Not directly. This fab is meant to primarily fabricate compound semiconductors which is Infineon's niche and is a major bottleneck for European industry today.
> Does everything need to have the word AI these days
Because Infineon's PR release for their compound semiconductor fab called out "AI".
Additonally, the "semiconductor" and "hardware" segment has now been rebranded has "AI" in a number of funds. By calling out something that's even tenuously tied to "AI", it allows funds that are contractually tied to investing in "AI" to purchase Infineon stock.
Infineon is betting big on the 800V dc power distribution that seems to become the new standard for AI data centers which is directly relevant for the chips that are made in this fab.
I think (but I have no actual insides), they picked 800V dc for datacenter also because that is commonly used for the DC bus in EVs. So, one can share a lot of components across industries. Also, 800V just kind of works well for power transistors like SiC Fets.
"Process node," in the sense of logic, RAM or Flash density, isn't relevant here. These are power devices. Silicon Carbide FETS and whatnot; bulk current switching and related devices. Not frontier process node logic devices.
That reality is carefully not made clear in all this "silicon sovereignty" narrative. It's a nice plant with new tooling making modern 300mm wafers. But this is not the equivalent of a TSMC or Intel fab making cutting edge, high margin silicon. And there are many competitors making similar power devices around the world.
As I mentioned about this before [0], this is a compound semiconductor fab - a very critical bottleneck for European industry and a much more worrisome NatSec issue than sub-14nm logical chip fabrication or arguably even AI.
This is not directly related to AI or logical compute, so kvetching about GPUs, SoCs, TSMC, AI, and other buzzwords is dumb.
I would also like to see local PCB manufacturers - pcbway etc like. Modern production facilities might even be locally competitive given the amount of automation that can be had.
They should, but sadly it's extremely difficult for PCB manufacturing to return to Europe.
EU has FTAs with Japan and SK, and others that dominate the segment like Taiwan, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and India have already unlocked public-private subsidized for the sector.
Additionally, the big players in the industry like ZDT, Unimicron, Nippon Mekatron, Foxconn, and Compeq have much stronger financial and political linkages in Asia or the Americas.
This fab itself is important, but was extremely difficult to stand-up and was largely a result of the supply chain issues that the automotive industry faced during zero covid, so it basically took 6 years to execute on this project. That lag-time is the biggest issue unless individual European states decide to take industrial policy their own hands, which becomes expensive very quickly.
The company seems to be primarily in Germany (Aachen), with headquarters/holding company just across the border in The Netherlands (10km away in Lemiers, right on the border). That region is pretty economically integrated and I believe setups like this are fairly common to make use of the "business climate" of The Netherlands. Think taxes but also less bureaucracy. It looks like at least one of the founders also studied in Maastricht.
> these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses
I don't like this framing.
These aren't logic ICs but that doesn't mean they are useless.
In fact, compound semiconductors and power electronics is one segment where Europe's China dependency is extremely high, as they have significant uses from automotive to PLCs to weapons systems.
>Heck, the only countries with Gallium Nitride fabrication capabilities and knowhow are the US, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and India.
So basically all major industrial powers? So I don't get the use of the world "only" as if the EU, the richest block in the world, managed to join some highly exclusive club.
> and China has already begun embargoing the EU's access to rare earth elements [0] and has begun enforcing sanctions against the EU's aerospace and UAV industry [1].
The way it's framed it sounds like China is some evil bad guy for doing that but that's standard practice that the EU and US also do. The EU also restricts ASML EUV machines to China and Chinese tech in their defense sector. Standard stuff.
ASEAN doesn't have the capacity yet, but this is changing in 3-5 years as Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam have gotten IP transfers from European, Korean and Japanese technology partners.
Neither does the rest of the Europe excluding an Ireland-UK-UAE JV called ChipX and the portion of STMicro in France that was part of state-owned Thomson Semiconducteurs before it was privatized.
Neither do any of the major industrial states in the Americas like Canada, Mexico, or Brazil.
> that's standard practice that the EU and US also do
My point is that states need to build domestic capacity where possible. And the EU is not a state. France continued to protect their GaN fabrication IP closely (not even sharing it with Italy despite STMicro being a French-Italian JV), and same with Germany to a certain extent.
It's actually the US that restricts ASML from selling EUV machines to China. The EUV light source itself is American technology developed and produced by Cymer in California. ASML was only permitted to acquire Cymer in 2014 under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government.
It's why, for instance, ASML's next generation research lithography machine is currently being installed in upstate New York and not somewhere in the Netherlands.
>It's why, for instance, ASML's next generation research lithography machine is currently being installed in upstate New York and not somewhere in the Netherlands.
Or more likely because there's already a semi fab in upstate new york and no fabs in the netherlands.
Nope. OP's right (and the only other person other than me who has pointed this out on HN).
ASML was one of the founding partners in SEMATECH which became the Upstate NY Semiconductor Cluster back in the mid-2000s.
It was out of SEMATECH that EUV Photolithography was productionized and licensed to ASML.
Btw, that tidbit has become one of the main vetting techniques I use now to see whether someone is blowing hot air or has actual experience in the Semiconductor industry.
Ah man, too bad you spent half your comment thumping your chest and dissing others, just to flex on your incomplete semi knowledge, because if you would have just stayed humble when explaining things without throwing accusations, you'd come out looking better.
