Likely because it's BILLIONS of dollars of R&D with 0 customers at this point. You'd be building a factory HOPING to get design wins. If I'm Nvidia or Apple or insert company - am I going to risk an entire generation of chips on a startup in Europe with 0 experience beyond what they can poach from competitors? Whatever this European company is, they'd likely need to sell at a massive loss for a generation or 2, just to prove they can do it, and then hope to win some of the profitable contracts from an Apple or Samsung or Nvidia. I would imagine the investment would make a nuclear plant look cheap. And all of that is assuming TSMC or Intel don't build fabs in response to strangle you out of the market.
> I would imagine the investment would make a nuclear plant look cheap.
The disaster of Flamanville is projected to cost 13 billion euros. Even TSMCs biggest projects are smaller than that in numbers.
> Whatever this European company is, they'd likely need to sell at a massive loss for a generation or 2, just to prove they can do it, and then hope to win some of the profitable contracts from an Apple or Samsung or Nvidia.
Samsung, NVIDIA and AMD are currently blocked by the limitations of TSMC which is mostly caused by Apple paying upfront to reserve all of TSMCs 3nm output [1]. If Europe were to say "okay, we're putting up a 3nm fab and we will not sell to Apple at all" you can bet they would instantly join in to the collaboration, alone to have an alternative to a bidding war with Apple's unfathomably large war chest.
3nm chip production requires BEUV litoghraphy. That one is far out. The so-called 5nm nodes can currently only produce 14nm-sized features. If there is a customer that is willing to reserve the entire EUV and BEUV output of TSMC, so be it; but also keep in mind it is unlikely to see such a large project.
> If there is a customer that is willing to reserve the entire EUV and BEUV output of TSMC, so be it
A modern society cannot accept a single company gobbling up the entire supply of a constrained resource simply because it can. This stifles innovation.
>need to sell at a massive loss for a generation or 2,
Isn't this where gov't subsidies can help? Not only can gov't wave taxes which helps, but they can also just flat out buy the chips. Or they can add incentives to companies for buying these chips. Either way, it helps ease the transitional pains.
In fact that’s exactly how TSMC and Samsung got where they are - the Taiwanese and Korean governments decided to invest in semiconductor manufacturing at the national level.
If a plan like the above goes through EU governments will likely subsidize the likes of Siemens and Philips with 10s of billions of €.
Then they can do it like the LHC. Each country contributes, but it happens to physically located in one member country. Either EU feels like it is strategically important to not be dependent, or it's not. By your response, it is clear it is not an important agenda item.
