It's not just Infineon - it's called the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC) and is a joint venture by TSMC, Bosch, Infineon, and NXP, with TSMC being the majority (70%) shareholder.
I've met one of the engineers designing the piping for that plant. Hardest project to date for him and mainly because TSMC was setting the pace.
You're right, honest mistake. I checked this several times, thinking "surely there aren't two chip plants built at the same time, in roughly the same location with the same company involved?".
There are actually more than these two. There is also GlobalFoundries also on the same street, and also Bosch, although I am not sure, whether the latter is really separate from the ESMC joint venture.
I wonder how these will fare in Saxony. I presume it's an industry which will attract and depend on highly qualified foreign workers. Dresden itself may be fine, but parts of Saxony are sadly no-go areas for anyone remotely non-white, or even moderately liberal. It's a really brain-damaged region outside of Dresden and Leipzig, and even those cities are not exactly welcoming examples of diversity. Given a historic chance of prosperity, I think odds are eastern Germany will shoot itself in the foot epically with this.
> but parts of Saxony are sadly no-go areas for anyone remotely non-white
Which is of course exaggerated as usually and if you are referring to the AFD, my take is that the focus on the eastern part is just cope by the western part, they are rising the same in the western part, the eastern is just ahead of the curve. This is very much a problem of the complete country. If the administration(s) manage to bring back the economy, than the AFD will also go away, if they don't then this will be the far bigger issue for any industry rather than the public perception of the workers.
> I think odds are eastern Germany will shoot itself in the foot epically with this.
How are they shooting themself in the foot, by investing into semiconductors? Even if it eventually fails, how would this be worse, then not having done anything? Also the odds of this failing (like the one in Magdeburg) are rather small. This is the news that the construction is finished, and it is a new module in an already existing factory of an already existing company in exactly this place. I don't believe the company is going to axe it, AFTER the factory is built and the costs were spent. This doesn't make any sense.
> Which is of course exaggerated as usually and if you are referring to the AFD, my take is that the focus on the eastern part is just cope by the western part, they are rising the same in the western part, the eastern is just ahead of the curve.
There is a reason, every young person with half a brain moves to Leipzig/Dresden, or leaves Saxony completely. Cope...The problem with right wing extremism in the area predates the AfD, Saxony was always in the top three for right wing hate crimes. Maybe read criminal stats or Verfassungsschutzberichte instead of crying injustice. Dude, you can't blame lack of decency and empathy on the economy forever... And it won't get better by ignoring shit feeling entitled to outside help fixing your mess.
> How are they shooting themself in the foot, by investing into semiconductors?
Maybe read the comment you replied to. The investment into semiconductors is the great chance for prosperity, reactionary politics and xenophobia how they ruin it.
I'm not saying it does not exist, I am saying that while there are dangerous people and situations in a society and this is one of them, there is no reason, to act like this is dominating entire landscapes. What I find way more concerning is the 32.3% increase in the same year.
Btw, there were 3612 cases in Bavaria[0] in 2024. This means there were 8 cases per 100k inhabitants in Saxony and 27 in Bavaria[1] Do you also want to claim, that Bavaria is a dangerous shithole? It doesn't seem to hurt the industry there.
> Cope...
That was referring to the common trope, that the AFD is solely an issue for the dumb Eastern part and it would never happen in the oh-so-educated Western part.
> Dude, you can't blame lack of decency and empathy on the economy forever... And it won't get better by ignoring shit feeling entitled to outside help fixing your mess.
I don't think political ignorance and frustration directly correlates with day-to-day empathy. But I do think 60 years of propaganda do something to a population and this issue is massively ignored and underestimated. Thinking this doesn't have any effect is saying they sucked at their job, which I think they really didn't, they were professionals in their own kind.
That is exactly what I mean with exaggeration and cope. This is an example of the Western part claiming the high-ground and planting the idea, that this can never happen in the West and is just these stupid Easterns, ignoring that there is very much a radicalism tourism, with people also coming from the West. I do live in Dresden, no there are no "no-go areas". That's just fear mongering and lying.
My man, I didn't even bring up the AfD. So think about that for a moment and do some introspection. You are projecting a lot.
And downplaying those numbers with all cause mortality... Maybe think about that too, hm?!
And your source states Bavaria had 144 violent right wing crimes, which is the number to match. Don't even sweat, for other reasons I would call it a shit hole too. But please, redo the math and be sure to not contrast the total population but the relevant potential victim populations. You know, since xenophobic violence isn't threatening everyone the same...
