This story was originally published by Tech Policy Press.

The European Union’s push for technological sovereignty faces an uncomfortable contradiction.

As the EU rolls out AI factories, gigafactories, and new data centers, it is creating a surge in demand for the advanced semiconductors that underpin artificial intelligence. Yet Europe produces fewer than 10 percent of the world’s chips and remains heavily dependent on U.S. designers and Asian manufacturers for the most advanced processors.

That tension sits at the heart of Chips Act 2.0, the European Commission’s planned overhaul of its flagship semiconductor strategy.

The original Chips Act, adopted in 2023, sought to raise Europe’s share of global semiconductor production to 20 percent by 2030. But the European Court of Auditors has warned that target is unlikely to be met, while the Commission’s own projections put Europe’s market share at about 11.7 percent.

The Commission now wants to correct what officials see as a major weakness in the first law: It focused on expanding supply without doing enough to stimulate demand. To address that gap, Chips Act 2.0 is expected to introduce demand-side measures, including public procurement tools, demand accelerators, and closer coordination between semiconductor producers and industrial users. The Commission’s calculation is straightforward: Stronger domestic demand will encourage companies to invest in designing and manufacturing chips in Europe.

But the strategy carries a paradox. The AI infrastructure that the Commission hopes will anchor a European semiconductor ecosystem will initially rely almost entirely on advanced processors designed by U.S. companies and manufactured in Asia.

“Key positions are held by a small number of firms, mostly outside Europe,” Claire Godfrey, executive director of the Balanced Economy Project, told Tech Policy Press.

AI factories create a demand trap

The European Commission’s AI Continent action plan includes 19 AI factories, computing facilities that integrate energy sources, specialized chips, and other infrastructure for running AI models and applications, plans for up to five AI gigafactories (since upgraded to seven), and a proposal to at least triple the bloc’s data center capacity within five to seven years under the Cloud and AI Development Act. That expansion will require a large supply of advanced AI processors.

The Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS) estimates that each planned AI factory site requires up to 25,000 advanced chips, while a gigafactory requires at least 100,000.

Almost all of those processors are expected to come from Nvidia. The company supplies most of the graphics processing units deployed in Europe, while its proprietary CUDA software underpins much of the AI software ecosystem. CEPS warns this could create an “Nvidia dependency trap,” where computing infrastructure is physically located in Europe but remains technologically dependent on a single U.S. supplier.

Recent AI infrastructure projects in Europe illustrate the problem. Mistral has lined up 13,800 Nvidia GPUs for a data center near Paris. Deutsche Telekom’s Munich Industrial AI Cloud is being built with nearly 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. And Nscale says its Sines deployment for Microsoft will start with more than 12,600 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs before expanding to more than 66,000 in 2027.

Europe still doesn’t control the chip supply chain

The challenge extends well beyond Nvidia. Even if Europe succeeds in expanding semiconductor manufacturing, the global supply chain limits how much autonomy any single region can achieve.

“Europe depends on both the United States and Asia, but at different stages of the value chain,” Toni Roldán-Monés, economist and assistant professor of public policy at IE University, told Tech Policy Press.

“The United States maintains a dominant position in areas such as chip design, intellectual property, and certain frontier equipment. Meanwhile, the manufacturing of the most advanced semiconductors is highly concentrated in Asia, especially in Taiwan and South Korea, while China plays a fundamental role in various materials, industrial processes, and critical minerals,” said Roldán.

Europe’s reliance on third countries is more evident in some parts of the chip value chain. In fabrication, Taiwan produces around 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips. In packaging, assembly, and testing, the EU holds just 4 percent of the market and remains highly dependent on Asia, according to Laith Altimime, President of SEMI Europe.

“The objective is… to avoid excessive dependence on a single country, company, or technology.” Toni Roldán-Monés

“No top 20 assembly, test, and packaging company is headquartered in the EU,” Godfrey said. “There is also the materials issue. China dominates several inputs used in key parts of the semiconductor and advanced electronics supply chain.”

