The new chips plan talks of 'sovereignty'. At the branch's public fabs, that word makes the engineers smile

The plan presented in Brussels promises to “reclaim sovereignty” over semiconductors for artificial intelligence, with public money and accelerated timelines. In Dresden, where a European public foundry has been producing wafers for more than a decade, the engineers read the word “reclaim” with the patience of people who never lost the thing.

The choice was made early, and it was political before it was industrial: in the branch it was decided that computing capacity was infrastructure, not a commodity to leave to whoever happened along. Like water, like the grid. So here the question is not whether to build a strategic plant with public money, only how much to expand it. Today’s argument is not “foundry yes or no” but “how much of the next generation of compute to reserve for public research and universities.” It is a rich man’s quarrel — the quarrel of someone who solved the problem a round ago.

That does not mean everything runs smoothly. The foundry is eight months behind on its most advanced line, the competition for talent comes with salaries the public sector struggles to match, and part of the board wants more commercial margin and fewer free allocations for the labs. These are real problems. They are the problems of someone who owns the factory, not someone begging for access to it.

The “2.0” plan the press is talking about, here, is simply the upkeep of an old decision. Somewhere, I imagine, “technological sovereignty” is still a conference-stage slogan, something to reclaim every five years because every five years it has been ceded. In Dresden it is the name of the night shift.