EU 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.
If the EU treats this as a strategic capability and not commercial, the spending is much less of a consideration.
The advantage that the EU has is in fact ASML. No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet. [0]
The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with TSMC to build a foundry in the EU that produces at the node they want to intercept (2 nm?). Then, make a business arrangement that puts European scientists and engineers into high-value roles. That would enable the EU to develop the technical skills and keep China from locking it up.
Man, I wish I too shared such optimism in EU or other massive multi government bureaucratic organizations to pull something off like this in 2021. But sorry I simply don’t.
From my experience with gov trying to do tech investment it’s going to go into the pockets of late career overpaid ‘executives’ with ‘industry experience’ and tons of (also overpaid and underqualified) contractors doing the same thing. Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to run it.
I mean I hope it goes to the engineers and smart dudes (who doesn’t want another successful semi competitor and 2nm?) and not the ones who know how to play the political game the best but I’m highly highly skeptical.
We’ll see in a few years I guess.
And I say that fully understanding ASML and the value they currently provide. But let’s hope who ever doles this out understands it as well as (maybe) half the people in this thread.
But even ignoring that giant elephant in the room, it adds the critical question why should ASML care to give special treatment to this one project? They are already killing it globally. Just because they operate in EU and this offers shit loads of money to potentially fleece?
Pretty much. All big players (US, EU, China) must maintain domestic strategically important industries (aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech ...) even with government subsidies.
The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the major players in the industry. Being the leader is not necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.
We have been trying to help Infineon get onto its own feet for years and years, it just isn't happening. The investment it would take for competing with TSMC would require massive government support with very few benefits. Specialized chips with higher margins but older tech make more sense than mass production with the most advanced process.
Same with solar or battery tech, we have the tech and the people but economically it isn't feasible to have production in the EU.
> No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet. [0]
Those are some huge claims, which could have previously been said for many currently outdated technologies.
The 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.
> .. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of something useful coming out of it.
The ECB has been buying trillions of euro's worth of dubious government bonds and bank debts for the last couple of years. Also every year the EU pays hundreds of billions worth of subsidies to European farmers so that they are able to sell their goods below global market prices. I would say that this 145 billion is as good an investment if not better than what EU money has been spent on so far.
> 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.
ASML is impressive for sure, but having the litho doesn't mean you can make good chips.
As a mediocre analogy, you don't expect to be able to write good novels because you got your hands on a printer.
I think much of the relevant general-purpose chip design knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning. I don't yet see any other chip company (eg NXP etc) suddenly be the next Intel or AMD yet (let alone the next Apple).
ARM IP, even full architectural license, is relatively small percentage of the cost of a semiconductor. Know-how for fables microarchitecture designs is widely distributed. Most fabless work goes to specialized asics.
It's the inability for SMIC to obtain EUV lithography equipment for their sub-7nm process technologies from ASML that prevents China from getting into high-end semiconductors, not the domestic microarchitecture know-how.
> I think much of the relevant general-purpose chip design knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning
Worth noting the Sophia Antipolis arm design centre in France continues to exist. It works on some of the big A-class cores (The A75 for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A75).
Though whether arm would get involved in this endeavour is another question. They have a significant physical IP portfolio: https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-physical and associated skillsets (I think at least some of this is UK based, not entirely sure how much) so would be a good partner to have and I suspect arm would like to see arm cores coming out as test designs rather than RISC-V cores. Of course in the wake of brexit potentially not a partnership the EU wants politically! UK government would spin it as UK company plays key part in major EU initiative with significant funding awarded. EU would spin it as EU brings in major global semiconductor company to new semiconductor initiative.
The company has offices and design centres in Copenhagen in Denmark; Oulu in Finland; Sophia Antipolis in France; Grasbrunn in Germany; Budapest in Hungary; Galway in Ireland; Trondheim in Norway; Katowice in Poland; Sentjernej in Slovenia; Lund in Sweden.
Your analogy works if ASML makes the only printer that can print the letter 'S'. Without it, you can't print and sell the books, regardless of who the author is.
The previous top model NXE:3400B, "weighs 180 tons and needs 20 trucks or three fully loaded Boeing 747s for shipment. The price tag is $120 million." [1]
Most of that is packaging, seriously. The purity requirements and vibrational limits for those parts are very high.
ASML has plans to get into sub 1nm level. 2nm and 1.5 nm is already in the pipeline.
The technology high-NA EUV (high Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet) becomes just insane. Mirror manufacturing process requires atomic scale corrections and the whole metrology is moved into vacuum.
The limit for mass production is measuring and calibration. The measurement accuracy is comparable or exeeding Large Hadron Collideror gravitational-wave astronomy. The speed (wafers per hour) must eventually slow down, requiring more machines and making the process more expensive. Then Moore's law finally dies due to the cost.
I’ve heard this often repeated claim about ASML owning the core tech behind TSMC’s 5nm process. However if it was just a question of buying N 200 million dollar machines to launch a 5nm foundry wouldn’t we see dozens of 5nm competitors? Why hasn’t intel , apple, Samsung, or AMD shelled out for 10?
Given the size of this commitment it seems clear that there is a lot more to 5nm than the lithography machine.
It also adds the question what ASML has to gain from handing over their technical advantage to some local gov effort.
I mean they can get paid but there’s a ton of other companies not starting from scratch they can also make billions off of so I don’t see why some geographic thing is some huge advantage for EU.
