Will Intel save Europe’s semiconductor ambitions?

If European Commissioner Thierry Breton wasn’t a religious man already, he might have become one after he got a call from Intel the other day. As the driving force behind the European Union’s ambition to establish cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing on European soil, Breton has desperately been trying to get Europe’s chipmakers and research institutes on board, only to be told that his goal is unrealistic. The research institutes are at least sympathetic, no doubt partially because they wouldn’t mind more funding, but even they know that one simply can’t skip multiple nodes. Europe first has to maneuver itself into a position in which building a cutting-edge fab actually makes sense – technologically, but also from a demand perspective. That process will easily take a decade.

How about luring one of the world’s foundries to Europe, then? After all, both Samsung and TSMC were recently persuaded to build fabs in the United States. “In the US, we committed to building a fab after the authorities made clear that they would subsidize the cost gap. But in Europe, the case isn’t that strong, and the Europeans really should figure out what exactly it is they want, and whether they can maybe achieve it with their own chipmakers,” a senior TSMC executive told the Financial Times. Ouch.