This is an opinion piece. I’m not telling you what to think. I’m asking you to think.
This is the shorter version of this article (B1-B2 readers). It has shorter sentences and simpler vocabulary. If you prefer more research, more data and more voices from the classroom, there is a C1 for B2 version of this article here with the same argument, the same classroom quotes and the same question at the end.
I taught the same lesson all week, while the country cooked.
It was a real heatwave. The kind that becomes a news story. Trains slowed down so the rails would not bend in the heat. Half the news blamed emissions. And I sat in air-conditioned rooms across the south of Germany, teaching a lesson about a man in a leather jacket who makes computer chips.
His name is Jensen Huang. His company is Nvidia. Here is the one line that matters: almost every serious AI system in the world runs on chips his company designs. And there is no real second supplier.
So every group asked me the same question. Is it a strength or a danger that the whole AI boom depends on one company? These chips are designed in America and built in Taiwan. All week, the heatwave and the chip question sat side by side in my head.
They came together on Friday. I had a one-to-one lesson with a client who works in the chip trade. He buys and sells chips for a living. So what he knows is simply his daily job — first-hand, and usually right.
Here is where I landed. I will show you the facts first. Then the classroom. Then what I really think. You do not have to agree with the last part. In fact, I would rather you argued with me.
Key Vocabulary — One Company, One Machine
fabless | designing chips but owning no factory to make them | fabless, ohne eigene Fertigung
a foundry | a factory that makes chips for other companies | Chipfabrik, Auftragsfertiger
to depend on | to need something and not be able to manage without it | abhängig sein von
a chokepoint | a narrow point where everything must pass through one place | Engpass, Nadelöhr
a single point of failure | one part whose collapse brings down the whole system | einzelne Schwachstelle, kritischer Ausfallpunkt
One Company, One Machine
Here is the first surprise. Nvidia does not make Nvidia’s chips.
The company is fabless. It has brilliant designers, but no factory. The building of the chips happens far away, in Taiwan, at a company called TSMC. TSMC is the most important foundry in the world. Around 80 to 90 per cent of the world’s AI chips come from Nvidia’s designs. Call it what it is: almost a monopoly.
Now go one step deeper. TSMC can only make the best chips because of a machine from a Dutch company called ASML. This machine prints circuits smaller than you can imagine. And ASML has a 100 per cent share of that technology. There is no rival. There is no plan B.
So the chain is simple. The world’s AI depends on Nvidia. Nvidia depends on TSMC. And TSMC depends on ASML. Each link is a chokepoint. That Dutch machine is the real single point of failure — the one part almost nobody talks about, and the one that would take years to replace.
It is a very tall tower on a very thin base. And the real question is hiding underneath it: why did one part of the world decide to stand at the bottom and watch everyone else build?
Key Vocabulary — The Thing We Won’t Build
capacity | how much a factory or region can produce | Kapazität, Produktionsvermögen
a subsidy | government money given to support an industry | Subvention, Fördergeld
rare earths | scarce metals needed for magnets, motors and electronics | Seltene Erden
to hollow out | to remove the strength from inside something while it still looks whole | aushöhlen, entkernen
a brain drain | the loss of skilled people to another country | Abwanderung von Fachkräften
The Thing We Won’t Build
Europe talks about being independent the way some people talk about going to the gym. Often, sincerely, and mostly next week.
The numbers are hard to read. In 2000, Europe held about a quarter of the world’s chip-making capacity. Today it is around 8 to 10 per cent. And most of what Europe makes is the older, simpler kind of chip — the sort that goes into cars and washing machines, not into AI.
The European Chips Act tried to fix this. The plan: reach 20 per cent of world production by 2030, with about 43 billion euros in subsidies and private money. Then reality arrived. Europe’s own auditors said the target was “very unlikely.” Their real guess is closer to 12 per cent. And in July 2025, Intel stopped its huge new factory in Magdeburg. The centre of Europe’s plan was cancelled by the company that was supposed to build it.
It goes deeper than chips, into the ground itself. AI hardware needs rare earths — special metals for magnets and motors. Here is the part that stings: Europe has them. Sweden sits on some of the largest deposits in Europe. But getting permission to mine takes six to eight years. So the metals stay in the ground, while China processes most of the world’s supply and sells them back to us.
My Friday client said it in one flat sentence. “We have the materials here, but we don’t have the process to get them out.” The materials exist. The skill and the will have quietly left.
He told me one small story I cannot forget. A little engineering firm near Freiburg was bought by a big American company about a year ago. “On paper the company still exists,” he said. “But the people don’t work there.” The engineers took the better money and moved west. A whole European skill, hollowed out through the back door. A quiet brain drain, while the sign stayed up over the front.
That was the moment my week stopped being about chips.
Key Vocabulary — What the Room Said
the boiling frog | the idea that slow danger goes unnoticed until it is too late | der Frosch im Topf, schleichende Gefahr
hindsight | understanding an event only after it has happened | Rückblick, im Nachhinein
day one | the very first day of a crisis, before anyone can react | Tag eins, der erste Krisentag
to push back | to challenge or resist an idea politely | Widerspruch einlegen, kontern
to hedge | to protect yourself by not depending on one option | sich absichern, streuen
What the Room Said
I start these lessons with a warm-up. Everyone researches one small part of the story and brings it back. So the best facts of the week rarely come from me. They come from a sales lead, an engineer, a lawyer.