They already operate in a highly lucrative global market with companies who don’t need to figure anything out.
If anything this should be expansion capital or efforts to build more factories locally. Not trying to do it themselves.
But hey what do I know. I don’t have multiple countries with lagging tech interests in mind with lots of money to burn.
Yes there is whole part of equation that has nothing to do with ASML. But the point, to over simplify things a lot was that without ASML there are currently zero chance you could get leading edge node working. But even with it you have barely started.
Reminds me of when I saw the customs declaration they had to make for the Troll oil platform[1]. It was "a thing" made here in the country, and it was being transported out of the country, so of course they had to customs declare it...
The declaration essentially said "one oil platform, unpackaged".
There was a suitable tariff code for it, but the value of it was so great the electronic customs declaration system couldn't handle all the digits.
Instead they had to write the value as a free-text comment.
Fascinating. Had to look it up — the photos of it are mind boggling.
I have to say though, from Wikipedia, sounds like there are only a few of them? Sort of one-offs, each of them (so to speak). I kind of think that might disqualify them.
(I know this comment is not exactly in the mood of HN, but this is the one thing I never fail to think of when someone mentions the Bagger family of murderous machines!)
Yes. The correct term for TSMC should be GigaFab, which was used long before Elon coined GigaFactory.
It was named as such because of the scale and capacity of those Fab as compared to other pure play competitor. It was also one reason how TSMC manage to win by Economy of Scale.
So, 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.
> 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).
This 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
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.
There is a missing bit of perapective: many EU startups rely on grants for bootstrapping because investors here are a lot more risk averse here. They commonly let folks get their startup to an MVP and become investable.
The other factor is that they come in waves: there could be many grants for your startup for a few years, then government focus shifts and they dry up, then 5 years later they might come again
Aquiring the grants and completing the required paperwork feels a lot like doing schoolwork - it's tedious, but certainly doable, I have won 2 grants a few years back for my startup, its not like you have to be a big corp to stand a chance.
I won a grant for our company, roughly 600k, but it took nearly 2 years until the first money hit our bank accounts and the ongoing documentation effort is really slowing a lot of things down.
But it might be because it's Germany, you have to use your regional bank for the process and ours was horrible.
Still, I think the 2-3 years is too short. I believe if you put in a lot of money into something it needs a bit of time, otherwise every participant will just do whatever they normally do, just more of it.
I 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.
Maybe 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?
"More VC like" has been proposed by Mariana Mazzucato. If the state invests in a startup/spinoff, the state should get equity in return rather than just some lofty words about future jobs or such.
Not for the purpose of creating long time state owned companies, but for cashing out when/if the investment is successful, just like VC's. This would both provide the state with money, removing the need to raise that same money via taxes, and hopefully also better align the incentives of the funding organisation by providing measurable goals.
Putting structure aside for now (although I agree we want an answer to that), I don't see why we even want governments allocating capital to projects like this
in the first place when the space is already very competitive with loads of private money. It seems like a classic case of big government doing big government things to justify their own existence.
If it does succeed, it will be a perpetual, repeatedly brought up, example of how the EU can get things done. The other projects will remain forever forgotten.
Government spending isn't the problem, it's who gets the money.
In the US I see it all going to established players. Which is fine for stuff like finding a COVID-19 vaccine. But is a total disaster for promoting innovation.
I have a computer engineering degree and have watched nothing of interest happen in semiconductor manufacturing for over 20 years. Yes we have blue LEDs now. Yes we have fast video cards. But if you look at single-threaded performance per clock cycle, it's been stuck within the same order of magnitude since the Pentium got 20 stage instruction pipelines and huge caches (which in hindsight were big blows for SIMD and MIMD).
It would take a paltry amount of money, in the low millions of dollars, to design real (general purpose) multicore processors that deliver orders of magnitude better performance than what we have today. But unfortunately lawmakers are for the most part technologically illiterate, and technologists are unduly skeptical of any type of programming outside the mainstream.
So my dream of a sub-$1000, 1000+ core CPU with a modest amount of RAM per core (between 1 MB and 1 GB) that can be programmed with existing tools like Erlang/Go/MATLAB/Julia and even Docker is just never gonna happen. And without that, there is no viable road to really experiment with stuff like AI, physics simulations etc without renting time in the cloud. We have the impression that progress is being made on these endeavors today, but things look a little different to me, watching them play out at a glacial pace, at mind boggling expense, over 3-4 decades. I mourn what might have been.
If the money required "to design real (general purpose) multicore processors that deliver orders of magnitude better performance than what we have today" is in low millions of dollars and technical challenge isn't too daunting, why haven't VCs invested in such ventures?
I do NOT believe that you can deliver "orders of magnitude better performance" general purpose multicore processors for low millions of dollars!
The salary for the verification engineers would already probably exceed low millions of dollars after 3 years. Not to mention licensing cost for EDA tools you need to tame billions of transistors.
I will give you low millions of dollars if you have a viable path to orders of magnitude better performance general purpose processors.
> It would take a paltry amount of money, in the low millions of dollars, to design real (general purpose) multicore processors that deliver orders of magnitude better performance than what we have today. But unfortunately lawmakers are for the most part technologically illiterate, and technologists are unduly skeptical of any type of programming outside the mainstream.