I live in east Germany and speak from experience. So maybe you are the arrogant one trying to ostplain the world to those seeing just fine.
Hello, GP here. I'm Polish, living in lower Silesia, so not that far from Saxony. My colleague, who worked on that plant, is also originally from this region, but moved to Dresden several years ago.
Either the same problem is much worse over here(possible[0]), or he isn't affected by it.
[0] On the flip side Koreans working at the LG plant here and associated Korean-owned businesses don't seem to mind.
Tbh, for living in the East you sure have the clichee of the arrogant and ignorant 'Wessi' internalized to a P. The idea that there are 'no-go-zones' in Saxony is just silly (I have grown up in one of those apparently 'nazi-infested' areas, my entire family lives there and I visit every couple of weeks). Yes there is a significant far-right problem, and no I don't have a solution either, but as far as hardcore neonazis go, that problem was far worse in the 1990s and early 2000s than now (this was when the 'old nazis' from West Germany moved into East Germany to build their networks - sowing the seeds basically).
Today there are plenty of 'non-white' (as you call them) refugees and asylum seekers (mostly from Syria and Afghanistan) and many more Ukrainian refugees (which for a while were the main target for Russian/AfD propaganda in East Germany) living in Saxon small towns, and 'somehow' it seems to work out (just travel by train or bus through the more rural areas of Saxony for a bit and you'll see).
In conclusion, your black and white world view and generalized insults towards East Germans are quite frankly disgusting.
Wrong comment? I wasn't talking to you and you didn't address any argument made, just reiterating the ever same Ossi vs. Wessi blabla.
> I have grown up in one of those apparently 'nazi-infested' areas, my entire family lives there and I visit every couple of weeks.
And are you even targeted by racism to make yours a relevant experience? Do you even try to understand the problem?
Man, and you even got some refugees! Saxony has one of the lowest shares of migrants and people with a migration background in all of Germany. Even Leipzig and in particular Dresden show up at the bottom compared with other German cities. That's facts.
In contrast, as shown above, Saxony has one of the highest rates of violent crimes motivated by right wing extremism (going on for decades). Tendenz steigend. All together, this makes Saxony factually one of the most dangerous and unwelcoming places to be for anyone targeted by racists. And dude, this is violent crimes, it doesn't even consider the daily verbal hostilities etc..
Maybe, just maybe, if people there would care as much about this very real problem as they care about its perception, things would change for the better. Making yourself the victim is what's disgusting.
As a Western German myself (who doesn't vote AfD), I'm inclined to agree.
Division and looking down on people, especially using attributes like "braindead", is arrogant and also just adds to the political capital of the far right.
Things that are not direct calls to violence or tearing down democracy must be acceptable parts of the discussion. And calling people who have opinions you consider hostile or wrong "stupid" has never helped anyone. Even when these opinions already cross the line of what's acceptable or are really "stupid" in your best-faith interpretation.
The Ossi/Wessi thing is especially problematic to bring up I feel. Also, the German East has been attracting industry and science facilities for quite a long time. And parts of Western Germany still seem to have issues with losing their perceived cultural hegemony.
But this process should be welcome to anyone who honestly wants a united Germany state.
Sowing division by looking down on the "former DDR" is a poison to democracy, just like yearning for autocracy.
The term "former DDR" is only recently going out of style in Western Germany, and that already says a lot.
Looking down on the AFD is understandable when you detest right-wing ideology, but it is no more helpful than laughing about people who were nostalgic about parts of the former DDR.
Adding arrogant arguments about wealth, the economy or cosmopolitanism will only increase this division and also the success of the AFD in the West.
For example, rejecting to celebrate and awe at cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism is not "Nazi".
That being said, yes, there are violent Nazis in Germany, many but not only in Eastern Germany.
Pointing fingers at only this problem just further sows division though, and it should also be clear that the far right that is active in the East is not a seperate entity from the far right in Western Germany.
Some regions in Western Germany also have strong far right hegemony, or are shifting to it, especially the poorer regions.
Sowing division about wealth and relating it to xenophobia is not helpful in increasing tolerance or decreasing frustration of working people.
And there is a shrinking part of the German left that ostentatiously is about human values, but has an ambivalent relationship towards capitalism, while rejecting any and all remotely critical sentiments regarding immigration. Often, even rejecting the German state: considering themselves leftists, but at the same time being deeply intertwined with the dominant cultural and political currents, and often enjoying a lot of wealth.
The arrogance of this "wealthy liberal establishment" as an issue is not much different from what helped Trump get elected, I feel.
