only come for your successor in office.
- simias 6y agoIt's not like we're starting from scratch though, we already have companies and people with ample experience in this field. Not to say that it's not a huge bar to clear or that I don't expect massive delays but I think it's a good thing overall.
- zhdc1 6y agoThe funding is only for two years, and it looks like this is an extension to an initiative that started in 2018. I don't think they expect to build a 2nm fab by 2023.
- rapsey 6y agoJust a giveaway to the best politically connected companies. Like all such EU initiatives.
- simias 6y agoSuch a tiresome and self-defeating mindset. If the EU does nothing it's useless, if it does something it's just corruption. Of course politics and lobbying will play a role when we're talking about hundreds of billions of euros, but that doesn't mean that it can't end up being a net positive for the union. Ask for transparency and keep tabs, don't assume that it's already lost.
- rapsey 6y agoThis mindset is born out of seeing how the game is played and where the money goes from past initiatives. Why would this one be in any way different? To quote a very rich and slimey asshole I’ve interacted with who’s income is largely from such initiatives. It’s just money for papers.
- yulaow 6y agoAlmost any "federal government" branch in any national or transnational entity works that way. They still get results good enough to push technology forward by encouraging parallel private investments. I mean the whole USA tech sector was basically bootstrapped by federal money/grants/investments given in no different way of what EU is doing right now.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoAnd even earlier, in chemical and advanced manufacturing space - just how many of the well-known US companies started as small shops that got their hands on government grants during WWII?
- cinquemb 6y ago> … government grants during WWII Seems like we're missing some "proper" motivation/focus/constraints now like war on this scale can provide… not just the EU, but this kind of diktat-innovation is increasingly more present everywhere… Probably goes hand in hand with the ever present bailout olympics for those deemed TBTF…
- LoSboccacc 6y ago2nm tech, and not only just the tech, but the whole fab for it in two-three years? that how eu is spending 145 billions while allocating 1bn to fighting covid?
- scotty79 6y agoI don't mind that at all. Covid requres just one vaccine and a bit of time and disrupts mostly businesses that produce just human powered entertainment (and health services which is the worst thing about it). While making the whole new generation of most important machines and landing beyond current cutting edge seem like both pricey and worthwhile endeavor.
- LoSboccacc 6y agobold to assume any new generation machine will come out of this, meanwhile real business that produced real wealth are closing down.
- scotty79 6y ago> real business that produced real wealth are closing down. Could you please share some examples? I'm genuinely curious.
- zhdc1 6y agoWhy? Europe already produces EUV lithography machines, and while I'm not that familiar with the field, I'm pretty sure ASML and TSMC are already working on 2nm lithography.
- LoSboccacc 6y agoTSMC is aiming at 2024 for 2nm, they're the market leader and they reportedly started research back in 2019 https://wccftech.com/tsmc-2nm-research-taiwan/ https://wccftech.com/tsmc-2nm-research-taiwan/ https://wccftech.com/ssmc-mass-produce-2nm-2024/ https://wccftech.com/ssmc-mass-produce-2nm-2024/ now a consortium of runner ups not only hopes to catch up, but plans a parallel release of a new node size, while starting later, while starting with less know how.
- zpeti 6y agoIt’s almost become normal now that bureaucrats get to decide which social group to spend money on, or which region to renovate buildings in, but the arrogance of thinking you can spend your way to the most cutting edge of current technology is just the next level of bureaucratic arrogance.
- scotty79 6y agoThat's how we got to the current cutting edge. Research of most important technological inventions of the past century was funded by beaurocrats. Market is only good at figuring out how to make things cheaper and in volume. Both very important things. But true scientific breakthroughs that push the business over next decades happen on taxpayers bill as distributed by beaurocrats. It sucks a bit that it's this way but if you are profit driven, you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in hopes of developing new tech.
- yvdriess 6y agoYep, this cannot be repeated enough. Government funding is how a lot of innovations happen, but it's not as visible as a private company bringing that innovation to market. To put in optimization terms, private companies are good at following the gradient. Government funding is necessary to escape the well and find new minimas.
- rapsey 6y agoGovernment funding is extremely wasteful and will generally go into the pockets of the well connected. The problem is this game has been played for a long time and it has diminishing returns. The players have had decades to get the exploitation down. Yes sillicon valley exists because of government money. But that was like 70 years ago. The world has changed and corruption is more severe. You will get no such bang for your government grant buck now.