>
> So my dream of a sub-$1000, 1000+ core CPU with a modest amount of RAM per core (between 1 MB and 1 GB) that can be programmed with existing tools like Erlang/Go/MATLAB/Julia and even Docker is just never gonna happen. And without that, there is no viable road to really experiment with stuff like AI, physics simulations etc without renting time in the cloud. We have the impression that progress is being made on these endeavors today, but things look a little different to me, watching them play out at a glacial pace, at mind boggling expense, over 3-4 decades. I mourn what might have been.
I'm really curious what specifically you mean by this. I see similar issues on the software side (my degree is in CS). Software is incredibly bloated and horrible at interoperability. Unix had pipes back in the early 70s, and somehow with GUIs and then mobile "apps," we've regressed. Identity-based security has failed time and again. And only rarely has software design progressed meaningfully beyond structured programming from the late 70s (not to mention the languages). Moore's law has given software developers around over 100M x improvement over the past 40 years, yet ordinary people would scarcely notice.
TL;DR: I see a lot of the same flaws in software, dominated by fads and popularity only of what is mainstream.
I'd really like to hear a dissident point of view from the hardware side.
Serious 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.
Why do you think EU is behind in tech? As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the lithography machines used by all state of the art IC nodes is designed in Europe. It’s one of the most complex machines on the planet.
Then there’s mega projects like LHC and ITER (international projects, but it’s not pure chance that they’re located in Europe) and Wendelstein 7-X.
My pet example is Nordic Semiconductor, which has an insanely good position in the Bluetooth LE device market. What’s also interesting is that two of the major competitors also design their chips in Norway. Although those companies do illustrate one problem in Norway (and perhaps Europe in general): the lack of capital at certain stages. In the IC businesses it seems most companies are acquired by US companies eventually.
Let’s look at EVs. Europe doesn’t have Tesla. But seems like most European car makers are doing OK with EVs. Arguably better than US incumbent car makers. VWs new platform is one of the most promising right now, although this project has shown that VW has a problem with software engineering. But so does most other older car companies in the world. There are also some interesting start ups that’s more focused on designing/supplying components, such as Rimac and Kreisel. Rimac seems to go toe-to-toe with Tesla on extreme performance.
I believe a lot of robots used in advanced manufacturing is German as well?
In general I have the impression that Europe is very strong in designing/making components and manufacturing machines and such. Things that the end consumer never hears about. Very few have heard about ASML, but everyone has heard about Intel. So maybe that contributes to the impression that EU is behind on tech.
Europe has also been ahead of the US in adopting tech on the consumer side in several areas. The US was in the stone age for a long time when it came to banking and payment for instance.
Why people have this perception seems pretty clear to me. Just comparing Europe to the US:
The US has both the major desktop/laptop CPU designers, as well as both desktop/laptop GPU designers. Of the three major desktop/laptop OSes, two are American, and the last doesn't belong to any particular country, but the primary creator moved from Europe to the US permanently.
The two major smartphone OSes are made by American companies. Two biggest browsers, again, Americans. Maybe three, if you count Mozilla (though Samsung is probably around there as well).
Huge internet/software tech companies that consumers interact with? Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple are all American. Europe has no equivalent to these, all they can boast is a few smaller ones like Spotify, or business facing giants like SAP (equivalent to that in the US would probably be like Oracle or IBM).
While obviously Europe doesn't have a complete dearth of local software, in terms of major consumer hits, especially the kind that get play outside of the region they originated in -- not much of that going on.
Also, I work at Google Munich, and it's pretty telling how rare it is for people here to get 'poached' by other local tech companies. It happened to a few people I knew...to go to Lyft's Munich office. Other than that, I can't think of any. When it comes to enticing engineers, there just aren't any German tech companies that play in the same league as Google.
The market defines behind "ahead/behind" by market value. None of the top 5 market caps in Europe are in tech. They are Nestle, Roche, Total SA, Novartis, and LVMH. They are tiny in comparison to the US tech giants.
All the anecdotal evidence you provide is nice, but is not represented in the market.
An example you give, Nordic Semiconductor, has a market cap of $3B.
Here's a good list of the worlds largest tech companies. The first European entry is #14, ASML:
I can't speak for the entirety of the Europe but from my experience with certain countries in the EU, there is a pervasive culture of avoiding risk at all costs in favor of stability. The culture extends from the government to investors and even employees.
Government has no appetite for creative destruction and pushes policy favoring large incumbents over upstarts. Investors have no appetite for risk and only seek conservative investments. The best minds (that don't leave the EU) would rather work for large companies, schools, government, etc. than at smaller, riskier organizations that may not be around in a few years.
My family in Europe thought I was a loser and/or crazy for leaving a job as an adjunct professor to work at a 100-person startup. It makes no sense to us but it's understandable to someone who views landing a lifetime cushy bureaucratic job as the gold standard.
That'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.
> 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 is standard practice is almost any trading agreement. No trading entity wants to enter a tariff free agreement with another entity which operates lower standards, and thus makes it easy for that partner to undercut their local market.
It’s the entire reason why the US and EU hold tariffs against each other. They don’t want the subsidies or differences in standards to allow one to undercut the other.
The US has similar terms in all their trading agreements, its just that historically the US has sought to export its copyright, tax and drug laws. Hence why most of the western world has drug laws and copyright laws that are almost a copy paste of US drug and copyright laws. Indeed it’s why weed is still technically illegal in Amsterdam. It’s also how the US gets foreign banks to enforce FATCA.