If you actually knew as much as you claim, you'd have known that ASML bought SVG in 2001, and became ASML US, so in 2004, it was ASML US, former SVG, that was investing in SEMATECH, not the Dutch ASML. It may have the ASML label, but it still remains a sovereign US operation, like you said firewalled form the rest.
I could be wrong about some of this, but if so then it's another good chance for you to flex again on how you know more than some of us.
The SVG acquisition was still part of the initial CRADA. Nor does it undermine my nor OP's point.
And it's not about flexing. I've gotten tired of reflexive Euro- and American nationalism on HN by people who don't work in the industry.
People dissing fairly hard European initiatives like Infineon work building a GaN wafer fab instead of one dedicated to logic ICs or going the complete opposite and postulating the EU can be completely cut off from the US and replicate every technology from scratch are both constantly brought up on HN and are ridiculous positions.
Design capacity doesn't imply fabrication, as can be seen with Israel and India's comparative dominance in the chip design industry.
Design capacity (basically programming and logic) is orthogonal to front-end fabrication (basically material science and chemical engineering) which is orthogonal to back-end/OSAT (basically materials science and metrology).
Only the US and Taiwan have domestic E2E capacity in all 3.
Designing a secure platform is possible within the EU[1].
[1]They need to use US EDA tools, And manufacture masks but maybe there are tricks they won't need to trust them - like inspecting critical parts of the masks.
Siemens has bought together a bunch of EDA tool makers, most notably Mentor Graphics. It doesn't really bring the know-how to Germany, but at least some kind of control over it.
It's not just high end CPUs that use the latest processes. Power, Performance and Area is important to all chips, including microcontrollers, FPGA, etc.
Also suitable for keeping an economy functioning and weaponry in war.
You might not be able to fabricate billion terraflop GPUs but at least the basics of survival will be able to be locally produced without scavenging washing machines for parts.
The (western) economy runs on sub 7nm phone, laptop and datacenter chips on which the white collar workforce produces value. Those are the ones that are also the most profitable since they have the highest margins. Europe doesn't have that.
Phones and laptops from a few years ago are not suddenly unusable.
Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person. Even gpu inference on older process nodes is perfectly doable. The HPC space absolutely prefers newer chips but hasn't ripped out their 2018 chips in their clusters because they still deliver value.
And sure, the latest best things sells for higher margins for now, but with the way consumer prices are going, people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less.
The greater danger to a working economy is not absence of the absolute must cutting edge chips but lack of independence which this initiative seems to seek to curtail. Good for Germany.
>Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person.
Except, it's the cutting edge that makes more money than making HW from 2016. And EU would definitely like to make more money rather than less.
Plus, Germany and EU doesn't even make 2016 levels of PC HW to have sovereignty there. They still depend on importing US chips made in Taiwan even if they want 2016 HW.
>people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less.
Doesn't really matter what people are choosing, the high margin parts are going towards datacenter customers now, not to consumers. Consumers have little choice now.
And with new consumer stuff seeing price increases, even old used HW is also seeing price increases due to supply and demand. And none of this is a win for Germany and the EU since they don't capture much value from this.
They are the most profitable, but you don't need much of those. While you need tons of cheap chips for robotics in manufacturing. If you want to focus on profits, you focus on the former, if you want the backbone of your industry to be more resilient, you focus on the latter. In a case of an embargo, the consumers can use yesteryear's hardware just fine, while the robot with a fixed deprecation schedule needs to be replaced.
Maybe you just woke up from a coma but here in Europe we’re ramping up our industrial base for a shooting war with Russia after the US withdraws from NATO. I don’t think smartphones are the biggest concern.
Smartphones(apple and google) make money, money you need to finance the war with Russia. And the non-Apple, non-Google smartphone, like Korea and China have, create the backbone of supply chain electronics that enable the Korean and Chinese military tech. How thick can you be to not see the importance of such an industry?
I’m fine with taking back sovereignty on the smartphone side as well since we can’t really rely on Apple and Google to not do whatever the guy in the White House asks them to do but we have to walk before we run.
If this thing evolves into a global war who would we export to?
When it comes to war with Russia, all the Fabs in Dresden are also primary targets for a strike with ballistic weapon systems. In the worst-case scenario, these will be attacked with conventional warheads or rather with a small thermonuclear warhead (EMP?). Probably the Fabs as a tactical target are even more in danger than MBDA in Bavaria or the tactical HQ of NATO in Rostock. Let's hope for a miracle that calms the escalation.
“Only for industrial uses” is kind of a crazy thing to say when you say it out loud, don’t you think? You might as well say “only for having real-world impact”.
You do not need a 2nm processor to run an engine, perform an ultrasound, drop a missile on someone's head, make 10 million parts in a factory, or fly a plane. The vast majority of the increased processing power we've developed since the mid-2010s gets pissed away rendering 30MB websites or generating AI cheating fruit husband videos. Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago.
We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year at never-before-seen speed, but every single day, hundreds or thousands of times a day, you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so.
>You do not need a 2nm processor to [...] drop a missile on someone's head, make 10 million parts in a factory, or fly a plane.
You do need 2nm CPUs and GPUs to run the CAD and CAE to design that missile and run the battlefield sensor fusion data processing to decide when and where to drop that missile.