The managers went to Jensen Huang’s famous line: his company is always “thirty days from failure.” Hartmut, in my most advanced group, liked it. He used the image of the boiling frog: the water gets warmer so slowly that comfort itself becomes the danger. “For me,” he said, “there’s no alternative to this kind of mindset.” Gudrun disagreed. Tell her every month that the company might die in thirty days, and after the third time she would stop listening. Fair. Fear has a shelf life.
Then Tobias said something I have quoted three times since. We only ask if Huang had vision because he won. “If you fail, it’s a negative connotation. If you win, you get a positive one.” That is hindsight doing its quiet work. The same risk, taken by a founder who failed, would be a warning in a business book.
The technical people went to the supply chain. Anton, in a Cologne group, gave the sharpest picture of the week. If China moves on Taiwan, he said, you will not be buying a new laptop for a long time. The chips stop. New machines take almost a year each to build. So, on day one, whatever you already own might be what you use for the next ten years. There is no real way to hedge against a shock like that. You cannot store ten years of laptops in a cupboard.
And in a small, quiet lesson, Carina and a colleague took the whole thing one step further, into software. Their own company’s product had just switched its AI engine to Claude, an American model. “I like control, not change,” Carina said — which is, honestly, the quiet motto of a whole continent. Nobody in the room pushed back. We just nodded.
Key Vocabulary — We Export Our Emissions
to offshore | to move work or production to another country | ins Ausland verlagern
carbon leakage | when climate rules in one country push emissions into another | Carbon Leakage, Verlagerung von Emissionen
to relocate | to move something from one place to another | verlagern, verlegen
performative | done for show, not for real effect | zur Schau gestellt, symbolisch
self-inflicted | a problem you cause to yourself | selbst verschuldet
self-sabotage | harming your own interests, often without meaning to | Selbstsabotage
We Export Our Emissions
Here is what I really think, and you can take it or leave it.
Everyone worries about the dependence. I worry about the thing underneath it. Europe has quietly made itself unable to build the alternative. And then it learned to call that a virtue.
Part of that story is about the environment. We do not want the mine, because mining is dirty. We do not want the factory, because factories are loud and thirsty. So we pay someone far away to do it, and we call that being green.
I want to be careful here. This is exactly where a reader who suffered through that heatwave starts to hear an enemy. So let me be clear. If the heat worried you, you should be even angrier than I am about how we handle emissions. Because we don’t cut them. We relocate them. We offshore the dirty work to a country with a dirtier power grid and weaker rules. And then we give ourselves a medal for the clean air we now import.
This has a name: carbon leakage. When rules make production expensive at home, some of it moves abroad, and the emissions move too. In 2023, the emissions from everything the EU consumes were about 21 per cent higher than the emissions made inside our own borders. The pollution is still ours. It just has a foreign address now.
Now the honest part, because I will not sell you a cleaner story than the facts allow. Studies of French and Danish firms show that companies rarely move abroad in order to pollute more cheaply. They move for wages and for customers. And the total effect on world emissions is often roughly neutral. So I am not saying that everything made abroad is automatically dirtier. That would be lazy and wrong.
But I am saying something narrower. Moving production away is not the clean win we pretend it is. The air does not care whose books the carbon sits on. Move the smokestack out of your view and your conscience feels better. The planet stays exactly as warm as before.
That is the performative kind of care about the environment. It counts only the emissions on your own list, and quietly ignores the ones you have sent overseas. Real care counts the carbon wherever it happens.
And here is the part that makes it worse. When you offshore the mine and the factory, you do not only export the emissions. You export the jobs, the engineers, the skill. That firm near Freiburg is the whole story in miniature. We told ourselves we were being clean and sensible. And we woke up unable to build the thing everyone now agrees is essential. A self-inflicted wound that we were trained to read as good manners.
Then the same thing happened one floor up, in software. In June 2026, the American company Anthropic released two very powerful AI models. Days later, the US government decided they were too dangerous in the wrong hands, and cut access for everyone outside the US. Anthropic had no simple way to block only foreigners, so it switched both models off for the whole world. Carina’s company, and thousands like it in Europe, had built on an engine that a foreign government could turn off with one letter. And briefly, it did.
So where does that leave the big question? I have told you where I stand. Europe’s caution looks less like wisdom and more like a trap we walked into with our eyes open. But I promised you a real argument, not a lecture. So here is the other side, fairly. Maybe this caution is wise. Maybe a continent that chooses cleaner air and stronger rules, and accepts dependence as the price, is making a mature choice.
I don’t think so. I think we have dressed self-sabotage up as virtue, and the bill is already arriving — in chips today, and in AI models tomorrow. But that is the argument, and it has real weight on both sides.
So I will leave it where I left the room. Is European caution wise self-protection, or self-sabotage dressed up as virtue? I have shown you my hand. Now show me yours.
Your Move
Forget the vocabulary drill this week. The task is a conversation.
Find someone whose opinion you trust, and argue the side you do not believe — in English. If you think the dependence is madness, defend the caution. If you think the caution is wise, defend the risk-takers. The point is to hold a hard position steadily in your second language, with the evidence on both sides. That is where real fluency lives.
You will get a few sentences wrong. Good. That is acquisition doing its job.
I will go first with the honesty, as always. I can talk for an hour about chips and three countries, and I still cannot reliably tell a German colleague whether I mean mir ist heiß or the more embarrassing ich bin heiß, after nearly twenty years here. We are all working with machinery we do not fully control. Mine is just German grammar. Same struggle, different dictionary.
This article grew out of a full week of teaching the same question across several groups. The companion three-level lesson (B1, B2 and C1, with the reading, the vocabulary and the full discussion task) is published next to it. If you want to run this argument with your own team, that is where to start.