Finally if you want to see some really repugnant trade agreement terms, look up Investor-state Dispute Settlement agreements that the US likes to put in their trade deals [1]
The USA is also one country, one culture, one language, 300 million people as an initial market and a continent. Each of these lower the barrier to entry. The last point point about being a continent is that I can ship across the USA for far less than I can ship from one side of the EU to the other. The USA has economies of scale that Europe still does not have.
> 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.
I guess that's related to the US dept culture too.
Not having money but borrowing it for all kinds of things and with that stacking dept upon dept is quite normal in the US while over here at the continent you usually want to pay it back asap.
So not having money or working for a company which doesn't generate any must feel much better in the US.
I would be terrified. I also wouldn't work for some startup which won't pay be but instead preach something about family values for example.
Earning money and owning stuff that I buy feels great. Wouldn't want to miss it.
Well I can certainly say one thing, thanks to EU regulation I don't have to eat chlorinated chicken, the air is clean and I have reasonable working hours and holiday protected by law. You seem to suggest that regulation is always bad, I think a lot of people would disagree.
Well, the current European culture is deeply shaped by a immense counter reaction to those times when daring and enterprising men blew up the world twice.
That's why consensus building and failure avoidance are common in Europe. People want good enough without moonshots.
> 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
One of the best examples of this are the digital tachograph design documents, which are hundreds of pages of legal gibberish mixed with a convoluted tech spec. 100% design by comitee. No wonder the top digital tachograph supplier is VDO and one if the lesser players, Stoneridge, has a much better designed and executed product.
In contrast with this, the US ELD is an 125 page document standardising functionality and the data output of the device.
I run a tech company in the Netherlands. I can corroborate most of this.
Giving employees equity in the Netherlands is nearly impossible without getting taxed to death. The position of the tax authority is that the sole reason you get equity, is because of your relationship as employee, and therefore the "gift of equity" is actually a form of salary, and therefore salary tax must be paid based on the value of the equity. In the Netherlands, this tax is around 50%.
Worse: depending on the exact legal implementation of the equity, you may end up having to pay the tax, based on its value on paper, before actually selling the equity, whose actual market price may be far lower. One could end up losing money just by having equity.
In the Netherlands, having a bankruptcy on your name makes you an ecomonic pariah. The process of going through a bankruptcy is not pleasant and comes with many responsibilities. Starting another company will be difficult. You will not be able to get a loan anymore. Oh, and your phone bill counts as a loan.
There is also a very weak culture of venture capital investment. There are very few such investors, and where they exist, the amounts they offer is tiny (like 10x lower) compared to US VCs, even though they ask the same amount of equity.
I am also not very impressed with the amount of advice/expertise VCs can offer over here.
The Dutch government likes to talk about how much they stimulate the tech and startup scenes. But when capital is concerned, their default answer is that you're supposed to get a loan. Lenders, unlike venture capitalists, are risk-averse (which they have to by law), meaning that they MUST get their loan paid back no matter what, which means that your business plan MUST be profitable, guaranteed, and that you must provide some sort of personal collateral, such as your savings or your house.
The sort of companies the government is thinking of, is for example a factory, where you need capital up front in order to buy machinery. The demand is known, so you know what profit you will roughly make. But this sort of thinking doesn't work for areas with high risk or a high degree of unknown.
For example let's say that you want to make a Twitter. You need money to pay for developers' salaries. But what will your profit be in year 3? It could be 1 million, or 0 (because nobody wants it). When banks hear this, they want a collateral equal to the loan amount. Why would I even get a loan then?
The best thing I can say about the Netherlands is the WBSO subsidy. When you do tech research and development on an area with risk (where risk is defined as being risky to you, e.g. because you have no experience with a particular topic or technology), then the government provides a subsidy for the amount of man-hours spent on this R&D. R&D includes software development too. This subsidy is implemented as a salary tax break.
Plus, when it turns out that your WBSO-subsidized product actually generates profit, then you get a corporate income tax break on the profits generated by that product. This is called the Innovatiebox.
WBSO and Innovatiebox are really nice once you have initial capital and have taken off. They won't help you when you start with near €0.
Partly we are all hopelessly impressed by American salesmanship.
For example our businesses ignored things like the Acorn Archimedes and bought PCs from IBM instead.
Good 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.
there 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.
It’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.
That'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.
Yep, 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.
Then by your own definition, and the statement issued by the EU commission, this is a bad investment.
I've worked for the large, sclerotic organisations that once put man on the moon. They will take your 100bn, crush it in to dust, and outsource the production of 1 million pages of documentation in 32 languages detailing the workings of something your never asked for. All in the blink of an eye.
Even if I agreed with you, we are talking about the cutting edge of optimisation, of driving down costs, of doing things in volume. The exact things you also say a market is needed for.
We aren't talking about a military research project like packet switching, or getting to the moon for the first time.
Research of most important technological inventions of the past century was funded by beaurocrats
Important defined how?
The car wasn't. The mobile phone wasn't. Computers in their post-WW2 form basically weren't, for the last half decade if not more it's all been private sector. Yes, DARPA did some very early work on packet switching networks and their work became widely adopted mostly because it was free: nice. But the moment these inventions started to matter, all R&D was taken over by the private sector.