Europe nevertheless retains important advantages.

The region is home to ASML, the Dutch company that dominates the market for extreme ultraviolet lithography systems, and to Belgium’s Imec, one of the world’s leading semiconductor research centers. Europe also remains a key supplier of specialist materials and power electronics.

Those strengths, however, “do not translate into autonomy across the semiconductor value chain,” Roldán said.

Sovereignty means resilience, not self-sufficiency

Few experts believe complete semiconductor self-sufficiency is achievable.

Instead, the goal should be to reduce strategic vulnerabilities rather than eliminate international interdependence. “It is not conceivable that one country can rebuild the supply chain. Global collaboration is key,” SEMI Europe’s Altimime told Tech Policy Press. SEMI forecasts that by 2028 the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region will only manufacture about 68 percent by volume of the non-memory semiconductor chips it demands.

“The challenge is to reduce dependencies that could become geopolitical vulnerabilities,” argues Roldán. “The sensible approach is to strengthen critical parts of the value chain, diversify suppliers, protect sensitive data, and develop domestic capabilities in strategic sectors. That can coexist perfectly well with foreign suppliers: The objective is not to expel them, but to avoid excessive dependence on a single country, company, or technology.”

That distinction is especially relevant for Europe’s sovereignty ambitions. As Godfrey notes, “European firms are building around Nvidia hardware, CUDA, cloud infrastructure, and the software choices that come with them. That leaves Europe with two problems. It relies on Asian manufacturing and materials chokepoints. It is also at risk of trying to address that exposure by tying itself more closely to U.S.-controlled AI and cloud infrastructure. The Chips Act 2.0 needs to deal with both, or it will miss a large part of the problem.”

Roldán said Europe’s greatest vulnerability is dependence on partners willing to use global supply chains for geopolitical leverage. Whether Chips Act 2.0 reduces that risk, experts say, will depend on whether it diversifies suppliers rather than just shifting dependence from Asian manufacturers to U.S. technology companies.

The platforms have four months to comply with the rules or face penalties of up to 6pc of global revenue.

ChatGPT, Roblox and Reddit will be governed under the EU Digital Services Act’s (DSA) most stringent rules that aim to mitigate risks that large platforms might pose to the safety of the bloc’s users.

The EU brands online services with more than 45m EU-based users as very large online platforms (VLOPs) or very large online search engines (VLOSEs). Once labelled as such, these platforms are required to follow specific rules that mitigate harm to their EU users, including around illegal content, ad transparency, health and safety.

These rules include creating user-friendly terms and conditions, establishing a point of contact for authorities and users, and the reporting of criminal offences. VLOPs and VLOSEs are also required to identify and assess systemic risks that could be linked to their services.

Designated platforms that don’t comply with these rules can face penalties of up to 6pc of their global annual turnover.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Roblox – the popular video game for children – and the online forum Reddit now have four months to comply with their additional obligations in the bloc.

The three new additions take the total platforms designated as VLOPs or VLOSEs to 28, including offerings from X, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, LinkedIn and TikTok. The designations also give the EU additional investigative powers to assess how the platforms function in the bloc. Ireland’s Coimisiún na Meán will also hold special responsibility to oversee ChatGPT and Reddit.

Since the DSA’s enforcement in 2024, the European Commission has launched numerous probes, resulting in penalties to date on X, Temu, and AliExpress – collectively amounting to nearly €900m.

“These new designations mean that ChatGPT, Reddit and Roblox will now be held to a higher standard of scrutiny and accountability in the European Union, in line with their large impact on our citizens and society,” said EU executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy Henna Virkkunen.

“We continue to watch the digital landscape closely and will not hesitate to designate any platform that meets the threshold for enhanced supervision under the Digital Services Act.”

