The EU Chips Act
Can Eindhoven’s photonic cleanrooms secure Europe’s technological sovereignty?
Semiconductors have become the fault line of modern geopolitics. The United States and China are investing aggressively in domestic chip production, treating semiconductors not as consumer goods but as strategic infrastructure. Europe, by contrast, spent decades optimising research while outsourcing large-scale manufacturing — until recent crises exposed how fragile that model had become.
With the EU Chips Act, Brussels is attempting a course correction. More than €43 billion in public and private investment is meant to double Europe’s share of global semiconductor production to 20% by 2030. The ambition is unmistakable. The open question is whether Europe can realistically compete on scale — or whether its future lies in technological differentiation.
That question increasingly points to photonics.
From Alarm to Strategy
The Chips Act did not emerge from abstract industrial planning. It was triggered by real-world shocks. Pandemic-related shortages halted European car factories, delayed defence systems and revealed how dependent the continent had become on a small number of overseas foundries.
What followed was a political realisation: chips are not just components, they are enablers of power. The Chips Act is Europe’s attempt to regain influence by strengthening its position across the semiconductor value chain — from research and design to production and crisis response.
Rather than copying the American or Asian model, Europe is using the Act as a strategic lever: to turn existing strengths into lasting industrial capability.
Bridging the Lab-to-Fab Gap
Europe’s problem has never been a lack of scientific excellence. Its universities and research institutes consistently deliver breakthroughs in semiconductors, photonics and quantum technologies. The weakness lies in what happens next.
Too often, promising ideas fail to cross the lab-to-fab gap — the difficult transition from experimental success to manufacturable technology. Scaling requires cleanroom access, pilot manufacturing, specialised talent and patient capital. Without that infrastructure, intellectual property tends to migrate abroad before it matures.
The Chips Act directly targets this bottleneck through pilot lines and competence centres, designed to keep innovation and industrialisation aligned. For researchers such as Professor Martijn Heck, Professor of Photonics at Eindhoven University of Technology, this alignment is decisive.
Strategic autonomy, in his view, is not achieved by legislation alone, but by ensuring that Europe can industrialise its own ideas.
Why Silicon Is No Longer Enough
Traditional electronic chips are approaching fundamental limits. As transistors shrink, gains in performance increasingly come at the cost of heat, energy consumption and system complexity. For applications such as AI, high-performance computing and advanced defence systems, these constraints are becoming critical.
Photonic chips offer an alternative path. By using light instead of electrons, they enable far higher data throughput with dramatically lower energy use. This makes them particularly attractive for AI workloads, secure communications and sensing technologies — areas where performance and efficiency are strategic assets.
The Netherlands, and specifically the Eindhoven–Twente ecosystem, has quietly become a global leader in this field. In late 2024, the EU selected a European photonics pilot line under the Chips Act, with a central role for Dutch institutions and industry. It was a technical decision with far-reaching strategic implications.
If Europe cannot win the chip race on volume, photonics offers a way to win on architecture.
Dual-Use Reality
Semiconductors sit at the intersection of civilian and military power. They are essential to satellites, radar systems, autonomous platforms and secure networks — but equally to energy infrastructure, space systems and climate technologies.
By investing in shared infrastructure and pilot manufacturing, the Chips Act lowers the threshold for deep-tech companies operating in this dual-use space. For founders and system builders working on defence, space or advanced energy systems, Europe is quietly rebuilding the industrial foundation they depend on.
This is where policy meets practice.
The Open Questions
Ambition alone will not determine success. The Chips Act faces structural challenges that cannot be ignored. Speed remains a concern in a sector that evolves faster than regulatory processes. Talent shortages, particularly in cleanroom engineering, could become a limiting factor. And strategic focus will matter: reinforcing legacy silicon technologies is safer politically, but may weaken Europe’s long-term position.
The real test is whether Europe is willing to prioritise future-defining technologies — even when the payoff is uncertain.
Conclusion: Control Beats Volume
The EU Chips Act is not simply an industrial subsidy programme. It is an attempt to reposition Europe within a fragmented global technology landscape.
Europe is unlikely to dominate semiconductor volume. Its opportunity lies elsewhere: in controlling the architectures that advanced systems depend on. If the Chips Act succeeds, it will be because Europe chose differentiation over imitation — and invested where others cannot easily follow.
In Eindhoven’s cleanrooms, the stakes are therefore higher than chips alone. What is being built there is not just technology, but strategic control.