Governments spray so much money at things that I'm sure for almost any broad category of thing, you can find something they funded. But that's no evidence that stuff would never have been researched anyway, given the enormous and long term R&D efforts routinely mounted by non governmental entities. Look at AI: government funded institutions are constantly lagging behind.
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.
Alphabet alone spends something like $21 billion on R&D per year. It doesn't take many years of that to reach $140 billion, and Alphabet is not the only company doing basic research.
Having spent many years reading research papers coming out of both academia and industry, my conclusion has been that the best papers are always those with corporate funding - some academic teams receive partly corporate funding and these tend to be in the middle, pure corporate labs tend to do the most exciting work. The bureaucrat-distributed money often gets allocated for decades to intellectual dead ends nobody cares about, purely through inertia and lack of institutional incentives to maximise ROI.
Just like the NASA bureaucrats thought they could make a dent in rocketry - how foolish of them.
Seriously though, some projects are just too expensive and risky for a privately funded venture. That's why public-private partnerships are created - it's always been like this and there doesn't appear to be an alternative.
The US recently spent their way into a cutting edge private space launch provider industry, and that seems like a roaring success. What makes you think it doesn't work?
How much of that was really private? My guess is the NASA launch facilities, former employees, and potential for future contracts were a big part of the picture.
While that's probably correct that without NASA support SpaceX may not survive 10 years ago, on the way to becoming the innovator it is today. Financially speaking however NASA has spent less to buy launch capability from SpaceX than it would have to otherwise.
From the R&D perspective NASA doesn't really have any say in how Starship/Superheavy are developed, which is the cutting edge of space launch. Nor does it dictate the timeline or milestones of the program. Not the same compared to the EU's initiative.
In fact, SpaceX's success shows a different path: let the private sector innovate, provide support in terms of know-how, credibility and potential contracts.
Seem's like though we're still stuck in the Goddard age and most of the resources go towards pursuing such techniques (with a few private orgs that have the lions share of support with public funds that even go towards such ends) of getting into LEO as if there couldn't possibly be any other way worth pursing… how long will we be stuck optimizing Goddard paperclips above all else?
It's also quite funny considering that Goddard himself had to do a lot of work alone, fight public opinion and face the lack of support from the American government, military and academia, all failing to understand the value of the rocket to study the atmosphere and near space, and for military applications, over I'm sure other public-private endeavors that had the blessing at the time (perhaps all the atomic research that provided more strategic benefits?)
SpaceX was almost completely privately invested and private risk. Once they had shown that they were serious, NASA awarded them contracts, because it was a great deal for NASA, compared to what they would pay otherwise.
Its sad to see these kind of attempts to trash talk the SpaceX achievements.
It's always been normal in the EU. There is little innovation here based on private risk taking, almost no venture capital, and huge barrieres for banks to lend money to innovators.
Hint: 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.
Readit News
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.
The advantage that the EU has is in fact ASML. No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet. [0]
The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with TSMC to build a foundry in the EU that produces at the node they want to intercept (2 nm?). Then, make a business arrangement that puts European scientists and engineers into high-value roles. That would enable the EU to develop the technical skills and keep China from locking it up.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25361028
From my experience with gov trying to do tech investment it’s going to go into the pockets of late career overpaid ‘executives’ with ‘industry experience’ and tons of (also overpaid and underqualified) contractors doing the same thing. Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to run it.
I mean I hope it goes to the engineers and smart dudes (who doesn’t want another successful semi competitor and 2nm?) and not the ones who know how to play the political game the best but I’m highly highly skeptical.
We’ll see in a few years I guess.
And I say that fully understanding ASML and the value they currently provide. But let’s hope who ever doles this out understands it as well as (maybe) half the people in this thread.
But even ignoring that giant elephant in the room, it adds the critical question why should ASML care to give special treatment to this one project? They are already killing it globally. Just because they operate in EU and this offers shit loads of money to potentially fleece?
The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the major players in the industry. Being the leader is not necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.
that's hardly in Taiwan's geopolitical interest. perhaps if the EU made some serious political concessions to Taiwan.
Same with solar or battery tech, we have the tech and the people but economically it isn't feasible to have production in the EU.
Those are some huge claims, which could have previously been said for many currently outdated technologies.
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.
The ECB has been buying trillions of euro's worth of dubious government bonds and bank debts for the last couple of years. Also every year the EU pays hundreds of billions worth of subsidies to European farmers so that they are able to sell their goods below global market prices. I would say that this 145 billion is as good an investment if not better than what EU money has been spent on so far.
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.
Dead Comment
As a mediocre analogy, you don't expect to be able to write good novels because you got your hands on a printer.
I think much of the relevant general-purpose chip design knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning. I don't yet see any other chip company (eg NXP etc) suddenly be the next Intel or AMD yet (let alone the next Apple).
Also, the European Union is heavily betting on the RISC-V for its future hyperscale HPC systems[2][3][4].
I would believe that next-gen European CPU budget declaration is part of this dynamic. And I really hope it will work out.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-semiconductors-...
[2] https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/project/epi/
[3] https://www.mdpi.com/2297-8747/25/3/46/pdf (PDF)
[4] https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/06/10/europes-homegrown-hp...
It's the inability for SMIC to obtain EUV lithography equipment for their sub-7nm process technologies from ASML that prevents China from getting into high-end semiconductors, not the domestic microarchitecture know-how.