Your comment reeks of the typical German/European ignorance and arrogance that made us fall behind the tech race, the EV race, etc leading the EU loosing a lot of GDP: "We don't need this battery EV car shit, you can just use diesel engines from 10 years ago" "we don't need this fancy self driving shit, our drivers love driving our cars themselves"
Stay ignorant, stay poor.
>Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago.
More entitled comments on the definition of "real work".
>We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year [...] you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so
Except vibe coding a SaaS jobs pays way better in Europe and gets you more perks and working conditions, that writing the code of a PLC. Ask me how I know. Or just look up the salaries on the jobs market.
>You DO NEED those 2nm CPUs and GPUs to run the CAD and CAE work to design an effective missile
We've been able to do intensive CAD and CAE to make effective missiles for a long while now. Modern process nodes are not required. Iran has been doing appreciable missile damage to US bases, and has never entered the TOP500.
> and run the battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing to decide when and where to drop that missile.
We have current, ongoing conflicts where it's clear that battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing is taking the backseat to just shooting people, blowing people up, and blowing obvious buildings and installations up. I know that is a gross oversimplification, but militaries worldwide have been chasing after sci-fi shit that's going to be The Future of War just for 99% of the ideas to hit the scrap pile while the remaining 1% develop into incremental improvements in doctrine. The most impactful idea to come out of the Russia-Ukraine war has been strapping an RPG-7 round to an ATmega328-controlled quadcopter, no Nvidia H200s involved.
>Otherwise if you stay low tech on 20 year old HW, you end up like Russian army today.
I'm sorry, but I don't know how you can say with a straight face that technological issues are even close to the top of the list of issues for the Russian military.
>Look at EU supercomputers that run these tasks, along with the computation needed for high-margin EU industries like pharma such as Novo Nordisk, and it all runs on low-nm US chips made in Taiwan,
Something being high margin doesn't mean it's a critical part of European sovereignty. Novo Nordisk making 75% of its profits on selling weight loss drugs to overweight Americans is indirectly good for the bloc because money is generally useful, but it's hardly a matter of security. A lot of low-margin businesses are massively subsidized for this reason. Why do you think the US has such massive subsidies for farming?
>not EU made microcontrollers and mosfets. Where's EU domestic sovereignty there?
The MCUs and FETs are what allows any semblance of day-to-day life to continue. If you had to choose to be a nation with only power electronics and MCUs, or a nation with only high-end CPUs, any sane person is picking the former. It follows that you focus on making sure the former is in place first.
>An out of touch argument on manipulating a definition of "real work". Work done by industrial controllers isn't "more real" than that done by CPUs and GPUs.
In a literal sense, yes, in most cases it is. You NEED the microcontrollers and power electronics to support the production of critical infrastructure and equipment more than you need the latest phone SoC. Even if you have the cutting edge CPUs and GPUs, if you are cut off from other componentry, you're not getting very far with it.
>By this definition the janitors and handyman in the hospital does more "real work" than the x-ray tech sitting looking at cat videos between looking at x-rays all day.
The tradesmen built the hospital in the first place, and the support staff keep it running. Yes, the x-ray tech would massively outstrip the strategic importance of the people that actually build and maintain the hospitals if buildings lasted forever and you never planned on building another hospital again.
>Our economy, yes even in the EU, works on who and what creates more added value to the economy, not whose job is more tough and gritty getting their hands dirty. Work smart, not hard.
Alcohol, advertising, gambling, and porn create a huge amount of added value. These are of very little interest to national security.
>Again, more ignorance. Jobs on vibe coding a SaaS pays way better in Europe and gets you better perks and working conditions, than writing the code of a PLC. Ask me how I know(former embedded programmer here in the semi industry). Or just look up the salaries on the jobs market. The SW industry ...
>Novo Nordisk making 75% of its profits on selling weight loss drugs to overweight Americans is indirectly good for the bloc because money is generally useful
THe highest margin businesses in EU run on US IP made in Taiwan. How is that on sovereignty? I literally addressed this twice.
>The MCUs and FETs are what allows any semblance of day-to-day life to continue.
So does having shoes on your feet, yet we don't onshore shoe manufacturing in the west.
>prioritizing cutting-edge chip fab over the basics that are supporting your ability to defend and provide for yourselves at the most basic level is just an incorrect move.
My brother in Christ, cutting edge fabs can also make 0,02$ microcontrollers and transistors in case of war. There's no logical reason to stay on ancient processes nodes other than because you're too broke to afford cutting edge fabs. Why do you think China is so depurate to amok cutting edge fabs and not stay on >7nM?
Your arguments are mostly flawed based on poor understanding of sovereignty, supply chains and market economics.
If the former all go missing, the consumer is not going to buy a new phone/laptop/etc. this year. If the latter go missing, agriculture and manufacturing companies (e.g. the automotive industry) go broke. The former have more profit, the latter are more important.
>The former have more profit, the latter are more important.
That's a massive contradiction based your skewed and subjective definition of what's important.
With more money from selling the former you can just buy the latter from several suppliers/countries locked in a race to them bottom to sell to you. Which is how th3e US economy works.
Also, the later being less profitable is at danger from rising competitors in Asia meaning Eu companies have more competition and less margins.
If you're still confused, in essence, making higher margins IS what's more important, not making low margin trinkets that you subjectively see as being more important.
