Saturday, December 11th, 2021
New semiconductor project from TSMC
Taiwan’s chip giant wants to gain a foothold in Germany
Industry worldwide is groaning from a dramatic semiconductor shortage. The Taiwanese contract manufacturer TSMC wants to remedy the situation and ramp up production quickly. After the USA and Japan, Germany is now also being targeted as a location for the construction of a new factory.
The world’s largest contract manufacturer of chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), is examining the construction of a semiconductor factory in Germany. The talks with the German government are at an early stage, writes the US finance agency Bloomberg.
Decisive for a decision are the amount of government subsidies, customer demand and the availability of appropriate skilled workers in Germany, said the Vice President for Europe and Asia on the sidelines of a conference in Taipei. So far, financing and location have not yet been discussed.
TSMC is a real heavyweight in the industry. When Apple needs ultra-fast microchips for its iPhones or VW needs semiconductors for its cars, they turn to the giant from Taiwan. If it were to fail, “it would have a massive impact on all kinds of industries,” he says Jan-Peter Kleinhans from the think tank Stiftung Neue Responsibility in the ntv podcast “Wieder Was Learned”.
In times of massive delivery bottlenecks, the plans are a glimmer of hope that Europe will be able to ramp up its chip production significantly in the foreseeable future and thus make itself somewhat independent of supplies from Asia. For TSMC, the negotiations about a plant in Germany are also part of a new internationalization strategy. The group, whose production sites have so far been mainly in Taiwan, has been on an expansion course since last year.
At the height of the supply shortage, TSMC began building a $ 12 billion facility in Arizona last year. A $ 7 billion facility in Japan is expected to follow shortly.
VW: “Have the worst ahead of us”
The shortage of semiconductors is one of the biggest risks to the EU’s economic recovery from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. In the last few months, production in many industries – from consumer electronics to automotive engineering – has stalled.
VW works council chief Daniela Cavallo had only warned on Thursday of a further worsening of the chip shortage at Europe’s largest car manufacturer. “The coming months will be tough, we have a real dry spell ahead of us,” said Cavallo in Wolfsburg. Closing days and the absence of shifts would accompany the company for a while, she announced after the group’s supervisory board meeting on investment planning for the next five years.
In the works council sheet “Mitbestimmen!” it became even clearer: “There will be a shortage of supplies for the whole of next year. And things will not suddenly get better in 2023 either,” quoted the magazine Cavallo. “We still have the worst ahead of us.”
In the first half of 2022, the EU wants to present a European chip law in order to catch up with the world’s best in the development and manufacture of microchips. By 2030, 20 percent of world production should come from Europe.