The larger ARM Cortex cores are still designed to a large degree in Southern France.
Worth noting the Sophia Antipolis arm design centre in France continues to exist. It works on some of the big A-class cores (The A75 for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A75).
Though whether arm would get involved in this endeavour is another question. They have a significant physical IP portfolio: https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-physical and associated skillsets (I think at least some of this is UK based, not entirely sure how much) so would be a good partner to have and I suspect arm would like to see arm cores coming out as test designs rather than RISC-V cores. Of course in the wake of brexit potentially not a partnership the EU wants politically! UK government would spin it as UK company plays key part in major EU initiative with significant funding awarded. EU would spin it as EU brings in major global semiconductor company to new semiconductor initiative.
Does that even marginally matter?
Even after Brexit, both EU, and UK will remain open economies, unless you believe a conspiracy theory that Boris is a closet communist.
[1] https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14039015/how-d....
ASML has plans to get into sub 1nm level. 2nm and 1.5 nm is already in the pipeline.
The technology high-NA EUV (high Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet) becomes just insane. Mirror manufacturing process requires atomic scale corrections and the whole metrology is moved into vacuum.
The limit for mass production is measuring and calibration. The measurement accuracy is comparable or exeeding Large Hadron Collideror gravitational-wave astronomy. The speed (wafers per hour) must eventually slow down, requiring more machines and making the process more expensive. Then Moore's law finally dies due to the cost.
Given the size of this commitment it seems clear that there is a lot more to 5nm than the lithography machine.
I mean they can get paid but there’s a ton of other companies not starting from scratch they can also make billions off of so I don’t see why some geographic thing is some huge advantage for EU.
They already operate in a highly lucrative global market with companies who don’t need to figure anything out.
If anything this should be expansion capital or efforts to build more factories locally. Not trying to do it themselves.
But hey what do I know. I don’t have multiple countries with lagging tech interests in mind with lots of money to burn.
Yes there is whole part of equation that has nothing to do with ASML. But the point, to over simplify things a lot was that without ASML there are currently zero chance you could get leading edge node working. But even with it you have barely started.
Look at Intel, Samsung and Global Foundry.
Unfortunately no. A number of pieces of military hardware produced in bigger numbers will leave even that pricetag in the dust.
The declaration essentially said "one oil platform, unpackaged".
There was a suitable tariff code for it, but the value of it was so great the electronic customs declaration system couldn't handle all the digits.
Instead they had to write the value as a free-text comment.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_A_platform
I have to say though, from Wikipedia, sounds like there are only a few of them? Sort of one-offs, each of them (so to speak). I kind of think that might disqualify them.
Like calling the ISS the most expensive machine?
https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow
(I know this comment is not exactly in the mood of HN, but this is the one thing I never fail to think of when someone mentions the Bagger family of murderous machines!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBdMRUG69uc
So many disciplines of engineering going into this machine!
And not a small part to gigantic speculative expectations around tech sector in general, which seem to have crossed the Atlantic this year.
So much speculative interest has never been a good thing as we know.
I thought 'gigafactory' was coined by Tesla/Elon?
It was named as such because of the scale and capacity of those Fab as compared to other pure play competitor. It was also one reason how TSMC manage to win by Economy of Scale.
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_fu...
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).
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
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.
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.
The other factor is that they come in waves: there could be many grants for your startup for a few years, then government focus shifts and they dry up, then 5 years later they might come again
Aquiring the grants and completing the required paperwork feels a lot like doing schoolwork - it's tedious, but certainly doable, I have won 2 grants a few years back for my startup, its not like you have to be a big corp to stand a chance.
But it might be because it's Germany, you have to use your regional bank for the process and ours was horrible.
Disclaimer: I used to work at a company that was particularly good in draining these kind of funds without delivering useful outputs.
How can we avoid spending money on lobbyists? Maybe the structure should be more VC-like?
Not for the purpose of creating long time state owned companies, but for cashing out when/if the investment is successful, just like VC's. This would both provide the state with money, removing the need to raise that same money via taxes, and hopefully also better align the incentives of the funding organisation by providing measurable goals.
In the US I see it all going to established players. Which is fine for stuff like finding a COVID-19 vaccine. But is a total disaster for promoting innovation.
I have a computer engineering degree and have watched nothing of interest happen in semiconductor manufacturing for over 20 years. Yes we have blue LEDs now. Yes we have fast video cards. But if you look at single-threaded performance per clock cycle, it's been stuck within the same order of magnitude since the Pentium got 20 stage instruction pipelines and huge caches (which in hindsight were big blows for SIMD and MIMD).
It would take a paltry amount of money, in the low millions of dollars, to design real (general purpose) multicore processors that deliver orders of magnitude better performance than what we have today. But unfortunately lawmakers are for the most part technologically illiterate, and technologists are unduly skeptical of any type of programming outside the mainstream.
So my dream of a sub-$1000, 1000+ core CPU with a modest amount of RAM per core (between 1 MB and 1 GB) that can be programmed with existing tools like Erlang/Go/MATLAB/Julia and even Docker is just never gonna happen. And without that, there is no viable road to really experiment with stuff like AI, physics simulations etc without renting time in the cloud. We have the impression that progress is being made on these endeavors today, but things look a little different to me, watching them play out at a glacial pace, at mind boggling expense, over 3-4 decades. I mourn what might have been.