Let's see the state of this project in 5 years. Experience tends to show European projects dragging forever and then suddenly closing whilst funds mysteriously move into semi public companies with boards full to the brim with retired political figures
You say this like it is a bad thing. But I think it is good, that less people in the food industry get exploited and get a proper wage. This means that the food can't be price competitive with other regions who don't pay a proper wage. And I am very glad, that we still produce at least some amount of food, even if it is inefficient as far as market theory is concerned, because I rather still want to eat something, even when some foreign nation determines we shouldn't get their food or there is some supply chain event again.
I also prefer to be able to go to the doctor and not be broke, because modern medicine is fucking expensive and nearly nobody would be able to pay for that alone. Also even for the few rich guys who could afford it, it gets cheaper that way, because otherwise there would be far fewer people on whose shoulder the fixed costs need to be split.
The issue with the pensions is also not the pensions per se, but the very unhealthy population structure. That's a problem nobody has a real solution for, but that doesn't mean pensions are bad.
Why should people in food industry have a special threatment compared to people working in other industries?
If I was paying a market price for my medical insurance, I would probably pay a third of it and be able to get a screening sooner than in a half a year as a cancer patient.
Pensions are a special case in my country, because we have just state pensions and almost no private funds. Everyone in my age - late 20s or early 30s know, that we pay a great share of our income to current pensioners but we won't be able to get it because of the demographics.
It's not just Infineon - it's called the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC) and is a joint venture by TSMC, Bosch, Infineon, and NXP, with TSMC being the majority (70%) shareholder.
I've met one of the engineers designing the piping for that plant. Hardest project to date for him and mainly because TSMC was setting the pace.
You're right, honest mistake. I checked this several times, thinking "surely there aren't two chip plants built at the same time, in roughly the same location with the same company involved?".
There are actually more than these two. There is also GlobalFoundries also on the same street, and also Bosch, although I am not sure, whether the latter is really separate from the ESMC joint venture.
I wonder how these will fare in Saxony. I presume it's an industry which will attract and depend on highly qualified foreign workers. Dresden itself may be fine, but parts of Saxony are sadly no-go areas for anyone remotely non-white, or even moderately liberal. It's a really brain-damaged region outside of Dresden and Leipzig, and even those cities are not exactly welcoming examples of diversity. Given a historic chance of prosperity, I think odds are eastern Germany will shoot itself in the foot epically with this.
> but parts of Saxony are sadly no-go areas for anyone remotely non-white
Which is of course exaggerated as usually and if you are referring to the AFD, my take is that the focus on the eastern part is just cope by the western part, they are rising the same in the western part, the eastern is just ahead of the curve. This is very much a problem of the complete country. If the administration(s) manage to bring back the economy, than the AFD will also go away, if they don't then this will be the far bigger issue for any industry rather than the public perception of the workers.
> I think odds are eastern Germany will shoot itself in the foot epically with this.
How are they shooting themself in the foot, by investing into semiconductors? Even if it eventually fails, how would this be worse, then not having done anything? Also the odds of this failing (like the one in Magdeburg) are rather small. This is the news that the construction is finished, and it is a new module in an already existing factory of an already existing company in exactly this place. I don't believe the company is going to axe it, AFTER the factory is built and the costs were spent. This doesn't make any sense.
> Which is of course exaggerated as usually and if you are referring to the AFD, my take is that the focus on the eastern part is just cope by the western part, they are rising the same in the western part, the eastern is just ahead of the curve.
There is a reason, every young person with half a brain moves to Leipzig/Dresden, or leaves Saxony completely. Cope...The problem with right wing extremism in the area predates the AfD, Saxony was always in the top three for right wing hate crimes. Maybe read criminal stats or Verfassungsschutzberichte instead of crying injustice. Dude, you can't blame lack of decency and empathy on the economy forever... And it won't get better by ignoring shit feeling entitled to outside help fixing your mess.
> How are they shooting themself in the foot, by investing into semiconductors?
Maybe read the comment you replied to. The investment into semiconductors is the great chance for prosperity, reactionary politics and xenophobia how they ruin it.
I'm not saying it does not exist, I am saying that while there are dangerous people and situations in a society and this is one of them, there is no reason, to act like this is dominating entire landscapes. What I find way more concerning is the 32.3% increase in the same year.
Btw, there were 3612 cases in Bavaria[0] in 2024. This means there were 8 cases per 100k inhabitants in Saxony and 27 in Bavaria[1] Do you also want to claim, that Bavaria is a dangerous shithole? It doesn't seem to hurt the industry there.
> Cope...
That was referring to the common trope, that the AFD is solely an issue for the dumb Eastern part and it would never happen in the oh-so-educated Western part.
> Dude, you can't blame lack of decency and empathy on the economy forever... And it won't get better by ignoring shit feeling entitled to outside help fixing your mess.
I don't think political ignorance and frustration directly correlates with day-to-day empathy. But I do think 60 years of propaganda do something to a population and this issue is massively ignored and underestimated. Thinking this doesn't have any effect is saying they sucked at their job, which I think they really didn't, they were professionals in their own kind.
That is exactly what I mean with exaggeration and cope. This is an example of the Western part claiming the high-ground and planting the idea, that this can never happen in the West and is just these stupid Easterns, ignoring that there is very much a radicalism tourism, with people also coming from the West. I do live in Dresden, no there are no "no-go areas". That's just fear mongering and lying.
My man, I didn't even bring up the AfD. So think about that for a moment and do some introspection. You are projecting a lot.
