The European Chips Act has set ambitious goals and its implementation is a significant pan-european effort. From an academic perspective, last year we published an open letter emphasizing the critical importance of open-source EDA for academia in Europe. We were excited and grateful to see that this initiative triggered the definition of a European roadmap in this area, and a matching Chips JU call for project funding. We believe that the projects funded by this call will have a significant impact. Moreover, we already see rising interest from many EU stakeholders, with increasing investments into open-source chip design, especially in open source IP development (e.g. RISC-V cores), and open source EDA tools.