Taipei: Europe spent years treating Taiwan as a delicate diplomatic problem to be managed quietly, a place referenced in carefully hedged statements and rarely at the centre of policy. That posture is becoming untenable. The reason is not a sudden burst of solidarity but a hard industrial fact: the island now fabricates close to nine-tenths of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, the sub-seven-nanometre chips that power everything from artillery guidance systems to the data centres training Europe’s nascent artificial-intelligence ambitions. Strategic affection rarely drives foreign policy. Dependence does.
The numbers explain the shift. Semiconductors accounted for roughly a quarter of Taiwanese exports to the European Union in recent years, while Europe supplies the high-end lithography machines and specialist materials without which no advanced fab can run. It is a relationship of mutual hostage-taking dressed up as commerce, and both sides increasingly understand it that way. What has changed is the geopolitical temperature around the Taiwan Strait, which has converted an ordinary supply chain into a single point of failure for the continent’s digital future.
Brussels has responded with characteristic ambivalence. On one hand, Taiwanese investment is flowing into European soil: a major fabrication plant rising in Dresden, wafer producers and component firms expanding their footprint, all evidence that the partnership is deepening in concrete rather than rhetorical terms. On the other, the Union has not enjoyed the AI-driven demand surge that has reshaped American chip politics, leaving its trade balance with Taipei stable but structurally lopsided. Europe needs Taiwan more than its order books suggest, and that asymmetry breeds hesitation about how far to commit politically.
The more striking development is that the conversation has crept beyond economics. The European Parliament has called openly for deeper security and defence cooperation with Indo-Pacific partners including Taiwan, singling out drone technology and related industries. A decade ago such language would have been unthinkable in a chamber wary of provoking Beijing. That it now appears in adopted resolutions signals an erosion of old taboos, even as the Commission and member states remain studiously cautious about anything resembling a security guarantee.
This is the contradiction at the heart of Europe’s Taiwan policy. The continent wants the chips, the investment and the technological insurance that a closer relationship provides, but it remains unwilling to spell out what it would do should the supply be threatened. Diversification offers no quick escape. Building leading-edge capacity in Europe will take a decade and tens of billions, and even then the island’s ecosystem of engineers, suppliers and tacit knowledge cannot be cloned by subsidy alone.
What Europe is discovering, belatedly, is that there is no version of technological autonomy that routes around Taipei. The honest course is to acknowledge the dependence, manage it with clear-eyed pragmatism, and stop pretending that a relationship this consequential can be conducted in the margins. Taiwan has become indispensable to Europe’s industrial sovereignty. The only open question is whether Brussels will admit it before a crisis forces the issue.
