Europe’s semiconductor strategy is at a crossroads. The collapse of Intel’s Magdeburg megafab plan has exposed a fundamental flaw in Europe’s approach to chip sovereignty: betting on a handful of giant, foreign-owned factories is not a strategy — it is a vulnerability.
In this policy paper, Mike Miller argues that Europe needs to abandon the “cathedral in the desert” model and replace it with something more durable: a pan-European hub-and-spoke ecosystem built around the nodes, layers, and chokepoints where European industry can genuinely become indispensable. Rather than chasing frontier chip manufacturing it cannot sustain, Europe should anchor its strategy in advanced packaging, chiplet integration, silicon photonics, power electronics, and certified supply chain assurance — areas where it already holds leverage and can build more.
The paper proposes five concrete pillars for a redesigned European semiconductor ecosystem, from utility-node manufacturing anchors serving the automotive and industrial base, to a Rapid Prototyping Frontier Foundry for maintaining competence in cutting-edge AI chip design, to an “Atlantic Shield” framework that turns European market access into a diplomatic instrument for securing reciprocity.
The goal is not self-sufficiency — it is enforced relevance. If Europe executes well, the measure of success by 2035 will not be a symbolic share of global wafer volume, but the ability to keep European industry and defence systems running under pressure, and to set the standards that the rest of the world must follow.
A strategic blueprint for Chips Act 2.0 and the decade ahead.