Industry, investment and R&D

What this area covers

Where public money goes and what it buys: state aid decisions, research and innovation programmes, plant and capacity announcements, and the ownership of the firms receiving all of it. Private capital enters here only where it changes who controls a European capability.

What it does not cover

One editorial line, stated so that it is not mistaken for an omission. This publication covers instruments, programmes and market structure. It does not report private financings in motion, including ones already named in the press.

A round the company raising it has not announced is not yet a fact about European industry, however widely it is repeated.

The instruments

The binding ones are the oldest ones.

State aid control

This is where chip strategy stops being a document and becomes a factory. The €659m German package cleared on 14 July 2026 funded four first-of-a-kind plants, and notably none of them is another headline mega-fab.

They are silicon carbide epi-wafers, power transistors, metrology and detectors, which is to say the niche links rather than the marquee one.

Chips Act 2.0

It would add a status test rather than a content one. Firms from countries party to the WTO Government Procurement Agreement are deemed domestic undertakings, so membership of a trade agreement confers European status for the purposes of the instrument, and the accompanying procurement preference is optional and self-declared.

The ownership tests are weaker than they read

The Foreign Subsidies Regulation, (EU) 2022/2560, does not define control at Article 2, where the Merger Regulation defines it through decisive influence.

The establishment-and-management test used in EDIP and SAFE is satisfied by an EU-incorporated subsidiary, and says nothing about who ultimately owns the parent.

The recurring shape

European firms are winning real revenue from the AI buildout at both ends of it, and no European firm is winning the middle.

Both ends

ASML posted €9.3bn of quarterly sales in July 2026 and is adding 30% to its low NA EUV capacity for 2027, with a further 30% under investigation for 2028. It is Europe's one genuine chokepoint in the semiconductor chain, and every system it adds runs more of the world's chipmaking through European hands.

Worth holding alongside it: almost none of the chips produced on ASML machines are consumed by European compute vendors.

Infineon posted record revenue in August 2026 on power silicon for AI datacentres, manufactured on European fabs, with a fourth Dresden module inside €2.7bn of capex. Power delivery sits alongside the accelerator rather than against it, so it grows with Nvidia's shipments instead of displacing them.

The middle is the cap table

In the issue.zero window Helsing raised $1.8bn at an $18bn valuation and Quantum Systems $1.2bn at roughly $8bn, both leaning on non-European institutional money: CPP Investments in one, Blackstone, Advent, Fidelity and Wellington in the other, alongside European names including Airbus, Balderton and HV Capital.

Helsing's own statement that it remains predominantly European-owned is a claim about voting control, not about where the capital came from.

Airbus Defence and Space anchoring the €500m E2D fund attacks precisely that gap, with roughly twenty companies at about €25m each. It is smaller than a single Helsing round.