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoRemind me how is that WeWork and Theranos investment going?
- AlexanderDhoore 6y agoITT bashing on EU without understanding it I believe the 17 signing nations are allowed to inject money into their own economy. Even if the goals are a bit unrealistic. EDIT The 2-3 years is when the funds are allocated. Not when the results are expected.
- rapsey 6y agoBecause somehow this initiative is different from all the other ones?
- varjag 6y agoWhich other ones you mean?
- rapsey 6y agoHorizon2020 for instance
- ginko 6y agoThat's a programme providing research grants. Why do you think it's a failure?
- sgift 6y agoCan you show where Horizon2020 squandered money? Or gave any other reason to bash the EU?
- rapsey 6y agoI know of two companies getting money. The first ones entire business model is EU funds. They “make” only the necessary burocratic documentation. They have zero intentions of producing anything. The other is large and dirty af with bribes. If you try to compete with them for EU grants, you are going to get an investigation into your business for misspending EU funds. Because they know the right people.
- orbifold 6y agoAlways great to see how the EU squanders money on projects like that.
- michalklujszo 6y agoWasn’t a project like that that was a starting point for Airbus?
- newdude116 6y agoAs if the corrupt SBIR Grants are any better. Do you homework dude!
- baybal2 6y agoJust by looking at the digit, it's 6 times bigger than the US programme on money spent per year. As unsubstantiated news suggest, the most of American program will be spent on attracting few, amazingly expensive, one off projects.
- Nokinside 6y agoEU has the tech. ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight. ASML is the world's largest photolithography systems manufacturer and the only one producing extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These EUV scanners are expensive as hell. Last years model costs $120 million per piece and you need 10-15 of them for TSMC gigafactory. TWINSCAN NXE:3400C (7 and 5 nm nodes, >170 wafers per hour) is probably the most expensive machine in the world.
- iagovar 6y agoThe EU has the tech, but that's not enough. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of something useful coming out of it. The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. And they are moderately confortable in their niches. This is a very high risk endeavour, even with EU money. And as far as I know, none of them manufacture for other end-user players, so even if there was a new fabless company with a cool project, it's likely that wouldn't be made in the EU bu by Samsumg or TSMC.
- rualca 6y ago> The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. They don't need to become major players for this program to be a major success. Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor. Moreover, AMD showed that right now the key factor to develop a product line that dominates all competitors in all categories, from performance to power efficiency and also price, is access to a capable manufacturing hub.
- DSingularity 6y agoWhat? You are basically discount AMD design. The manufacturing and process tech are critical but not enough alone. You need good design.
- random5634 6y agoListening to the EU bang on about state subsidies (they are very worried UK might subsidize some industry) always makes me laugh. The EU farm and many other policies are basically state aid. I’m not against it, but stop with the hypocritical denouncements.
- aristophenes 6y agoAnyone familiar with EU politics care to comment on how likely it is that this funding actually goes through, and a probable timeline?
- imtringued 6y agoI'd like to see more government investment into domestic industries, however I believe that the semiconductor manufacturing market is already heavily saturated. R&D is welcome but beyond ensuring independence from foreign manufacturing there are not that many benefits that you would expect from this example of government stimulus. This industry primarily hires high skilled workers but unless they also directly fund the education of those high skilled workers it's not going to result in less underemployment. I mean come on, the existing semiconductor industry in the EU has found it's niche. It's already well developed. If there really was a shortage of domestic semiconductor products then these companies would have been able to make a killing with their local fabs because corona related shipping restrictions resulted in a lack of supply from foreign nations. They wouldn't need the government stimulus and stand on their own. It would make more sense to use this government stimulus on reducing CO2 emissions because most nations do not have economic incentives for reducing CO2 emissions. With our current economic models environmentalism amounts to charity and charity is one thing the government is very good at. The reason why I bring up CO2 reductions is because they are inherently domestic. You cannot put CO2 or electricity on a container ship and move the problem to a different country. A lot of the work also involves simple manual labor which helps with the underemployment problem for low skilled workers.
- ginko 6y ago>however I believe that the semiconductor manufacturing market is already heavily saturated Is it? It seems to be headed for a TSMC monopoly as far as I can see.
