ASML the holding company is European, but a large portion of their IP is firewalled within the US or Taiwan, though plenty of IP is generated within Netherlands.
Much of Asia (eg. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Philippines, and now Vietnam+India) as well as the US has spent decades working and financing both backend and frontend semiconductor processes, but European states fell behind in the 2000s and 2010s.
FYI Infineon primarily develops power electronics, compound semiconductors, and legacy nodes. This is critical but a distinct usecase from fabricating wafers for GPUs and bleeding edge SoCs.
This helps Europe's automotive and industrial sectors from being overly dependent on Asian intermediate parts in this space, which is a much more critical dependency from a NatSec perspective compared to bleeding edge compute.
The title is a bit sensationalist and - unfortunately - misleading. This project was greenlit in February 2023 and is not connected to the recent EU Chips / Data Center / Sovereignty Package that came out in June this year. What is notable is that the EU funding grant of 1bn was officially approved in February 2025.
Technically this is a 300mm power + analog/mixed-signal fab. This means MOSFETs, IGBTs, plus wide-bandgap SiC and GaN devices. No FinFET/GAAFET, nothing in the 5/3/2nm class.
The framing of the article that this is AI-related is questionable. Infineon can market these chips to the AI market or the Automotive or renewable Energy market.
4 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 14.5 ms ] threadMuch of Asia (eg. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Philippines, and now Vietnam+India) as well as the US has spent decades working and financing both backend and frontend semiconductor processes, but European states fell behind in the 2000s and 2010s.
This helps Europe's automotive and industrial sectors from being overly dependent on Asian intermediate parts in this space, which is a much more critical dependency from a NatSec perspective compared to bleeding edge compute.
The title is a bit sensationalist and - unfortunately - misleading. This project was greenlit in February 2023 and is not connected to the recent EU Chips / Data Center / Sovereignty Package that came out in June this year. What is notable is that the EU funding grant of 1bn was officially approved in February 2025.
Technically this is a 300mm power + analog/mixed-signal fab. This means MOSFETs, IGBTs, plus wide-bandgap SiC and GaN devices. No FinFET/GAAFET, nothing in the 5/3/2nm class.
The framing of the article that this is AI-related is questionable. Infineon can market these chips to the AI market or the Automotive or renewable Energy market.