Europe dreams of sovereignty, but its circuit board industry is quietly vanishing

When the EU presented the Chips Act, the message was familiar: technological sovereignty. More fabs, more capacity, more control over the strategic products and semiconductors meant to shape Europe's future. Yet sovereignty isn't a single building block; it's a stack. Europe's political narrative assumes more wafer production automatically leads to strategic autonomy. But chips don't float in space. They need packaging, substrates—and above all, printed circuit boards (PCBs). Without a domestic PCB production base, "autonomy" becomes a slogan, not a strategy