The contradictory combination of being anti-right, pro-immigration, demanding of material wealth and at the same time claiming the moral arrogance of being on the morally "good" side will not slow down the decline of the left party of the political spectrum.
Not to mention federal politicians doing their best to kill the German economy and motivation to work at all, it's quite hard to imagine why any foreign engineer would chose to move to Saxony of all places. Have you been to the countryside in the Bundesland? It's bad. Neonazi and racism all over the place. Literally visible to the casual observer, you don't even have to talk to anyone. T-shirts, stickers, graffiti, stupid notices, ... people there don't hide it.
Dresden and especially Leipzig are quite nice though - lots of culture, music and art. Also close to Berlin. It's not exactly like you would have to travel through the countryside by carriage to get anywhere. I agree that the political and cultural situation outside the cities there is sad though.
I am frequently in Leipzig, it's indeed a very nice city. But it's also immediately obvious people with a (visible) migration background are a smaller minority than elsewhere (which is backed by stats). So for a lived experience, I would strongly suggest talking to those minorities. The reports I heard speak of a lot of casual racism.
While you don't have to travel by carriage, you may even use the airport, avoiding the Umland is still an alienating and saddening state of affairs you can hardly call acceptable. For example, Saxony has absolutely beautiful nature along the Elbsandsteingebirge/Sächsische Schweiz, but those areas are also notoriously hot spots of the violent far right (e.g. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinheads_S%C3%A4chsische_Schw...). For me it felt moderately dangerous, as a white person. As an Indian, are you gonna join your colleagues on "workation" there, are you gonna bring up your worries? It's all fine, bro, racism in Saxony is all Wessi propaganda, bro. Just avoid leaving the safe zones.
How is this a bad thing??? Public names should be transparent and precise. It's the TSMC branch for Europe. This is exactly what the name says. I don't want a fancy name that sounds cool, but doesn't mean anything, so everyone needs to look up, what it means first. Names are supposed to be self-explanatory.
Infineon is betting big on the 800V dc power distribution that seems to become the new standard for AI data centers which is directly relevant for the chips that are made in this fab.
I think (but I have no actual insides), they picked 800V dc for datacenter also because that is commonly used for the DC bus in EVs. So, one can share a lot of components across industries. Also, 800V just kind of works well for power transistors like SiC Fets.
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.
"Process node," in the sense of logic, RAM or Flash density, isn't relevant here. These are power devices. Silicon Carbide FETS and whatnot; bulk current switching and related devices. Not frontier process node logic devices.
That reality is carefully left unclear in all this "silicon sovereignty" narrative. It's a nice plant with new tooling cranking out 300mm wafers, but it's not the same game as a TSMC or Intel fab making cutting edge, high margin silicon, and there are a number of competitors making similar power devices around the world. And yes, the "AI" fluff is pure marketing nonsense; everyone needs lots of power devices for everything. Yes, they'll obviously seek lucrative contracts to supply exotic power devices for AI applications, but that stuff gets commoditized quickly.
Also suitable for keeping an economy functioning and weaponry in war.
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 (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.
Phones and laptops from a few years ago are not suddenly unusable.
Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person. Even gpu inference on older process nodes is perfectly doable. The HPC space absolutely prefers newer chips but hasn't ripped out their 2018 chips in their clusters because they still deliver value.
And sure, the latest best things sells for higher margins for now, but with the way consumer prices are going, people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less.
The greater danger to a working economy is not absence of the absolute must cutting edge chips but lack of independence which this initiative seems to seek to curtail. Good for Germany.
>Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person.
Except, it's the cutting edge that makes more money than making HW from 2016. And EU would definitely like to make more money rather than less.
Plus, Germany and EU doesn't even make 2016 levels of PC HW to have sovereignty there. They still depend on importing US chips made in Taiwan even if they want 2016 HW.
>people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less.
Doesn't really matter what people are choosing, the high margin parts are going towards datacenter customers now, not to consumers. Consumers have little choice now.
And with new consumer stuff seeing price increases, even old used HW is also seeing price increases due to supply and demand. And none of this is a win for Germany and the EU since they don't capture much value from this.
Maybe you just woke up from a coma but here in Europe we’re ramping up our industrial base for a shooting war with Russia after the US withdraws from NATO. I don’t think smartphones are the biggest concern.
Smartphones(apple and google) make a lot of money, money which you need to finance the war with Russia.
And the non-Apple, non-Google smartphone, like Korea and China have, create the backbone of supply chain electronics that enable the Korean and Chinese military tech to be so advanced and cheap.
