Novara: The wafer plant GlobalWafers put up in this corner of Piedmont carried a price tag of roughly 450 million euros, and it arrived without a trade agreement, an investment treaty or formal diplomatic recognition behind it. Taiwanese firms keep rewriting Europe’s chip geography while European officials argue about what to call the relationship.
The numbers settle the argument for them. Taiwanese investment into the European Union nearly tripled between 2020 and 2024 and stood near 14 billion euros by the middle of 2025. Bilateral goods trade runs at about 72 billion euros a year, which puts Taiwan around thirteenth among the bloc’s partners. Semiconductors made up close to a quarter of what Taiwan sold into Europe in 2024, and Taiwanese foundries produce the overwhelming share of the world’s most advanced logic chips.
Europe buys that output and sells back much of the lithography equipment, chemicals and specialty materials that make it possible. Mutual dependence of that kind normally simplifies policy. Here it has not.
The two sides last met in December for the fourth round of their Trade and Investment Dialogue. They compared notes on semiconductor supply chains, promised to implement the 2024 understanding on offshore wind investment, traded complaints about global steel overcapacity, and repeated long-standing European grievances over agri-food market access. Officials also raised the seniority of the meeting. They did not produce anything resembling a negotiating mandate.
That gap defines the relationship. The European Parliament has asked repeatedly for an impact assessment and scoping exercise on a bilateral investment agreement with Taipei. Successive Commissions have declined to start one. Brussels prefers a format it can describe as technical, because a treaty would force twenty-seven capitals to say out loud what they think about Beijing’s reaction.
Taiwanese companies have stopped waiting for the answer. Foxconn is committing more than 250 million euros alongside Thales and Radiall to a chip assembly and test site near Bordeaux. The Novara fab supplies wafers into European fabs that the bloc subsidised under its own chips legislation. Each of these decisions imports a piece of Taiwan’s industrial base into the single market, and each one does so under ordinary commercial law rather than any negotiated protection.
Europe should notice the asymmetry it has created. It receives capital, capacity and technical skill from a partner it will not sign anything with, which means it also holds none of the instruments a treaty would provide. There is no investor-state mechanism, no committee that can arbitrate a licensing dispute, no ratchet that locks in market access if political weather changes in Taipei. When European farmers hit Taiwanese sanitary barriers, officials can only raise the matter and wait.
The economic security argument cuts the other way too. Concentration risk in advanced logic is the single largest exposure in Europe’s industrial base, and the practical hedge is not domestic capacity alone, which will take a decade, but deeper contractual ties with the supplier. Dialogue without instruments delivers neither.
Critics of a bolder line make a serious point. A formal negotiation with Taipei would invite retaliation from Beijing at a moment when the Commission is still trying to hold a separate track of trade talks with China open, and the costs would land on European exporters who have nothing to do with chips. Some member states would refuse to sign in any case, leaving the bloc looking weaker than before.
The honest position acknowledges that trade-off rather than hiding behind procedural language. Europe has decided the political price of a Taiwan agreement exceeds the commercial benefit, and it should say so. What it should stop doing is treating an upgraded dialogue as though it were a substitute. The wafers leaving Novara do not care what the format is called.