- m4rtink 6y agoNot to mention the current supply issues for gaming console chips and GPUs - unless it's a very temporary blip it looks like insufficient production of the most cutting edge chips & all that on top of the TSMC monopoly.
- monkeydust 6y agoIndeed. More on that here if your interested https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25466561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25466561
- eric_khun 6y agoThe world starts realising all the processors that everyone depends on is mainly from Taiwan. I just wrote an article[1] about the importance of processors and talking about key players such that help the semis industry such ASML, and why it's not that simple to get into the game. . It's not as easy as pouring money into some companies. Sourcing trusted partners + years (decades?) of R&D might be needed to achieve what TSMC did in Taiwan [1] https://erickhun.com/posts/world-innovation-taiwan-semiconductors/?c https://erickhun.com/posts/world-innovation-taiwan-semicondu...
- tasogare 6y agoI hope governments, including EU, will realize that and help (commercially, diplomatically and of course militarily) Taiwan not being invaded by its greedy neighbor.
- WanderPanda 6y agoI might have looked positively at this if the bureaucrats would have actual skin in the game and would be judged by the outcome in 5-10 years. But in the likely case that this will fail and most of the money will be drained through lobbyism etc., nobody will talk about it and they will come up with the next thing they can throw money at to come across as being super innovative. Disclaimer: I used to work at a company that was particularly good in draining these kind of funds without delivering useful outputs.
- singhrac 6y agoMaybe you could use your experience to propose a system (whether funding vehicle restrictions or proper incentives) for that not to happen in this case? I think we’d all be excited by that. How can we avoid spending money on lobbyists? Maybe the structure should be more VC-like?
- rusk 6y agoNo point arguing with ideology.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoIt is arguably quite ideological to insist that a large monopolistic bureaucracy, or a conglomeration of them - e.g. the EU - will be efficient in allocating vast amounts of resources when basic game and microeconomic theory suggests otherwise. Still, an argument for state subsidies, despite some inevitable degree of inefficiency, can be made.
- rusk 6y agoPoint was that despite repeated successes with this style of investment the libhurdurians still insist it’s a bad idea, totally blind to the fact that lassaiz affaire is just as prone to degeneration. It’s ideology as much as any other approach and when you find people insisting on it without any concrete examples it’s just plain ideology you’re dealing with and there’s just no point wasting your time.
- _ph_ 6y agoGood news. Yes, as with all government money, there is some pork barreling involved, but there is a long history of such government initiatives laying the starting seed for high tech industry development. It means money is invested in Europe tied to a certain purpose. Giving talented engineers a job perspective and companies a field in which they can invest into.
- m4rtink 6y agoExactly, I suppose the Taiwan government also helped a lot to TSMC to get started & get where it is now.
- rapsey 6y agoYeah but that was then and this is now. Exploiting these EU programmes is a business for many. They produce paperwork and they get EU funds.
- thu2111 6y agothere is a long history of such government initiatives laying the starting seed for high tech industry development However, not in the EU. The EU has been engaging in massive subsidisation for decades and has little to show for it. In some places it seems to have led to a hollowed out society in which companies that are supposedly startups spend all their time chasing grant money instead of building real products. VC investment is hard work. The EU isn't a well run VC firm even though it deploys more capital than such firms do, and it shows: they don't really care what the money gets spent on as long as there's a paper trail they can use to do ass-covering if it turns out the money was lost to fraud. So it creates this USSR-like culture of zombie firms that can't really survive independent of state funding.
- leke 6y agoHmmm... Just after I watched this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF3sp-q3Zmk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF3sp-q3Zmk and thought the future was RISC-V
- snvzz 6y agoI did watch https://youtu.be/_2KgrFm2Fz4 https://youtu.be/_2KgrFm2Fz4 and came to the same conclusion.
- mhh__ 6y agoEven ignoring specific criticism of RISC-V - the ISA means fuck all if you can't build the actual uarch that implements it. We are probably going to see x86 struggle because of issue-width (although Jim Keller seriously hinted something enormous when he was still at Intel), but the ISA itself (to 1*) isn't much of a CPU
- dirtyid 6y agoExciting development. Not many power blocs has the prerequisites to pull this off, though EU coordination capabilities still questionable.
