On 3 June 2026, the European Commission unveiled the Chips Act 2.0 — a sweeping revision of Europe's semiconductor strategy and the clearest signal yet that technological sovereignty has moved from talking point to industrial policy. As Les Echos put it, Europe is setting out to reconquer its chips.

What the first Chips Act did — and didn't — achieve

The original 2023 European Chips Act mobilised some €52 billion in public and private investment and is credited with creating an estimated 46,000 direct and indirect jobs, alongside a real strengthening of Europe's research capacity in semiconductors. But its headline ambition — 20% of global chip production by 2030 — was widely judged out of reach, and Europe's dependence on non-European suppliers for the most advanced components barely moved.

Chips Act 2.0 is the Commission's answer to that gap: less a second subsidy round, more an attempt at a complete industrial strategy.

What changes with 2.0

The new proposal works the whole value chain, from raw materials to packaging, rather than just fab construction:

  • First-of-a-Kind funding — State aid rules open up to novel projects anywhere in the semiconductor value chain, not only leading-edge fabs.
  • Strategic projects — co-investment by the EU, member states, and industry in designated priority projects, including "Grand Challenges" for strategically important chips such as AI accelerators.
  • Demand Accelerators — a genuinely new idea: instead of only pushing supply, the EU will organise demand, aligning new European chips with what industry actually needs and steering public procurement toward solutions that deliver European economic value.
  • Faster permitting — approvals capped at 12 months, addressing one of the loudest industry complaints of the past three years.
  • Supply-chain resilience — a business-to-business semiconductor supply-chain platform and a new "Semiconductor Regions of Excellence" label.

The timing is no accident. The global semiconductor market is expected to reach €1.37 trillion by 2030, with AI-related components driving roughly 70% of that growth. Whoever controls the silicon controls the stack above it.

Why this matters beyond hardware

Sovereignty isn't built at one layer of the stack. Chips, clouds, and software rise — or stay dependent — together.

For the European software ecosystem, the chips story is upstream of everything. Every European SaaS product ultimately runs on someone's silicon, in someone's data centre, under someone's jurisdiction. A credible European chip supply chain makes European cloud infrastructure more resilient, and that in turn strengthens the case every European software company makes to its customers: your data, your stack, your rules.

The shift in method matters too. With its demand-side instruments and procurement preference for European value, Chips Act 2.0 borrows the logic that European tech advocates have urged for years: don't just fund supply — be the customer. If that thinking spreads from semiconductors to cloud and software procurement, the ripple effects for European SaaS could be bigger than the act itself.

Europe has learned from round one. The reconquest of its chips is now also a bet on the entire European stack — and that's a bet worth watching from every corner of the ecosystem, including ours.