Iirc up till recently EU environmental laws practically outlawed any kind of silicon fabs on the continent. It's only now that Intel has decided to move a plant here, so something must've changed.
Have a look at this Wikipedia article – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... – and see that it lists semiconductor fabs in multiple EU countries – Germany, Italy, the UK (was in EU at the time), Ireland, France – opening in every decade from the 1950s through to the 2010s. The accuracy of your recollection seems open to question.
There used to a lot more fabs in the US and Europe back in the 90s. I used to work at a company that supplied fab equipment to many of them. My guess is there was a lot of consolidation over the years due to lax environmental laws and labor costs in Asian countries.
European environmental laws can be complied with and the technology to do so is commercially available. There are tens of larger process fabs in Europe. AMD Dresden was only behind Intel when it was new.