- credit_guy 6y agoSo, first thing when it comes to big dollar (or in this case Euro) numbers: some of these funds will be loans, not grants. In this case the split will be about 50-50. Second, this is not new money, this is part of recovery funds already allocated in July 2020 for combating the economic recession created by the Coronavirus [1]. These funds were already earmarked for environmental and digital initiatives. This declaration is probably a clarification of how much is given specifically to the digital initiatives. This looks quite smart to me. In the US neither the original CARES act ($1.4 TN) passed in March, nor the new stimulus bill ($0.9 TN) has any funds dedicated to cutting edge industries. There were instead funds for airline companies and cruise lines. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_EU#Recovery_fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_EU#Recovery_fu...
- adventured 6y ago> In the US neither the original CARES act ($1.4 TN) passed in March, nor the new stimulus bill ($0.9 TN) has any funds dedicated to cutting edge industries. That's because the US largely doesn't have to do that. The reason the US has a couple hundred major technology companies and Europe doesn't is due to its far superior venture capital market, which Europe almost entirely lacks by relative scale and so it has to try to make up for it with government money (which has been a repeated approach in Europe going back decades now, it hasn't worked well).
- dmix 6y agoThis is true. Canada has been trying to spend hundreds of millions or billions (under a series of different names and projects) to develop a domestic SV like tech sector and it keeps failing. Our smartest people keep leaving to the US and taking US venture capital. Or selling to US companies. All for very good reasons. It’s where the rest of the smart people are. I’m convinced that’s what matters most, the people, not just billions of dollars won’t replace that. If anything it’s quite obvious the US gov should be investing in infrastructure (transit, urban development, etc) like a good gov instead of venturing into even more territories pretending they can compete with highly advanced industries (be that finance or tech). These governments, not just US, have enough things they are already struggling to deliver on. I really wouldn’t recommend they also pretend they are venture capitalists or worse starting the organization themselves. Even old school NASA success was a lucky collection of semi-nationalizing a bunch of already successful private industry, academia, and a hardcore Cold War patriotic mission. And I should note one of the most famous people who helped get the US to the moon was Canadian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Chamberlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Chamberlin One could argue NASA slowly lost that powerhouse ability as it became just another hundred billion dollar gov project. They still do great things but nowhere near the scale or speed as the past.
- jamesblonde 6y agoSweden missing from here is a surprise. We have Ericsson who still design their own chips for telecom devices - one of the few companies left in Europe to do so. And Volvo and Scania might be interested for self-driving cars.
- ourlordcaffeine 6y agoVolvo cars is now Chinese owned. Swedish Volvo only do HGVs.
- disabled 6y agoThis makes me so excited as an electrical engineering student pursuing her masters degree in the European Union, as a dual US|EU citizen!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- golfer 6y agoSerious question: Why is the EU so far behind in tech company influence/leadership compared to the US and Asia? Europe has successful tech enterprises, but surely is capable of so much more on a global scale.
- thu2111 6y agoThat's a deep question that is asked nowhere near enough. And when it is asked, my experience has been it's mostly been Americans doing the asking. Here's a story. I was once visiting Silicon Valley for work and getting dinner with a friend who lives there. I'm a Brit who lives in central Europe. On the way over I'd bought a copy of Der Spiegel, which likes to write tabloid-esque articles about the Power Of Tech Firms. The front cover this particular week was one such article and I had found it kind of funny, so I was showing it to my friend and we were discussing it. Next to us in the restaurant was another table with an elderly gentlemen dining alone. Suddenly he leaned over and joined our conversation. It turned out he was some sort of economics academic and one of his 'research interests' was this question of why the EU doesn't generate tech firms. He had a lot of insight and I've never forgotten that discussion: it has influenced my thoughts about how to set up my own software firm. One of the points he made is that outside the USA there's no real culture of granting early employees equity, whereas in the US tech industry that's standard. ARM is apparently one of the few exceptions, in which the co-founders did in fact hand out equity early on. The incentivising effect this produces is profound. I've felt it myself - when I joined a startup, having an ownership stake as well as a salary made the difference between doing the work, and genuinely caring about the company, being willing to get into arguments and fight for what was important, etc. So a culture gap with respect to ownership is perhaps one reason. The man made other points that were more commonly observed, like the different approaches to regulation. A few days ago people were surprised to discover that the UK/EU Brexit treaty mandates SHA-1 for some obscure data interchange format. This is typical for the EU. In the US people at least pretend to care about the innovation-harming impact of regulation, even on the left. There's zero culture of that in the EU. The EU views more regulation as inherently good, and anything that isn't caked in hundreds of pages of regulations as being merely on the TODO list. It also brooks no dissent: one of the EU's "red lines" in the negotiations was that they didn't want the UK to undercut their "standards", defined as regulation. Any country that attempts to deregulate gets taken to court by the EU Commission itself, in its own courts, which almost always rule in favour of the Commission regardless of what the law actually says. This creates a one-way ratchet of ever more convoluted and obsolete rules, which in turn imposes a thicket of complexity costs on companies that have other things to focus on. Many of these rules are justified on the grounds of making trade easier but often have the opposite effect. Finally there are the very real cultural aspects. The US/Valley culture practically celebrates failure. This isn't necessarily good - failure is still failure, but family and friends at least seem to be pretty supportive of entrepreneurs in general and "failure" is very flexibly defined. For instance creating a company that never makes money isn't a problem in the US thanks to a mix of this culture and bottomless VC money. Whereas that would be perceived as failure by family and friends in Europe.
