[eecc]

That’s an entirely different framework, one that doesn’t concern investment decisions of Apple or Google.

I do agree that USA and EU could foot the bill and subsidize a couple billions in such industrial infrastructure, perhaps taking back a cut of the profit rather than privatizing all of it.

But they’re not doing it, or are making pitiful efforts at that

[Maxion]

It's just an insane amount of money to invest with the long-term effect of you oversaturating the chip market.

Throwing 20B into a chip fab in the EU would be politically a very unpopular move, if it's done as a public company or worse directly state owned, you'll royally piss of Taiwan, South Korea and China and it's likely they'd retaliate by e.g. subsidising their auto industry more in order to give the death blow to the EU auto industry.

[simonh]

They'd more likely split themselves laughing.

The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration. It's not to cannibalise our own full-employment high value economies, by diverting enormous capital and labour into duplicating vast swathes of lower value jobs we don't actually have the work force for anyway, just so we can pay unaffordable prices for the resulting goods.

We probably both agree it's an absurd fantasy, and the people trying to make stuff like this happen are implementing policies that ensure that it won't, such as putting tariffs on the inputs they need to build out this domestic manufacturing capacity in the first place.

[sarchertech]

> The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration.

So permanent world peace. That sounds much easier.

[galangalalgol]

Amd it isn't only geopolitical threats we have to worry about. The world's hard disk supply disappeared with a tsunami in Thailand. Taiwan is vulnerable to those and earthquakes. Efficiency and robustness are at odds and we are leaning too far towards efficiency. Even if China hadn't been so large it could absorb the costs of capturing the world's entire manufacturing base with subsidies, centralizing that much has risks completely apart from politics.

[lmz]

Thailand was flooding, not tsunamis.

[dyauspitr]

It’s one thing when toys, pots, furniture etc. is made somewhere else. It’s a completely different thing when your high tech is manufactured there.

[gostsamo]

The issue with national investment in the EU is that it might be attacked as state sponsored activity where one can complain that public money are used for market moves or if it is EU wide initiative, then the governments will squabble whose economy will get the money. The framework is not mature enough to allow for delegating to someone to solve the problem for everyone and to balance the beneficiaries in the long term.

[Aerroon]

It shouldn't be a politically unpopular move. Other countries can get pissed off, but those other countries also cannot guarantee that Europe will get chips when times are tough. If you want to build modern drones and missiles you need access to a large amount of computer chips. In a crisis will those still be available to Europe?