How thick can you be to not see the importance of such an industry in the defense sector? You say Europe woke up from a coma, but from your argument, I can safely say we're still deep in it and there's no way we're ever waking up if the average Europoor thinks like you.
I’m fine with taking back sovereignty on the smartphone side as well since we can’t really rely on Apple and Google to not do whatever the guy in the White House asks them to do but we have to walk before we run.
If this thing evolves into a global war who would we export to?
When it comes to war with Russia, all the Fabs in Dresden are also primary targets for a strike with ballistic weapon systems. In the worst-case scenario, these will be attacked with conventional warheads or rather with a small thermonuclear warhead (EMP?). Probably the Fabs as a tactical target are even more in danger than MBDA in Bavaria or the tactical HQ of NATO in Rostock. Let's hope for a miracle that calms the escalation.
They are the most profitable, but you don't need much of those. While you need tons of cheap chips for robotics in manufacturing. If you want to focus on profits, you focus on the former, if you want the backbone of your industry to be more resilient, you focus on the latter. In a case of an embargo, the consumers can use yesteryear's hardware just fine, while the robot with a fixed deprecation schedule needs to be replaced.
> these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses
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].
>Heck, the only countries with Gallium Nitride fabrication capabilities and knowhow are the US, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and India.
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.
It's actually the US that restricts ASML from selling EUV machines to China. The EUV light source itself is American technology developed and produced by Cymer in California. ASML was only permitted to acquire Cymer in 2014 under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government.
It's why, for instance, ASML's next generation research lithography machine is currently being installed in upstate New York and not somewhere in the Netherlands.
>It's why, for instance, ASML's next generation research lithography machine is currently being installed in upstate New York and not somewhere in the Netherlands.
Or more likely because there's already a semi fab in upstate new york and no fabs in the netherlands.
Nope. OP's right (and the only other person other than me who has pointed this out on HN).
ASML was one of the founding partners in Albany NanoTech in collaboration with SEMATECH which became the Upstate NY Semiconductor Cluster back in the mid-2000s [0][1].
It was out of SEMATECH that DUV and EUV Photolithography was productionized and licensed to ASML.
Much of the underlying IP used by ASML is licensed and firewalled under JVs with the US DoE and/or the SUNY Consortium (primarily their D/EUV light source work) or firewalled and export controlled by Taiwan (primarily their metrology work)
Btw, that tidbit has become one of the main vetting techniques I use now to see whether someone is blowing hot air or has actual experience in the Semiconductor industry.
Ah man, too bad you spent half your comment thumping your chest and dissing others, just to flex on your incomplete semi knowledge, because if you would have just stayed humble when explaining things without throwing accusations, you'd come out looking better.
If you actually knew as much as you claim, you'd have known that ASML bought SVG in 2001, and became ASML US, so in 2004, it was ASML US, former SVG, that was investing in SEMATECH, not the Dutch ASML. It may have the ASML label, but it still remains a sovereign US operation, like you said firewalled form the rest.
I could be wrong about some of this, but if so then it's another good chance for you to flex again on how you know more than some of us.
The SVG acquisition was still part of the initial CRADA. Nor does it undermine my nor OP's point.
And it's not about flexing. I've gotten tired of reflexive Euro- and American nationalism on HN by people who don't work in the industry.
People dissing fairly hard European initiatives like Infineon work building a GaN wafer fab instead of one dedicated to logic ICs or going the complete opposite and postulating the EU can be completely cut off from the US and replicate every technology from scratch are both constantly brought up on HN and are ridiculous positions.
ASEAN doesn't have the capacity yet, but this is changing in 3-5 years as Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam have gotten IP transfers from European, Korean and Japanese technology partners.
Neither does the rest of the Europe excluding an Ireland-UK-UAE JV called ChipX (but the team is largely located in the US, UAE, Malaysia, and Japan) and the portion of STMicro in France that was part of state-owned Thomson Semiconducteurs before it was privatized.
Neither do any of the major industrial states in the Americas like Canada, Mexico, or Brazil.
> that's standard practice that the EU and US also do
My point is that states need to build domestic capacity where possible. And the EU is not a state. France continued to protect their GaN fabrication IP closely (not even sharing it with Italy despite STMicro being a French-Italian JV), and same with Germany to a certain extent.
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.
Designing a secure platform is possible within the EU[1].
[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.
Siemens has bought together a bunch of EDA tool makers, most notably Mentor Graphics. It doesn't really bring the know-how to Germany, but at least some kind of control over it.