- bitL 6y agoHint: it's going to end up with the same results as European AI - a bunch of inept large companies getting money without any results. Top-down approach from basic MBAs down to engineers never worked.
- bogomipz 6y agoI always find these discussion around the business of chip production interesting and since there's always many knowledgeable people on these I wanted to ask if anyone has a good recommendations for books on the business of chip production?
- allie1 6y agoIntel must be thrilled
- nickpp 6y agoUSA entrepreneur: I need to start a company that will attract VC money. Damn, that means a company with huge potential. I better start working. EU entrepreneur: I need to start a company that can access these juicy governmental funds. Let’s see, what exactly do these bureaucrats want? Hmm, sounds complicated, who do I know in the approval committee? I better start calling. Incentives matter.
- kindly_fo 6y agoI don't get why you are so upset us has more it companies than eu. Us and eu are friends and their good stuff you can use without wasting 140 billions. The r&d are very costly and by not doing it all this centuries eu saved gazillion of money.
- christophilus 6y agoWell, I hope all of the naysayers are wrong. I’m looking forward to what more competition will bring to this space.
- albertop 6y agoThis is NOT how innovation works. https://www.amazon.com/How-Innovation-Works-Flourishes-Freedom/dp/0062916599 https://www.amazon.com/How-Innovation-Works-Flourishes-Freed...
- arnaudsm 6y agoHistorically, Silicon Valley was created from government contracts and subsidies. Gov. intervention can work if done correctly.
- throwaway2048 6y agoTSMC itself involved huge amounts of government spending and support.
- I_am_tiberius 6y agoPlanned economy at works.
- bshanks 6y agoIf 50% of this is loans and 50% are grants, and if all of the grants are over 3 years, then that's 145/(2*3) = 24.17 billion Euros in grants per year, or $29.33 billion dollars per year. By contrast, in the US, US National Science Foundation (NSF) is the grant-giving agency for most basic science/math research in the US, except biology which is under a different agency (NIH) (also I think DOE funds some energy-related research)) total budget is $8.3 billion per year. So if these assumptions are correct, then this initiative alone is over 3.5x the total US NSF budget. This is not completely an apples-to-apples comparison because this is obviously applied rather than basic research.
- naruvimama 6y agoChina is bound to win in the long run, given the resources, captive market and most importantly competitive/cost of talent. Japan, US, India and possibly some EU countries are partnering today to build an alternative to Huawei in 5G. This is coming 10 years late. We might be repeating the same mistake but now in semiconductors.
- tw04 6y agoI can't decide if this is comical or depressing. The EU realizes they need to own the ability to manufacture processors. Meanwhile here in the US we've got hedge fund managers trying to gut Intel, national security be damned: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/activist-hedge-fund-advises-intel-to-outsource-cpu-manufacturing/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/activist-hedge-fund-...
- OpticalWindows 6y agoso thats where the NATO money went
- antisoeu 6y agoIt's basically decided that the EU will become a socialist state by now. That's another 145 Billion for corruption.
- neop1x 6y ago2nm... then what - 1nm? 500pm after that?
- blargmaster42_8 6y agoGovernment beeing government this will have to opposite effect.
- kats 6y agoThat's awesome, congrats!
- 02020202 6y agolet's reinvent the wheel for 145B of tax payer's money...ffs.