EU, US to share data on semiconductor market distortion

The EU and US will share results from respective market surveys on possible market distortions in the semiconductor industry, officials from the two allies said in a press conference at the sixth meeting of the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) on Friday (April 5).

The two jurisdictions are conducting their own surveys to identify “market distortions” and will be sharing their data, said US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo at the press conference.

Margrethe Vestager, EU Commission executive vice president for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age, said the US survey is mandatory, while the EU’s is voluntary.

The surveys are expected to conclude in early summer, said Vestager on the sidelines of the press conference.

The TTC meeting, which took place in Leuven, Belgium, on Thursday and Friday, is set to be the last before EU Parliament and US presidential elections. EU Commissioners and US State Department representatives have been intensely questioned by reporters about deliverables from TTC over the last week.

The future of the TTC, launched in 2021, hangs in the balance. Already, observers and industry have queried the forum’s usefulness, arguing that it has produced little tangible progress.

The likelihood of a Trump presidency in the US starting in autumn looms large over the forum as during his last presidency, Trump drastically reduced international cooperation with allies.

Euractiv previously reported that the allied countries are opening up to stakeholder feedback on the TTC to iterate upon the forum based on a draft joint statement.

Against this backdrop, the US and EU announced a series of coordination efforts on Friday, such as a dialogue between the EU AI Office and the US AI Safety Institute and a three-year extension to “administrative arrangements, under which they have been cooperating fruitfully to identify early-on supply chain disruptions and ensure subsidies transparency,” according to an EU Commission press release.

AI collaboration

The collaboration between the two AI institutions is “somewhat broader in scope [compared to the US-UK AI collaboration,” said Verstager, “because it is it is not just testing, it’s also everything that comes with it; benchmarks, methodologies, how to understand interpret regulatory approaches in both jurisdictions.”

She brought up red-teaming as an example of the two institutes’ broad collaboration. Red-teaming is traditionally a cybersecurity procedure that identifies security weaknesses in a system. In an AI context, it refers to a process by which developers try to elicit undesirable responses from an algorithm.

When asked about the longevity of the “administrative arrangements” on chips in light of a Trump presidency, a Commission official told Euractiv on Thursday that it would be up to the next US administration.

[Edited by Alice Taylor]

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