https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1191197175 vs. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/583767292

I can imagine their pace might be accelerated but better than endless discussions, shuffling and never shipping

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 facility was backed by the EU's Chips Act with one billion euros in subsidies

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 press release [0] 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.

[0] - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/infineon-opens-the-...

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.

One could say they have an even bigger real world impact.

I don't like this framing.

These aren't logic ICs but that doesn't mean they are useless or "easy".

Heck, the only countries with Gallium Nitride fabrication capabilities and knowhow are the US, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and India.

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, 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].

These are dual use technologies and a major reason why both the US and China heavily invested in compound semiconductor capacity in the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Edit: can't reply

> In 2024 Belgium closed its only semi fab, which had recently pivoted to GaN

THEMA Foundries is working in photonics, not GaNs [2]. The GaN initiative (BelGaN) failed and the only two buyers interested in buying out the property for GaN fabrication were a Chinese and Indian player [2].

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-firms-brace-more-shut...

[1] - https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3351292/...

[2] - https://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/2025/apr/belg...

So basically all major industrial powers? In which case I don't get the use of the world "only" here, as if the EU, the richest block in the world, deserve praise for doing something countries a lot less wealthier are doing.

> 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 sanctions Chinese tech in their defense sector. Standard stuff.

[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.

Design capacity doesn't imply fabrication capacity, as can be seen with Israel and India's comparative dominance in the chip design industry.

Design capacity (basically programming and logic design) 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.

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, Compeq, TTM, and Flex 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.

Concentrating on building a niche in compound semiconductors as well as 2.5/3D packaging would probably be the best bet for the EU today, but I expect to see French-German industrial rivalry to undermine coordination.

[1] https://aisler.net/en