It's not just high end CPUs that use the latest processes. Power, Performance and Area is important to all chips, including microcontrollers, FPGA, etc.
“Only for industrial uses” is kind of a crazy thing to say when you say it out loud, don’t you think? You might as well say “only for having real-world impact”.
You do not need a 2nm processor to run an engine, perform an ultrasound, drop a missile on someone's head, make 10 million parts in a factory, or fly a plane. The vast majority of the increased processing power we've developed since the mid-2010s gets pissed away rendering 30MB websites or generating AI cheating fruit husband videos. Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago.
We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year at never-before-seen speed, but every single day, hundreds or thousands of times a day, you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so.
>You do not need a 2nm processor to [...] drop a missile on someone's head, make 10 million parts in a factory, or fly a plane.
What a silly argument. You DO NEED those 2nm CPUs and GPUs to run the CAD and CAE work to design an effective missile and run the battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing to decide when and where to drop that missile. Otherwise if you stay low tech on 20 year old HW, you end up like Russian army today.
Look at EU supercomputers that run these tasks along with the computation needed for high-margin EU industries like pharma such as Novo Nordisk, and it all runs on low-nm US chips made in Taiwan, not EU made microcontrollers and mosfets. Where's EU domestic sovereignty there?
>Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago.
An out of touch argument on manipulating a definition of "real work". Work done by industrial controllers isn't "more real" than that done by CPUs and GPUs. By this definition the janitors and handyman in the hospital does more "real work" than the x-ray tech sitting looking at cat videos between looking at x-rays all day. Our economy, yes even in the EU, works on who and what creates more added value to the economy, not whose job is more tough and gritty getting their hands dirty. Work smart, not hard.
>We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year [...] you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so
Again, more ignorance. Jobs on vibe coding a SaaS pays way better in Europe and gets you better perks and working conditions, than writing the code of a PLC. Ask me how I know(former embedded programmer here in the semi industry). Or just look up the salaries on the jobs market. The SW industry just pays way better than the industrial controller HW industry. Yeah, the latter is important too, but clearly not important enough when you see the salaries you're offered, meaning they don't actually value it as much.
Your luddite comment just reeks of the typical German/European ignorance and arrogance that made us fall behind the tech race, the EV race, etc leading to the EU losing a lot of GDP and influence on the world stage: "We don't need this battery EV car shit, you can just use diesel engines from 10 years ago", "we don't need this fancy self driving shit, our drivers love driving our cars themselves".
>You DO NEED those 2nm CPUs and GPUs to run the CAD and CAE work to design an effective missile
We've been able to do intensive CAD and CAE to make effective missiles for a long while now. Modern process nodes are not required. Iran has been doing appreciable missile damage to US bases, and has never entered the TOP500.
> and run the battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing to decide when and where to drop that missile.
We have current, ongoing conflicts where it's clear that battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing is taking the backseat to just shooting people, blowing people up, and blowing obvious buildings and installations up. I know that is a gross oversimplification, but militaries worldwide have been chasing after sci-fi shit that's going to be The Future of War just for 99% of the ideas to hit the scrap pile while the remaining 1% develop into incremental improvements in doctrine. The most impactful idea to come out of the Russia-Ukraine war has been strapping an RPG-7 round to an ATmega328-controlled quadcopter, no Nvidia H200s involved.
>Otherwise if you stay low tech on 20 year old HW, you end up like Russian army today.
I'm sorry, but I don't know how you can say with a straight face that technological issues are even close to the top of the list of issues for the Russian military.
>Look at EU supercomputers that run these tasks, along with the computation needed for high-margin EU industries like pharma such as Novo Nordisk, and it all runs on low-nm US chips made in Taiwan,
Something being high margin doesn't mean it's a critical part of European sovereignty. Novo Nordisk making 75% of its profits on selling weight loss drugs to overweight Americans is indirectly good for the bloc because money is generally useful, but it's hardly a matter of security. A lot of low-margin businesses are massively subsidized for this reason. Why do you think the US has such massive subsidies for farming?
>not EU made microcontrollers and mosfets. Where's EU domestic sovereignty there?
The MCUs and FETs are what allows any semblance of day-to-day life to continue. If you had to choose to be a nation with only power electronics and MCUs, or a nation with only high-end CPUs, any sane person is picking the former. It follows that you focus on making sure the former is in place first.
>An out of touch argument on manipulating a definition of "real work". Work done by industrial controllers isn't "more real" than that done by CPUs and GPUs.
