Manufacturing represents ~15% of the EU GDP, vs. ~11% in the US. Both because lower wages make manufacturing in the EU more competitive and because financialization has not gone as far as in the US.
Manufacturing what though? Certainly not technology. We know they're not trying to build their own compute clouds to compete with AWS or Microsoft. Or OpenAI. They're not even trying to compete with Nvidia.
The EU's entire productive economy is stuff like cheese, VW cars, and perfumes.
The EU is a greater share of global manufacturing than the US [1]. Are you comparing real manufacturing to cloud/search providers, GPUs, and generative AI that has shown questionable value? Airbus has an order book ~11 years long and Boeing is hanging on by a thread. Rheinmetall, Germany's largest defense company, is worth more than VW (as mentioned in this piece). The giga press hardware manufactured for Tesla was built by Idra Group in Italy.
I somewhat chuckle at the idea that they should be spitting out GPUs instead of electric vehicles, defense hardware, and aircraft (both civilian and military).
Not sure if you're trolling or seriously underinformed. Firstly, since when is building compute clouds manufacturing?
More to the point though, a large portion of manufacturing machinery is in fact build in Germany and the Netherlands (ASML is probably the most famous example, but others include Festo, Bosch ...), you'll find hardly an advanced production line which doesn't run on machines build in Europe. Interestingly most of the companies behind this are smaller size businesses, it seems like the European business sphere does not tend so much toward large corporates (although I could be wrong here, I have not seen any statistics).
This is like someone saying the US economy consists of junk food and t-shirts. Why post such ignorant comments, when you could take a few minutes to inform yourself instead of looking foolish.
