“Europe's chip de-risking has no energy chapter” — CEIAS
I have an analysis in CEIAS Insights — the journal of the Central European Institute of Asian Studies — titled “Europe’s chip de-risking has no energy chapter.”
The argument
Europe has documented its dependency on Taiwanese semiconductors better than almost any other: more than 90% of the world’s most advanced chips (below 10 nanometres) are made on the island, and TSMC’s 3- and 2-nanometre lines are replicated nowhere else. The 2023 Chips Act mobilized €43 billion to lift the EU’s share of global production to 20% by 2030 — a target the European Court of Auditors has judged “essentially aspirational.” The Chips Act 2.0 proposal of June 2026 sharpens the diagnosis without changing the frame: it strengthens supply-chain monitoring, materials tracking and equipment chokepoint analysis.
What that architecture does not see is that these fabs are physically enormous electricity loads. A single advanced fab draws roughly 200 megawatts, comparable to a medium-sized European city. TSMC already accounts for close to 10% of Taiwan’s electricity consumption, and could approach 24% by 2030 as EUV lithography scales. European chip security therefore depends, in part, on the future output of a single island utility.
Taiwan’s power equation is tightening on both sides
On the supply side, Taiwan relied on imports for about 95% of its energy in 2025, including more than 99% of its oil and gas. The last operating reactor was shut down in May 2025; the reversal under way since (the amended reactor-lifetime law, the Maanshan restart plan filed in March 2026) requires 18 to 24 months of inspections, meaning no nuclear power returns to the grid before about 2028. The ten-year plan presented in June 2026 does not yet include it in the projections: it bets on some 26 gigawatts of new gas-fired capacity by 2035.
On the demand side, the same revision doubled the growth outlook — 2.5% per year on average through 2035, twice the pace of the past decade, driven largely by chipmaking and AI. Taipower expects the semiconductor sector alone to add more than 5 gigawatts of demand by 2030.
Between the two, LNG is the swing fuel: 47.8% of electricity generation in 2025, against reserves covering roughly eleven days of consumption, compared with forty for coal and a hundred and forty for crude.
The risk is not the one that dominates commentary
The scenario that deserves more attention is not the blockade but structural scarcity: connection moratoria — Taipower has approved no large new data-centre connection north of Taoyuan since 2023 — curtailed expansion plans, rising industrial tariffs, investment decisions quietly shifting elsewhere. In that world, the constraint never shows up as an outage. It shows up as slower growth in the advanced-node capacity Europe depends on, and a higher marginal cost for every chip it imports.
Four recommendations
- Add an energy layer to existing monitoring — reserve margin, LNG stock-days, connection moratoria, industrial tariff decisions, curtailment events. The Chips Act 2.0 negotiation, which creates a formal early-warning indicator list, is the obvious vehicle.
- Treat energy cooperation with Taiwan as chip-supply insurance. European firms are already there: under a 2020 corporate power purchase agreement, TSMC takes the entire 920-megawatt output of Ørsted’s Greater Changhua 2b and 4 offshore wind farms.
- Stress-test European industrial planning against a power-constrained Taiwan, not only a blockaded one.
- Name energy explicitly in EU–Taiwan economic dialogues. The cooperation is commercial and technical, it already happens between firms, and it crosses no political red lines.
My conclusion: Europe cannot rebuild the leading edge at home this decade — its own auditors have said as much. What it can do is help keep the lights on where the leading edge lives and, at minimum, start watching the meter. A de-risking strategy that counts fabs but not megawatts is not security policy. It is bookkeeping.