It's not a plot. Everything is public in within EU strategy and the issues with the US digital products have been long discussed in the EU parliament.

Oh, this is actually substantial [1].

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...

We've seen how amazing the EU has been for Europe. One EU company in the Top 50 companies in the world by market cap: ASML.

Big round of applause.

The Chips Act 2.0, for the 1.0 did... Nothing at all?

It's the "If it moves, tax it. If it still moves, tax it more. Tax is until it doesn't move at all anymore. Then subsidize it.".

It's a strategy from losers and by losers.

There's no way the EU shall ever compete again (we at least had some chip industry in the beginning) with the EU or China on CPUs/GPUs. That's never going to happen.

The only thing europeans can hope for is to leech on open-source efforts to diminish their reliance on big US software companies but... The same EU bureaucrats who are making big announcements explaining how the EU shall become relevant again are, in illegal backroom deals, taking bribes from Microsoft (one of the company that has the most to lose if the EU gets serious about embracing open source).

The Lisbon Strategy, stemming from 2000:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/lis1_en.htm

TL;DR from bureaucratese: to make the EU "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world" capable of sustainable economic growth with more jobs and greater social cohesion.

As of 2026, everyone can see for themselves what the previous long game has delivered. Not even that social cohesion; everyone is fighting over entitlements and blaming someone else (boomers, immigrants, techbros, childless people) for ruining the system.