The salary for the verification engineers would already probably exceed low millions of dollars after 3 years. Not to mention licensing cost for EDA tools you need to tame billions of transistors.
I will give you low millions of dollars if you have a viable path to orders of magnitude better performance general purpose processors.
I'm really curious what specifically you mean by this. I see similar issues on the software side (my degree is in CS). Software is incredibly bloated and horrible at interoperability. Unix had pipes back in the early 70s, and somehow with GUIs and then mobile "apps," we've regressed. Identity-based security has failed time and again. And only rarely has software design progressed meaningfully beyond structured programming from the late 70s (not to mention the languages). Moore's law has given software developers around over 100M x improvement over the past 40 years, yet ordinary people would scarcely notice.
TL;DR: I see a lot of the same flaws in software, dominated by fads and popularity only of what is mainstream.
I'd really like to hear a dissident point of view from the hardware side.
Then there’s mega projects like LHC and ITER (international projects, but it’s not pure chance that they’re located in Europe) and Wendelstein 7-X.
My pet example is Nordic Semiconductor, which has an insanely good position in the Bluetooth LE device market. What’s also interesting is that two of the major competitors also design their chips in Norway. Although those companies do illustrate one problem in Norway (and perhaps Europe in general): the lack of capital at certain stages. In the IC businesses it seems most companies are acquired by US companies eventually.
Let’s look at EVs. Europe doesn’t have Tesla. But seems like most European car makers are doing OK with EVs. Arguably better than US incumbent car makers. VWs new platform is one of the most promising right now, although this project has shown that VW has a problem with software engineering. But so does most other older car companies in the world. There are also some interesting start ups that’s more focused on designing/supplying components, such as Rimac and Kreisel. Rimac seems to go toe-to-toe with Tesla on extreme performance.
I believe a lot of robots used in advanced manufacturing is German as well?
In general I have the impression that Europe is very strong in designing/making components and manufacturing machines and such. Things that the end consumer never hears about. Very few have heard about ASML, but everyone has heard about Intel. So maybe that contributes to the impression that EU is behind on tech.
Europe has also been ahead of the US in adopting tech on the consumer side in several areas. The US was in the stone age for a long time when it came to banking and payment for instance.
How do you measure being behind/ahead in tech?
The US has both the major desktop/laptop CPU designers, as well as both desktop/laptop GPU designers. Of the three major desktop/laptop OSes, two are American, and the last doesn't belong to any particular country, but the primary creator moved from Europe to the US permanently.
The two major smartphone OSes are made by American companies. Two biggest browsers, again, Americans. Maybe three, if you count Mozilla (though Samsung is probably around there as well).
Huge internet/software tech companies that consumers interact with? Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple are all American. Europe has no equivalent to these, all they can boast is a few smaller ones like Spotify, or business facing giants like SAP (equivalent to that in the US would probably be like Oracle or IBM).
While obviously Europe doesn't have a complete dearth of local software, in terms of major consumer hits, especially the kind that get play outside of the region they originated in -- not much of that going on.
Also, I work at Google Munich, and it's pretty telling how rare it is for people here to get 'poached' by other local tech companies. It happened to a few people I knew...to go to Lyft's Munich office. Other than that, I can't think of any. When it comes to enticing engineers, there just aren't any German tech companies that play in the same league as Google.
All the anecdotal evidence you provide is nice, but is not represented in the market.
An example you give, Nordic Semiconductor, has a market cap of $3B.
Here's a good list of the worlds largest tech companies. The first European entry is #14, ASML:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...
Government has no appetite for creative destruction and pushes policy favoring large incumbents over upstarts. Investors have no appetite for risk and only seek conservative investments. The best minds (that don't leave the EU) would rather work for large companies, schools, government, etc. than at smaller, riskier organizations that may not be around in a few years.
My family in Europe thought I was a loser and/or crazy for leaving a job as an adjunct professor to work at a 100-person startup. It makes no sense to us but it's understandable to someone who views landing a lifetime cushy bureaucratic job as the gold standard.
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.
This is standard practice is almost any trading agreement. No trading entity wants to enter a tariff free agreement with another entity which operates lower standards, and thus makes it easy for that partner to undercut their local market.
It’s the entire reason why the US and EU hold tariffs against each other. They don’t want the subsidies or differences in standards to allow one to undercut the other.
The US has similar terms in all their trading agreements, its just that historically the US has sought to export its copyright, tax and drug laws. Hence why most of the western world has drug laws and copyright laws that are almost a copy paste of US drug and copyright laws. Indeed it’s why weed is still technically illegal in Amsterdam. It’s also how the US gets foreign banks to enforce FATCA.
Finally if you want to see some really repugnant trade agreement terms, look up Investor-state Dispute Settlement agreements that the US likes to put in their trade deals [1]
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor-state_dispute_settl...
I guess that's related to the US dept culture too. Not having money but borrowing it for all kinds of things and with that stacking dept upon dept is quite normal in the US while over here at the continent you usually want to pay it back asap.
So not having money or working for a company which doesn't generate any must feel much better in the US.
I would be terrified. I also wouldn't work for some startup which won't pay be but instead preach something about family values for example. Earning money and owning stuff that I buy feels great. Wouldn't want to miss it.
That's why consensus building and failure avoidance are common in Europe. People want good enough without moonshots.