And downplaying those numbers with all cause mortality... Maybe think about that too, hm?!
And your source states Bavaria had 144 violent right wing crimes, which is the number to match. Don't even sweat, for other reasons I would call it a shit hole too. But please, redo the math and be sure to not contrast the total population but the relevant potential victim populations. You know, since xenophobic violence isn't threatening everyone the same...
I live in east Germany and speak from experience. So maybe you are the arrogant one trying to ostplain the world to those seeing just fine.
Hello, GP here. I'm Polish, living in lower Silesia, so just across the border from Saxony. My colleague, who worked on that plant, is also originally from this region, but moved to Dresden several years ago.
Either the same problem is much worse over here(possible[0]), or he isn't affected by it.
[0] On the flip side Koreans working at the LG plant here and associated Korean-owned businesses don't seem to mind.
Yeah sorry but this is bullshit. There's plenty of "non-white" refugees living a normal life in Saxony, also in the villages in bumfuck-nowhere (not to downplay the far-right and neonazi problem though, but East Germany isn't that far behind West Germany, take a slice from West Germany with the same demographic composition as East Germany and you'll get the same percentage of AfD voters). Getting industry back into East Germany is exactly the right thing to do, better local jobs means less 'brain drain' into West Germany and with this, less AfD support.
How is this a bad thing??? Public names should be transparent and precise. It's the TSMC branch for Europe. This is exactly what the name says. I don't want a fancy name that sounds cool, but doesn't mean anything, so everyone needs to look up, what it means first. Names are supposed to be self-explanatory.
If I was Queen of Germany, I would put everything into a platform like Arduino or RaspPi which can be widely used across industries and education. Some amount of taxes will be allocated to buy these boards and guarantee demand for manufacturing. Then every citizen gets such a device in return. Basically mandatory purchase. The education sector can completely lean in on the platform, abundance will have it dominate DIY projects and may create additional demand as reference platform. Whoever doesn't need it, can sell it or give it away to charity. This will stabilize a critical industry and aid digital education, engineering and so on. I feel like people would be more easy about a tax, if they get a physical product in exchange.
Over time this program would be extended to include and bring back other critical industries and manufacturing capabilities, ultimately leading to citizens being able to choose their mandatory product to some extent and preference. For example it would be really cool to have a basic, but very robust and repairable sewing machine, 3D printer, ... which all aid survivability/adaptability of the collective in crisis, if widely distributed. These products would also set the baseline for quality and accessibility expectations.
Of course this goes hand in hand with a 4 day work week, so people can actually learn to appreciate their mandated crisis hobbies and indulge their family and friends doing so. And if all of this doesn't pan out economically, I would simply plunder and enslave a neighboring country <3
Good, that you are not. An overpriced variant, running on marketing, of a cheap non-customizable product, riddled with design errors in the hardware and non-existent to actually broken software, without any liability and support, basically only suitable for consumers with too much time and interest, being mandatory for the industry is surely going to help.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 75.6 ms ] thread> The company ... sought to capitalise on the massive AI investment boom
These chips are probably very useful and important, but I don't see what they have to do with AI. Does everything need to have the word AI these days?
Not directly. This fab is meant to primarily fabricate compound semiconductors which is Infineon's niche and is a major bottleneck for European industry today.
> Does everything need to have the word AI these days
Because Infineon's PR release for their compound semiconductor fab called out "AI".
Additonally, the "semiconductor" and "hardware" segment has now been rebranded has "AI" in a number of funds. By calling out something that's even tenuously tied to "AI", it allows funds that are contractually tied to investing in "AI" to purchase Infineon stock.
Investor relations is important as well.
That reality is carefully not made clear in all this "silicon sovereignty" narrative. It's a nice plant with new tooling making modern 300mm wafers. But this is not the equivalent of a TSMC or Intel fab making cutting edge, high margin silicon. And there are many competitors making similar power devices around the world.
This is not directly related to AI or logical compute, so kvetching about GPUs, SoCs, TSMC, AI, and other buzzwords is dumb.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557914
EU has FTAs with Japan and SK, and others that dominate the segment like Taiwan, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and India have already unlocked public-private subsidized for the sector.
Additionally, the big players in the industry like ZDT, Unimicron, Nippon Mekatron, Foxconn, and Compeq have much stronger financial and political linkages in Asia or the Americas.
This fab itself is important, but was extremely difficult to stand-up and was largely a result of the supply chain issues that the automotive industry faced during zero covid, so it basically took 6 years to execute on this project. That lag-time is the biggest issue unless individual European states decide to take industrial policy their own hands, which becomes expensive very quickly.
[1] https://aisler.net/en
I don't like this framing.
These aren't logic ICs but that doesn't mean they are useless.
In fact, compound semiconductors and power electronics is one segment where Europe's China dependency is extremely high, as they have significant uses from automotive to PLCs to weapons systems.
So basically all major industrial powers? So I don't get the use of the world "only" as if the EU, the richest block in the world, managed to join some highly exclusive club.
> and China has already begun embargoing the EU's access to rare earth elements [0] and has begun enforcing sanctions against the EU's aerospace and UAV industry [1].
The way it's framed it sounds like China is some evil bad guy for doing that but that's standard practice that the EU and US also do. The EU also restricts ASML EUV machines to China and Chinese tech in their defense sector. Standard stuff.
