All the member nations of the EU have signed on to a Dutch-led coalition that wants to encourage additional investment in semiconductor manufacturing in the EU. This revision of the 2022 European Chips Act would see the EU pivot its plan to take over global production and instead target specific weaknesses in the EU's semiconductor strategies, as per Reuters.
The EU's Chips Act budgeted 43 billion euros ($50.4 billion) in semiconductor manufacturing, chip design, and better supply chain monitoring that could allow state intervention in key areas. The idea was to counterbalance the USA's investment in encouraging chip manufacturing in the United States with the Chips Act and Inflation Reduction Act efforts, investing tens of billions in American semiconductor manufacturing. The EU Chips Act hoped to regain some market share from Taiwanese TSMC, too, targeting control of some 20% of the supply chain by 2030.
However, the EU is reportedly only on target to reach 11.7% of the world's supply by that date, a rise of just under two percent since 2022. With that in mind, the new Dutch coalition is pushing for even greater funding - up to a quadrupling of existing semiconductor investment - as well as a pivot to more targeted support for EU industry.
The initiative was launched in March and led by the Netherlands, with support from eight other member states. Since then, the rest of the EU countries have all come on board, and the coalition has received support from industry groups like SEMI, which represent some 3,000 companies, as well as 50 dedicated semiconductor manufacturers. These include US-based manufacturing and chip design firms like Nvidia, ASML, and Intel, as well as European-based STMicroelectronics and Infineon.
The coalition now wants to revise the 2022 Chips Act to its 2.0 form, encouraging the speeding of approvals for infrastructure spending, and improving access to skills and finance for the semiconductor supply chain in the EU. It also wants the EU to better secure access to critical chip design and manufacturing technologies, and even have the EU set a separate budget exclusively for semiconductor manufacturing and investment.
Although the 2022 Chips Act did encourage a wave of investment in silicon fabrication and design in the EU, it fell short of its intended goals, especially after US-based Intel pulled out its plans to build a new factory in Germany.
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