EU cannot become as dependent on Chinese rare earth elements as on Russian energy: EU’s von der Leyen

BRUSSELS

The European Union cannot become as dependent on Chinese rare earth metals as it has been on the Russian fossil energy, the president of the European Commission said on Monday.

Speaking at the Tallinn Digital Summit, Ursula von der Leyen said the EU must “avoid falling into the same dependency on China” with scarce raw materials it was “with oil and gas from Russia.”

This is why the EU executive body works on the so-called European Critical Raw Materials Act to diversify the bloc’s supply chains of lithium and other rare earth elements towards “trusted partners” and to make strategic reserves, she explained.

For the same reasons, the EU aims to increase its global market share of semiconductors to 20% by 2030 through the European Chips Act.

The strategy, announced in February, is expected to mobilize as much as €43 billion ($41.7 billion) of public and private investment for the development and mass production of next-generation chips.

“Chips are in every digital device, from cars to phones to medical equipment. Without chips, there is no modern economy,” she stressed, citing as an example the impact of EU sanctions banning the export of semiconductors to Russia.

“The Russian military cannibalizes washing machines and refrigerators trying to get semiconductors for their military hardware,” she noted.

As another contrast with China, von der Leyen underlined that the EU chose to take a “human-centric approach” to the games of the high-tech industry.

As a result, the EU’s data privacy rules have impacted the data protection standards in the US tech hub Silicon Valley, she claimed.