ASEAN doesn't have the capacity yet, but this is changing in 3-5 years as Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam have gotten IP transfers from European, Korean and Japanese technology partners.
Neither does the rest of the Europe excluding an Ireland-UK-UAE JV called ChipX and the portion of STMicro in France that was part of state-owned Thomson Semiconducteurs before it was privatized.
Neither do any of the major industrial states in the Americas like Canada, Mexico, or Brazil.
> that's standard practice that the EU and US also do
My point is that states need to build domestic capacity where possible. And the EU is not a state. France continued to protect their GaN fabrication IP closely (not even sharing it with Italy despite STMicro being a French-Italian JV), and same with Germany to a certain extent.
It's actually the US that restricts ASML from selling EUV machines to China. The EUV light source itself is American technology developed and produced by Cymer in California. ASML was only permitted to acquire Cymer in 2014 under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government.
It's why, for instance, ASML's next generation research lithography machine is currently being installed in upstate New York and not somewhere in the Netherlands.
Or more likely because there's already a semi fab in upstate new york and no fabs in the netherlands.
ASML was one of the founding partners in SEMATECH which became the Upstate NY Semiconductor Cluster back in the mid-2000s.
It was out of SEMATECH that EUV Photolithography was productionized and licensed to ASML.
Btw, that tidbit has become one of the main vetting techniques I use now to see whether someone is blowing hot air or has actual experience in the Semiconductor industry.
If you actually knew as much as you claim, you'd have known that ASML bought SVG in 2001, and became ASML US, so in 2004, it was ASML US, former SVG, that was investing in SEMATECH, not the Dutch ASML. It may have the ASML label, but it still remains a sovereign US operation, like you said firewalled form the rest.
I could be wrong about some of this, but if so then it's another good chance for you to flex again on how you know more than some of us.
And it's not about flexing. I've gotten tired of reflexive Euro- and American nationalism on HN by people who don't work in the industry.
People dissing fairly hard European initiatives like Infineon work building a GaN wafer fab instead of one dedicated to logic ICs or going the complete opposite and postulating the EU can be completely cut off from the US and replicate every technology from scratch are both constantly brought up on HN and are ridiculous positions.
Design capacity doesn't imply fabrication, as can be seen with Israel and India's comparative dominance in the chip design industry.
Design capacity (basically programming and logic) is orthogonal to front-end fabrication (basically material science and chemical engineering) which is orthogonal to back-end/OSAT (basically materials science and metrology).
Only the US and Taiwan have domestic E2E capacity in all 3.
[1]They need to use US EDA tools, And manufacture masks but maybe there are tricks they won't need to trust them - like inspecting critical parts of the masks.
You might not be able to fabricate billion terraflop GPUs but at least the basics of survival will be able to be locally produced without scavenging washing machines for parts.
The (western) economy runs on sub 7nm phone, laptop and datacenter chips on which the white collar workforce produces value. Those are the ones that are also the most profitable since they have the highest margins. Europe doesn't have that.
Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person. Even gpu inference on older process nodes is perfectly doable. The HPC space absolutely prefers newer chips but hasn't ripped out their 2018 chips in their clusters because they still deliver value.
And sure, the latest best things sells for higher margins for now, but with the way consumer prices are going, people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less.
The greater danger to a working economy is not absence of the absolute must cutting edge chips but lack of independence which this initiative seems to seek to curtail. Good for Germany.
Except, it's the cutting edge that makes more money than making HW from 2016. And EU would definitely like to make more money rather than less.
Plus, Germany and EU doesn't even make 2016 levels of PC HW to have sovereignty there. They still depend on importing US chips made in Taiwan even if they want 2016 HW.
>people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less.
Doesn't really matter what people are choosing, the high margin parts are going towards datacenter customers now, not to consumers. Consumers have little choice now.
And with new consumer stuff seeing price increases, even old used HW is also seeing price increases due to supply and demand. And none of this is a win for Germany and the EU since they don't capture much value from this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_secto...
Also, in that case, manufacturing capacity is what counts and EU lacks that too.
Eu can't make yesterday's HW either. Nor HW form yester-dacde.
If this thing evolves into a global war who would we export to?
We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year at never-before-seen speed, but every single day, hundreds or thousands of times a day, you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so.
You do need 2nm CPUs and GPUs to run the CAD and CAE to design that missile and run the battlefield sensor fusion data processing to decide when and where to drop that missile.
Your comment reeks of the typical German/European ignorance and arrogance that made us fall behind the tech race, the EV race, etc leading the EU loosing a lot of GDP: "We don't need this battery EV car shit, you can just use diesel engines from 10 years ago" "we don't need this fancy self driving shit, our drivers love driving our cars themselves"
Stay ignorant, stay poor.
>Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago.
More entitled comments on the definition of "real work".
>We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year [...] you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so
Except vibe coding a SaaS jobs pays way better in Europe and gets you more perks and working conditions, that writing the code of a PLC. Ask me how I know. Or just look up the salaries on the jobs market.
We've been able to do intensive CAD and CAE to make effective missiles for a long while now. Modern process nodes are not required. Iran has been doing appreciable missile damage to US bases, and has never entered the TOP500.
> and run the battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing to decide when and where to drop that missile.
