Since Airbus, Nothing but Intentions and Appeals

I. The Act

When Airbus came into being, two men decided. So it is put in an earlier essay on this site, "The Lost Courage", and that is the whole story in a single sentence. In 1970, France and Germany merged their national aerospace champions into a single company — one firm, one product line, shared risk, a common goal against American dominance. Not a declaration of intent, not a funding programme, not a cluster in which competitors cooperate. A fused entity that could exist only as a whole. That was the act. Airbus flies today because someone back then built a structure that no one could later leave on their own.

This structure is the key. A champion does not arise when separate firms are asked to pull together. It arises when they are bound together so tightly that parting becomes more expensive than staying. Airbus was architecture. What Europe has attempted in the semiconductor industry ever since was appeal.

II. The Repetition That Never Was

Europe did not attempt to transfer the Airbus idea to chips once, but in four runs. And every time it stayed an idea.

It began in the 1980s with the Mega Project: Siemens and Philips, under the European research framework, with around a billion, to keep pace in the memory business. They did not keep pace. Siemens did demonstrate a four-megabit chip, but had to license the one-megabit technology from Toshiba — and by then Japan's NTT had already shown sixteen megabits. Europe was behind from the very start, in the most expensive, most brutal, most capital-intensive segment the industry knows.

In 1989 this became JESSI, the Joint European Submicron Silicon Initiative, an eight-year programme of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Britain. And here one must be honest: as research, JESSI was in parts a success. It delivered a half-micron process in 1994, at the same time as the United States and Japan; out of its environment and the reorganization of Philips in Eindhoven came ASML, today's global monopolist of lithography machines. But the champion that was actually the point never came into being. Philips withdrew from memory, Siemens abandoned its sixteen-megabit plans and went to IBM instead, the budget was cut. The research succeeded; the consolidation did not happen. They had built a shared laboratory, not a shared company — and a laboratory dissolves the moment its participants have other interests.

III. The Name Without the Thing

Then, in 2013, came the name. The EU Digital Commissioner Neelie Kroes coined the formula "Airbus of Chips" for a plan by the large European semiconductor firms. It sounded like resolve. But even then the observers said what everyone knew: shareholder and antitrust interests would not permit a real merger. "Airbus of Chips" therefore never denoted a consolidation, but at best a hoped-for alignment. The name was borrowed, the thing was not done. They invoked Airbus without repeating the act that Airbus had been.

IV. The End Point

How it ends when the champion fails to appear and only the individual firms remain was shown by Qimonda. Siemens had spun off its chip arm as Infineon in 1999, and Infineon spun off its memory business as Qimonda in 2006. It was Europe's last large memory manufacturer, at times the world's number two. In January 2009 it filed for insolvency — a rescue package from Saxony, Portugal, and Infineon failed to come together in time. The plants in Dresden, Portugal, and Richmond were closed. With that, European volume memory production ended.

What became of the remains afterward belongs to another essay on this site, "The Final Sale", but it can be said in one sentence: Qimonda's roughly seven thousand patents and 2.8 terabytes of technical documentation, together with a key engineer with twenty-four years of Siemens, Infineon, and Qimonda experience, were passed on through licensing firms and today form the foundation of CXMT, China's fourth-largest memory maker, which stands before the largest semiconductor IPO in Chinese history. The state had subsidized, the corporations had appropriated and exited, and what was invented now carries a foreign champion.

V. Forty-Three Billion in Intent

One might think a lesson had been drawn from all this. The opposite is the case. In 2023 the European Chips Act came into force, the largest undertaking so far: forty-three billion euros of public and private funds to double Europe's world market share from ten to twenty percent by 2030. It is the continuation of the same line with bigger numbers — and it is already being dismantled by its own institutions. The EU Commission itself forecasts only just under twelve percent for 2030. The European Court of Auditors called the twenty-percent target unrealistic and noted that the Act was adopted without ever systematically examining why the preceding strategy of 2013 — the "Airbus of Chips" — had failed to halt the decline. A German think tank described the Act as what it is: not a strategy, but a collection of ideas and initiatives.

That is the pure form of the diagnosis. Forty years after the Mega Project, forty-three billion strong, and the core remains unchanged: an intention, an appeal, a target its own auditors hold to be unreachable — and no architecture that binds anyone.

VI. The Honest Counterweight

Here one must object, or the diagnosis becomes unfair. "Europe cannot do chips" is false. On the contrary: in one place Europe is world-leading, and at the decisive one. ASML, which emerged from Philips, is the uncontested master of EUV lithography — no modern fab in the world, not in Taiwan or Korea either, builds leading-edge chips without European machines. Add Zeiss, STMicroelectronics, the research center imec. The equipment and research part of the chain is European-dominated.

But precisely that sharpens the diagnosis rather than softening it. For the one great success, ASML, did not come out of the consolidation programmes, but as a focused, independent spin-off — a clearly bounded structure that stood on its own, not a subsidized alignment of several corporations. What worked was architecture in the small. What failed was the appeal in the large. Europe can do chips. It just cannot build the champion it has been announcing for forty years — because announcing is not building.

VII. Architecture, Not Appeal

With this the circle closes to the question "The Lost Courage" posed: why Europe could once and today cannot. The answer the semiconductor history gives is not that the Europeans had grown more foolish or poorer. It is more structural. Airbus was possible because a single decision sufficed, one that no one could later reverse. Since then, every comparable decision has been broken up into a web of national interests, competition law, and shareholder duties, in which intent can form but binding can no longer. The moment memory became unprofitable for shareholders, Philips and Siemens left — and no programme could hold them, because none bound them.

That is the lesson, and it is the same as everywhere on this site: an appeal does not hold, because it speaks against the very interests it pretends to steer. Only an architecture holds that makes parting impossible or too expensive. Airbus was such an architecture. Everything Europe has produced in the semiconductor industry since then has been intentions and appeals.

Since Airbus, Europe has repeated the name for forty years and not done the thing a second time. Mega Project, JESSI, "Airbus of Chips," Chips Act — four runs, one pattern: the invocation of an architecture no one is any longer willing to build. Airbus was a decision. Everything since was an intention.