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OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads has reached $1B in annualised revenue run rate in under 200 days and has opened self-service buying across Europe, India, the Middle East and North Africa. On the same day the European Commission designated ChatGPT a Very Large Online Search Engine under the Digital Services Act, on 159.1 million declared monthly users in the EU.

ChatGPT’s advertising business has reached $1B in annualised revenue in under 200 days. Self-service buying opens across Europe, India, the Middle East and North Africa, OpenAI said.

The purpose it gives for this is a free tier. Advertising sits alongside subscriptions, enterprise deals and paid API access, funding a free ChatGPT for more than a billion weekly users.

The same day brought something OpenAI did not mention. The European Commission designated ChatGPT a Very Large Online Search Engine under the Digital Services Act, Euronews reported.

The number that triggered it is 159.1 million. That is ChatGPT’s declared average of monthly active users in the EU, against a designation threshold of 45 million.

Europe was already being sold to. TNW reported this month that ChatGPT ads were reaching 31 European countries through OpenAI’s own sales team and its partners.

What changed today is who can buy. Ads Manager lets any business purchase directly, which is how small and medium companies enter a market previously run through agencies.

One obligation lands squarely on that. Designated platforms and search engines must keep a public advertisement repository, the Commission’s guidance says.

It has to hold a year of history after an ad last runs. Content, who paid, the period it ran, the targeting parameters used and how many people it reached.

The buying is already specific enough to make that interesting. Cost per click and outcome-optimised bidding now account for most campaigns, after TNW covered the move to CPC.

The stricter advertising rule may not reach it. The ban on ads profiled using sensitive data is written for providers of online platforms, and ChatGPT has been designated a search engine.

Personalisation is where the announcement hedges. OpenAI says the system may draw on a user’s broader ChatGPT experience depending on the country and their settings, in a product it is building towards conversational ads.

Nobody has resolved the scope question publicly. Ireland’s digital services coordinator supervises ChatGPT, and OpenAI has four months to comply with what the designation does bring.

Which is what makes the timing worth noting. People tell a chatbot things they would never type into a search box, and the rule written for that data is pointed at a category ChatGPT was not put in.

The Love Island USA season 8 reunion premieres exclusively on Peacock on Monday, August 31 at 9pm ET and if it’s anything like the spicy trailer, reality TV fans are in for a treat. All eyes on Melanie… that’s all we’re saying.

You can watch the Love Island USA season 8 reunion online from anywhere with a VPN and potentially for free.

Every F-35 pilot in the US Air Force gets their own custom-fitted $400,000 helmet, which lets them peer through the cockpit mid-flight to see what’s going on in the surrounding airspace and the ground below.

This is possible through six infrared cameras embedded on to the flight’s exterior, broadcasting a 360-degree video stream straight into the pilot’s visor. Pilots say it’s like being able to see through the hull of the aircraft, as if it were made of glass.

No expense spared

The Cronos blockchain network has resumed trading activity after a price-manipulation attack on the Tectonic cryptocurrency lending platform allowed an attacker to borrow $74 million.

According to current information, the threat actor artificially inflated the price of Tectonic’s TONIC token by 100 times, then used it as collateral to borrow real assets. The price manipulation happened in 20 minutes.

Despite the massive amount the exploit generated, the attacker only managed to steal roughly $6 million worth of Ethereum, the rest of the funds being “stuck” on Cronos, says blockchain security and data analytics company PeckShield.

Cronos is an Ethereum-like blockchain network associated with Crypto.com, while Tectonic is a decentralized finance (DeFi) lending app running on Cronos.

Tectonic, which was Cronos’ largest lending protocol before the incident, holding $122 million, allows users to deposit cryptocurrency and borrow against assets they provide as collateral.

After the incident, the total value locked according to DeFiLlama is just under $3 million.

Yesterday, Tectonic announced that it was investigating an incident and advised users not to interact with the protocol until the platform publicly confirmed that it was safe to do so.

Cronos responded quickly to the detected exploit and halted the blockchain’s operation, freezing all transactions in progress at the time.