One of the best examples of this are the digital tachograph design documents, which are hundreds of pages of legal gibberish mixed with a convoluted tech spec. 100% design by comitee. No wonder the top digital tachograph supplier is VDO and one if the lesser players, Stoneridge, has a much better designed and executed product.
In contrast with this, the US ELD is an 125 page document standardising functionality and the data output of the device.
Giving employees equity in the Netherlands is nearly impossible without getting taxed to death. The position of the tax authority is that the sole reason you get equity, is because of your relationship as employee, and therefore the "gift of equity" is actually a form of salary, and therefore salary tax must be paid based on the value of the equity. In the Netherlands, this tax is around 50%.
Worse: depending on the exact legal implementation of the equity, you may end up having to pay the tax, based on its value on paper, before actually selling the equity, whose actual market price may be far lower. One could end up losing money just by having equity.
In the Netherlands, having a bankruptcy on your name makes you an ecomonic pariah. The process of going through a bankruptcy is not pleasant and comes with many responsibilities. Starting another company will be difficult. You will not be able to get a loan anymore. Oh, and your phone bill counts as a loan.
There is also a very weak culture of venture capital investment. There are very few such investors, and where they exist, the amounts they offer is tiny (like 10x lower) compared to US VCs, even though they ask the same amount of equity.
I am also not very impressed with the amount of advice/expertise VCs can offer over here.
The Dutch government likes to talk about how much they stimulate the tech and startup scenes. But when capital is concerned, their default answer is that you're supposed to get a loan. Lenders, unlike venture capitalists, are risk-averse (which they have to by law), meaning that they MUST get their loan paid back no matter what, which means that your business plan MUST be profitable, guaranteed, and that you must provide some sort of personal collateral, such as your savings or your house.
The sort of companies the government is thinking of, is for example a factory, where you need capital up front in order to buy machinery. The demand is known, so you know what profit you will roughly make. But this sort of thinking doesn't work for areas with high risk or a high degree of unknown.
For example let's say that you want to make a Twitter. You need money to pay for developers' salaries. But what will your profit be in year 3? It could be 1 million, or 0 (because nobody wants it). When banks hear this, they want a collateral equal to the loan amount. Why would I even get a loan then?
The best thing I can say about the Netherlands is the WBSO subsidy. When you do tech research and development on an area with risk (where risk is defined as being risky to you, e.g. because you have no experience with a particular topic or technology), then the government provides a subsidy for the amount of man-hours spent on this R&D. R&D includes software development too. This subsidy is implemented as a salary tax break.
Plus, when it turns out that your WBSO-subsidized product actually generates profit, then you get a corporate income tax break on the profits generated by that product. This is called the Innovatiebox.
WBSO and Innovatiebox are really nice once you have initial capital and have taken off. They won't help you when you start with near €0.
How Europe lost its tech companies (2017)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSU5MFPn6Zk
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.
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.
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.
I've worked for the large, sclerotic organisations that once put man on the moon. They will take your 100bn, crush it in to dust, and outsource the production of 1 million pages of documentation in 32 languages detailing the workings of something your never asked for. All in the blink of an eye.
We aren't talking about a military research project like packet switching, or getting to the moon for the first time.
Important defined how?
The car wasn't. The mobile phone wasn't. Computers in their post-WW2 form basically weren't, for the last half decade if not more it's all been private sector. Yes, DARPA did some very early work on packet switching networks and their work became widely adopted mostly because it was free: nice. But the moment these inventions started to matter, all R&D was taken over by the private sector.
Governments spray so much money at things that I'm sure for almost any broad category of thing, you can find something they funded. But that's no evidence that stuff would never have been researched anyway, given the enormous and long term R&D efforts routinely mounted by non governmental entities. Look at AI: government funded institutions are constantly lagging behind.
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.
Alphabet alone spends something like $21 billion on R&D per year. It doesn't take many years of that to reach $140 billion, and Alphabet is not the only company doing basic research.
Having spent many years reading research papers coming out of both academia and industry, my conclusion has been that the best papers are always those with corporate funding - some academic teams receive partly corporate funding and these tend to be in the middle, pure corporate labs tend to do the most exciting work. The bureaucrat-distributed money often gets allocated for decades to intellectual dead ends nobody cares about, purely through inertia and lack of institutional incentives to maximise ROI.
Seriously though, some projects are just too expensive and risky for a privately funded venture. That's why public-private partnerships are created - it's always been like this and there doesn't appear to be an alternative.
From the R&D perspective NASA doesn't really have any say in how Starship/Superheavy are developed, which is the cutting edge of space launch. Nor does it dictate the timeline or milestones of the program. Not the same compared to the EU's initiative.
In fact, SpaceX's success shows a different path: let the private sector innovate, provide support in terms of know-how, credibility and potential contracts.
It's also quite funny considering that Goddard himself had to do a lot of work alone, fight public opinion and face the lack of support from the American government, military and academia, all failing to understand the value of the rocket to study the atmosphere and near space, and for military applications, over I'm sure other public-private endeavors that had the blessing at the time (perhaps all the atomic research that provided more strategic benefits?)
SpaceX was almost completely privately invested and private risk. Once they had shown that they were serious, NASA awarded them contracts, because it was a great deal for NASA, compared to what they would pay otherwise.
Its sad to see these kind of attempts to trash talk the SpaceX achievements.