This commentary examines the gap between the political promises attached to the European Chips Act and what the resulting investments can realistically deliver. Since 2022, the Act has subsidized 18 semiconductor investments worth €36 billion, justified repeatedly in terms of supply security, resilience, technological sovereignty, and autonomy. Yet most support has gone to front-end manufacturing, while Europe remains highly dependent on non-European capabilities in back-end production, equipment, materials, and design. Drawing on the structure of semiconductor global production networks, the article argues that additional production capacity in Europe can strengthen industrial capabilities and Europe’s position in the global industry but cannot by itself create secure or autonomous European semiconductor supply chains. This does not imply that semiconductor subsidies are necessarily misguided; rather, they should be assessed against more realistic objectives. Recent policy debate has begun to place greater emphasis on “strategic indispensability,” but the Chips Act 2.0 proposal largely adds this concept to the existing vocabulary of sovereignty, resilience, dependency reduction, and security of supply instead of replacing it.