Comment by ludvigk
8 hours ago
Same here. And I doubt 3B EUR will do anything (remember the >$100B investment round that OpenAI got?)
In the EU it seems we are very much at risk of being cut off from frontier AI if the US government should decide to do so.
OpenAI also indirectly depends on ASML, but sadly Europe seems too cowardly to leverage this dependency at the moment.
If EU were to "leverage" ASML, and that would require rather unlikely approval of Netherlands, it wouldn't end very well.
Already shipped machines can not be taken back, nor can they be stopped. Sure, you can cut the support, and buildup of new fabs will be stalled. But the other side, Chinese or USA, has many more levers to pull. Raw materials, energy (LNG), was majority of consumer goods, solar panels, batteries, semiconductors. EU doesn't mine or make most of them, and isn't nowhere close to even starting, instead, industrial base is already shrinking.
Even worse, ASML may dominate EUV, but other suppliers do very well in DUV. The moment ASML becomes unreliable, all of them will get infusion of money, as they become national security issue.
What about ASML subsidiaries in USA, like Cymer and ASML Wilton, will they take the bullet for the parent? Or will they become part of new competitor, with all the knowhow.
And China has already set domestic capacities in this area as a national priority.
Blocking EU from those services would crash the valuation of US AI companies, so I'm not expecting it to happen.
You'd still have access to the Chinese models though right? Even if you want to argue they aren't truly SOTA they're still pretty dang good.