We have current, ongoing conflicts where it's clear that battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing is taking the backseat to just shooting people, blowing people up, and blowing obvious buildings and installations up. I know that is a gross oversimplification, but militaries worldwide have been chasing after sci-fi shit that's going to be The Future of War just for 99% of the ideas to hit the scrap pile while the remaining 1% develop into incremental improvements in doctrine. The most impactful idea to come out of the Russia-Ukraine war has been strapping an RPG-7 round to an ATmega328-controlled quadcopter, no Nvidia H200s involved.
>Otherwise if you stay low tech on 20 year old HW, you end up like Russian army today.
I'm sorry, but I don't know how you can say with a straight face that technological issues are even close to the top of the list of issues for the Russian military.
>Look at EU supercomputers that run these tasks, along with the computation needed for high-margin EU industries like pharma such as Novo Nordisk, and it all runs on low-nm US chips made in Taiwan,
Something being high margin doesn't mean it's a critical part of European sovereignty. Novo Nordisk making 75% of its profits on selling weight loss drugs to overweight Americans is indirectly good for the bloc because money is generally useful, but it's hardly a matter of security. A lot of low-margin businesses are massively subsidized for this reason. Why do you think the US has such massive subsidies for farming?
>not EU made microcontrollers and mosfets. Where's EU domestic sovereignty there?
The MCUs and FETs are what allows any semblance of day-to-day life to continue. If you had to choose to be a nation with only power electronics and MCUs, or a nation with only high-end CPUs, any sane person is picking the former. It follows that you focus on making sure the former is in place first.
>An out of touch argument on manipulating a definition of "real work". Work done by industrial controllers isn't "more real" than that done by CPUs and GPUs.
In a literal sense, yes, in most cases it is. You NEED the microcontrollers and power electronics to support the production of critical infrastructure and equipment more than you need the latest phone SoC. Even if you have the cutting edge CPUs and GPUs, if you are cut off from other componentry, you're not getting very far with it.
>By this definition the janitors and handyman in the hospital does more "real work" than the x-ray tech sitting looking at cat videos between looking at x-rays all day.
The tradesmen built the hospital in the first place, and the support staff keep it running. Yes, the x-ray tech would massively outstrip the strategic importance of the people that actually build and maintain the hospitals if buildings lasted forever and you never planned on building another hospital again.
>Our economy, yes even in the EU, works on who and what creates more added value to the economy, not whose job is more tough and gritty getting their hands dirty. Work smart, not hard.
Alcohol, advertising, gambling, and porn create a huge amount of added value. These are of very little interest to national security.
>Again, more ignorance. Jobs on vibe coding a SaaS pays way better in Europe and gets you better perks and working conditions, than writing the code of a PLC. Ask me how I know(former embedded programmer here in the semi industry). Or just look up the salaries on the jobs market. The SW industry ...
THe highest margin businesses in EU run on US IP made in Taiwan. How is that on sovereignty? I literally addressed this twice.
>The MCUs and FETs are what allows any semblance of day-to-day life to continue.
So does having shoes on your feet, yet we don't onshore shoe manufacturing in the west.
>prioritizing cutting-edge chip fab over the basics that are supporting your ability to defend and provide for yourselves at the most basic level is just an incorrect move.
My brother in Christ, cutting edge fabs can also make 0,02$ microcontrollers and transistors in case of war. There's no logical reason to stay on ancient processes nodes other than because you're too broke to afford cutting edge fabs. Why do you think China is so depurate to amok cutting edge fabs and not stay on >7nM?
Your arguments are mostly flawed based on poor understanding of sovereignty, supply chains and market economics.
That's a massive contradiction based your skewed and subjective definition of what's important.
With more money from selling the former you can just buy the latter from several suppliers/countries locked in a race to them bottom to sell to you. Which is how th3e US economy works.
Also, the later being less profitable is at danger from rising competitors in Asia meaning Eu companies have more competition and less margins.
If you're still confused, in essence, making higher margins IS what's more important, not making low margin trinkets that you subjectively see as being more important.
Infineon got €1bn of tax payer money to open the plant (~$1.1bn).
> The facility was backed by the EU's Chips Act with one billion euros in subsidies
I member
I also prefer to be able to go to the doctor and not be broke, because modern medicine is fucking expensive and nearly nobody would be able to pay for that alone. Also even for the few rich guys who could afford it, it gets cheaper that way, because otherwise there would be far fewer people on whose shoulder the fixed costs need to be split.
The issue with the pensions is also not the pensions per se, but the very unhealthy population structure. That's a problem nobody has a real solution for, but that doesn't mean pensions are bad.
If I was paying a market price for my medical insurance, I would probably pay a third of it and be able to get a screening sooner than in a half a year as a cancer patient.
Pensions are a special case in my country, because we have just state pensions and almost no private funds. Everyone in my age - late 20s or early 30s know, that we pay a great share of our income to current pensioners but we won't be able to get it because of the demographics.
I've met one of the engineers designing the piping for that plant. Hardest project to date for him and mainly because TSMC was setting the pace.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1191197175 vs. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/583767292
Apparently there are.
Saxony has had a decently-sized or large (by German standards) microelectronics sector for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Saxony
As you'd probably guess, they're mostly situated around Leipzig and Dresden.
Which is of course exaggerated as usually and if you are referring to the AFD, my take is that the focus on the eastern part is just cope by the western part, they are rising the same in the western part, the eastern is just ahead of the curve. This is very much a problem of the complete country. If the administration(s) manage to bring back the economy, than the AFD will also go away, if they don't then this will be the far bigger issue for any industry rather than the public perception of the workers.