Earlier today, Cronos restarted the network again and notified users that it “is producing blocks again and is fully back online.”

“This was a validator-consensus emergency action to protect users from an exploit on the Tectonic protocol,” Cronos states.

“The chain state was restored to before the Tectonic exploit from this morning. Cronos is producing blocks again as of 2026-08-30 23:49:01 UTC, starting from block 90,896,189.”

The blockchain is currently being closely monitored for stability, protocol compatibility, and other issues.

The platform also said it would provide further details about the exploit in a post-mortem report to be published soon.

Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.

The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.

Get the report

The MSI PRO MP243 is a slim-bezel monitor that delivers nearly everything you would want from a low-cost display. At the same time, it’s exactly what you would expect when you hear the words “budget monitor.”

It’s not going to impress you with flashy features, and it’s not going to win any performance awards. It’s not the very best business monitor we’ve ever tested. But what it does offer, however, is a sleek design, an easy setup, and enough of what most people need to make it a practical choice for everyday work in the office or home.

Four days into a Kickstarter run that ends September 26, FarseerTech’s RocXZoom has already pulled in about $249,628 from 344 backers against a $9,999 goal. Company copy calls it the world’s first robotic extreme zoom camera, and the hardware matches the slogan more closely than most crowdfunding pitches do.

FarseerTech’s senior team formerly worked on the R&D and mass production of DJI products such as the Inspire, Osmo Pocket, and the high-end Ronin 4D. As you’d expect, this experience is reflected in the camera’s design: a beautifully machined aluminum body, a motorized pan-and-tilt head, a built-in vision chip, and a long zoom, all packed into a 400-gram handheld unit rated for IP54 dust and splash resistance, which means it can withstand being dropped in the mud. A 5 inch OLED screen on the back provides a clear view of what you’re capturing. The battery life is advertized as up to four hours.

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On paper, the camera has some impressive specs, including a 20x optical zoom and 50x hybrid zoom, which is equivalent to a 40mm to 2,000mm full frame lens range, albeit the latter is a bit misleading; more on that below. The aperture increases from f1.8 to f3.9 as the lens extends. Video resolution is up to 4K at 30fps, with 1080p accessible at both 30 and 60fps. Photos can be in either 4K or 1080p resolution. Stabilization is achieved by a mixture of electrical image stabilization within the camera and, on higher-end kits, a gimbal. The 2,000mm figure attracts a lot of attention, but it’s worth taking a closer look: the camera has a far more realistic reach of roughly 40mm to 1kmm, with the rest being digital zoom and processing. The software they’ve developed will determine how well that works in the long run.

Then there’s subject tracking, which employs a computer vision system to detect subjects and automatically pan and zoom the camera to keep them in view. It is based on a model that has been trained on a large number of bird photos, with additional assistance from a Siamese network to identify individuals. FarseerTech claims it can identify over 300 distinct animal species, track people or custom targets, react in 0.01 seconds, and keep up with subjects moving at up to 45 mph. So far, we’ve seen some demo film featuring a fake bird on a remote control car, which is a good real-world test but far from the subjects they claim it can handle.

The camera has a small but powerful 1/2.5 inch sensor hidden behind that impressive-sounding lens. That allows them to pack a lot of zoom into a small body, but it also means sacrificing some image quality, especially in low light, dynamic range, and fine texture. Anyone who has used a competent compact or mirrorless camera with a good telephoto lens understands what I’m talking about.

FarseerTech is marketing this camera based on ease and automation rather than pure image quality. That’s supported by the pricing: their Kickstarter campaign is substantially more competitive than the retail price, with the Super Early Bird for the standalone camera costing only $449, followed by $499 and $549 on later tiers, for an MSRP of $799. The Pro Kit costs somewhat more: Super Early Bird is $849, followed by $949 and $1,049, with a retail price of $2,099. They hope to begin shipping this device by November 2026, but they showed out the hardware during CES 2026, so we at least have an idea of how it functions.
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