Position paper – Chips Act 2.0 - ACEA - European Automobile Manufacturers' Association

ACEA's position paper is not a plea—it is Europe's automotive sector issuing an ultimatum on chip sovereignty. The real teeth of Chips Act 2.0 lie not in fab subsidies but in the fight over architecture definition rights. As ADAS shifts from L2 to L3/L4, per-vehicle compute demand surges from 50 to 2,000+ TOPS, and SoC design authority is migrating from legacy suppliers like NXP and Infineon toward OEMs and AI-chip disruptors. ACEA's subtext: Europe cannot remain a perpetual chip buyer. On compliance, the existential risk is not cost—it is regulatory fragmentation. If Brussels mandates geographic distribution ratios across design, fabrication, and packaging, OEM BOM costs will inflate 15-25% with 6-9 month delivery slippage. More insidious than the 2021 shortage, far more lethal. Strategically, Washington's CHIPS Act technology-boundary clauses and Brussels' digital-sovereignty narrative are converging into a pincer. TSMC in Taiwan, China and mature-node capacity on the Chinese mainland are simultaneously flagged under both jurisdictions' de-risking frameworks. Infineon and ST's domestic expansion is, in essence, policy arbitrage against geopolitical discount. 12-24 month outlook: SDV will force a shift from fixed silicon to reconfigurable architectures; RISC-V penetration in automotive MCUs could exceed 30%. This paper is the overture. The real confrontation arrives with the 2026 EU minimum-localization mandate for automotive semiconductors.