> I think odds are eastern Germany will shoot itself in the foot epically with this.
How are they shooting themself in the foot, by investing into semiconductors? Even if it eventually fails, how would this be worse, then not having done anything? Also the odds of this failing (like the one in Magdeburg) are rather small. This is the news that the construction is finished, and it is a new module in an already existing factory of an already existing company in exactly this place. I don't believe the company is going to axe it, AFTER the factory is built and the costs were spent. This doesn't make any sense.
Sure buddy. https://www.raa-sachsen.de/support/statistik/statistiken/rec...
There is a reason, every young person with half a brain moves to Leipzig/Dresden, or leaves Saxony completely. Cope...The problem with right wing extremism in the area predates the AfD, Saxony was always in the top three for right wing hate crimes. Maybe read criminal stats or Verfassungsschutzberichte instead of crying injustice. Dude, you can't blame lack of decency and empathy on the economy forever... And it won't get better by ignoring shit feeling entitled to outside help fixing your mess.
> How are they shooting themself in the foot, by investing into semiconductors?
Maybe read the comment you replied to. The investment into semiconductors is the great chance for prosperity, reactionary politics and xenophobia how they ruin it.
Public perception is already brilliant: https://www.fr.de/politik/vorsicht-ostdeutschland-11150062.h...
> Im Jahr 2024 verzeichneten Opferberatungsstellen in Sachsen 328 rechtsmotivierte Angriffe, von denen mindestens 446 Personen direkt betroffen waren.
According to https://www.statistik.sachsen.de/html/lebenserwartung-gestor... there were 56.968 dead people in Saxony. Assuming all of those attacks killed all people which they didn't, you are 120 times more likely to just die, than to be in one of those attacks. According to https://www.lpr.sachsen.de/download/Lagebild_HGW_2024.pdf, there were 10.202 cases of domestic violence in the same year.
I'm not saying it does not exist, I am saying that while there are dangerous people and situations in a society and this is one of them, there is no reason, to act like this is dominating entire landscapes. What I find way more concerning is the 32.3% increase in the same year.
Btw, there were 3612 cases in Bavaria[0] in 2024. This means there were 8 cases per 100k inhabitants in Saxony and 27 in Bavaria[1] Do you also want to claim, that Bavaria is a dangerous shithole? It doesn't seem to hurt the industry there.
> Cope...
That was referring to the common trope, that the AFD is solely an issue for the dumb Eastern part and it would never happen in the oh-so-educated Western part.
> Dude, you can't blame lack of decency and empathy on the economy forever... And it won't get better by ignoring shit feeling entitled to outside help fixing your mess.
I don't think political ignorance and frustration directly correlates with day-to-day empathy. But I do think 60 years of propaganda do something to a population and this issue is massively ignored and underestimated. Thinking this doesn't have any effect is saying they sucked at their job, which I think they really didn't, they were professionals in their own kind.
> Public perception is already brilliant: https://www.fr.de/politik/vorsicht-ostdeutschland-11150062.h...
That is exactly what I mean with exaggeration and cope. This is an example of the Western part claiming the high-ground and planting the idea, that this can never happen in the West and is just these stupid Easterns, ignoring that there is very much a radicalism tourism, with people also coming from the West. I do live in Dresden, no there are no "no-go areas". That's just fear mongering and lying.
[0] https://www.gruene-fraktion-bayern.de/themen/demokratie-gege... [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demografie_Deutschlands#mwKak
And downplaying those numbers with all cause mortality... Maybe think about that too, hm?!
And your source states Bavaria had 144 violent right wing crimes, which is the number to match. Don't even sweat, for other reasons I would call it a shit hole too. But please, redo the math and be sure to not contrast the total population but the relevant potential victim populations. You know, since xenophobic violence isn't threatening everyone the same...
I live in east Germany and speak from experience. So maybe you are the arrogant one trying to ostplain the world to those seeing just fine.
Either the same problem is much worse over here(possible[0]), or he isn't affected by it.
[0] On the flip side Koreans working at the LG plant here and associated Korean-owned businesses don't seem to mind.
Yeah sorry but this is bullshit. There's plenty of "non-white" refugees living a normal life in Saxony, also in the villages in bumfuck-nowhere (not to downplay the far-right and neonazi problem though, but East Germany isn't that far behind West Germany, take a slice from West Germany with the same demographic composition as East Germany and you'll get the same percentage of AfD voters). Getting industry back into East Germany is exactly the right thing to do, better local jobs means less 'brain drain' into West Germany and with this, less AfD support.
I can imagine their pace might be accelerated but better than endless discussions, shuffling and never shipping
>Looks inside
>It's all TSMC
Over time this program would be extended to include and bring back other critical industries and manufacturing capabilities, ultimately leading to citizens being able to choose their mandatory product to some extent and preference. For example it would be really cool to have a basic, but very robust and repairable sewing machine, 3D printer, ... which all aid survivability/adaptability of the collective in crisis, if widely distributed. These products would also set the baseline for quality and accessibility expectations.
Of course this goes hand in hand with a 4 day work week, so people can actually learn to appreciate their mandated crisis hobbies and indulge their family and friends doing so. And if all of this doesn't pan out economically, I would simply plunder and enslave a neighboring country <3