The European Union plans to mobilize 45,000 million euros in investments until 2030 to quadruple its chip production in order to reduce its dependence on other countries and become a “leading” power in a strategic sector.
“The European Chip Law comes absolutely at the right time and has two main objectives: first, in the short term, to increase our resilience to future crises by anticipating and avoiding supply problems”, declared the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von Der Leyen, after adopting the plan. “The second, in the medium term, is to make Europe an industrial leader in this very strategic market,” he added.
To do this, Brussels wants 20% of the world’s chips to be produced in the EU by the end of this decade, which means that it will have to multiply its production by four, since now it barely reaches 10% of a marketwhose value will double in the next eight years.
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A strategic sector
Chips are essential to almost any electronic device, from mobile phones to washing machines to industrial machinery. Even if the EU is a world leader in research and in machinery to produce chips, and strong in specific sectors such as car or industrial chips, for its manufacture it depends above all on factories in Taiwan and South Korea, responsible for more than half of global production.
The shortage of semiconductors generated by the pandemic starkly exposed the risks of this dependency, forcing industries as powerful as the automobile industry to paralyze production lines or deplete reserves of some more everyday products. Hence Brussels defend the strategic importance of a plan that follows the line of other initiatives aimed at increasing its autonomy in sensitive areas. “Europe cannot be left out of the technological race for semiconductors (…).
“Europe cannot be left out of the semiconductor technology race”
All our partners invest in a sector that affects all industries. Europe cannot watch the train go by”, declared the Commissioner for the Single Market, Thierry Breton. To get on the bandwagon, Brussels proposes a strategy based on strengthening its leadership in research, building new factories on the continent and securing its supply chains, associating with third countries or by controlling exports as a last resort in the event of a crisis.And it plans to mobilize a total of around 45,000 million euros in public and private investments, below the 52,000 million dollars that the United States will allocate to revitalize its sector and far of the 430,000 million of South Korea or the 170,000 million budgeted by China for semiconductors between 2014 and 2024.
Production and research
Most of the money, 30,000 million euros, will be public investments already planned by the Member States and financed from the Community budget, the Next Generation recovery fund or their national budgets. Another 11,000 million in public and private investment will go to research, to which would be added at least 2,000 million euros in financing for emerging companies in the sector through a “Chip Fund”.
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These two initiatives would make it possible to generate a total of more than 15,000 million euros in investment, according to calculations in Brussels. They will serve, for example, to finance pilot lines to build chip prototypes, with the idea that innovation “leaves the laboratory” and translates into production.
EFE
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