In a literal sense, yes, in most cases it is. You NEED the microcontrollers and power electronics to support the production of critical infrastructure and equipment more than you need the latest phone SoC. Even if you have the cutting edge CPUs and GPUs, if you are cut off from other componentry, you're not getting very far with it.
>By this definition the janitors and handyman in the hospital does more "real work" than the x-ray tech sitting looking at cat videos between looking at x-rays all day.
The tradesmen built the hospital in the first place, and the support staff keep it running. Yes, the x-ray tech would massively outstrip the strategic importance of the people that actually build and maintain the hospitals if buildings lasted forever and you never planned on building another hospital again.
>Our economy, yes even in the EU, works on who and what creates more added value to the economy, not whose job is more tough and gritty getting their hands dirty. Work smart, not hard.
Alcohol, advertising, gambling, and porn create a huge amount of added value. These are of very little interest to national security.
>Again, more ignorance. Jobs on vibe coding a SaaS pays way better in Europe and gets you better perks and working conditions, than writing the code of a PLC. Ask me how I know(former embedded programmer here in the semi industry). Or just look up the salaries on the jobs market. The SW industry just pays way better than the industrial controller HW industry. Yeah, the latter is important too, but clearly not important enough when you see the salaries you're offered, meaning they don't actually value it as much.
Those salaries are massively suppressed by various cultural dynamics in Europe, and a misplaced trust in the US to protect it. Europe is waking up to the possibility that the US may not be a permanent ally. The government that no longer trusts NATO's biggest spender isn't concerned about your wish that they would primarily invest in cutting edge technology that has as-of-yet undetermined returns in national security so that you can have a salary closer to what you would see in an American tech company.
>Your luddite comment just reeks of the typical German/European ignorance and arrogance that made us fall behind the tech race, the EV race, etc leading to the EU losing a lot of GDP and influence on the world stage: "We don't need this battery EV car shit, you can just use diesel engines from 10 years ago", "we don't need this fancy self driving shit, our drivers love driving our cars themselves".
I'm in the US. I don't have a dog in the hunt. I do agree that European ignorance/arrogance has put your nations and you personally in a bad position. I truly am sorry that you can't make the money you want working on the things that will allow you to endure if the rubber actually meets the road. Even though that's all true, prioritizing cutting-edge chip fab over the basics that are supporting your ability to defend and provide for yourselves at the most basic level is just an incorrect move. It is not a coincidence that this stuff picked up steam after the war in Ukraine started, and Trump started floating the idea of leaving NATO.
>Novo Nordisk making 75% of its profits on selling weight loss drugs to overweight Americans is indirectly good for the bloc because money is generally useful
The highest margin businesses in EU run on US IP made in Taiwan. How is that on sovereignty? I literally addressed this twice. It's a massive vulnerability that nobody in the EU is even remotely addressing. Making our own 0,02$ microcontrollers and mosfets is missing the forest from the trees. Why do you think China is making their own GPUs now?
>The tradesmen built the hospital in the first place, and the support staff keep it running.
Except there's more tradesmen than x-ray techs on the market, and training or importing the former from aboard is a lot easier and cheaper than the latter. Flawed argument.
>The MCUs and FETs are what allows any semblance of day-to-day life to continue.
So does having shoes on your feet, yet we don't onshore shoe manufacturing in the west.
>Those salaries are massively suppressed by various cultural dynamics in Europe, and a misplaced trust in the US to protect it.
No, they're suppressed by the EU business elites who want cheap labor. The US is the convenient boogieman so that the Europoors don't guillotine their leaders and oligarchs.
>so that you can have a salary closer to what you would see in an American tech company.
Haha, that's just wishful thinking. HW and embedded SW jobs still pay like shit in Europe because the EU economy is so shit it's too addicted to offshoring and driving labor costs into the ground in the race to the bottom to increase shareholder value. So everyone still wants to be a Saas tech-bro than an engineer because it pays better.
>prioritizing cutting-edge chip fab over the basics that are supporting your ability to defend and provide for yourselves at the most basic level is just an incorrect move.
My brother in Christ, cutting edge fabs can also make 0,02$ microcontrollers and transistors in case of war, they're not stuck making GPUS. There's no logical reason to stay on ancient processes nodes other than because you're too broke to afford cutting edge fabs. Why do you think China is so depurate to make cutting edge fabs and not stay on >7nM?
Your arguments are mostly flawed based on poor understanding of sovereignty, supply chains and market economics.
If the former all go missing, the consumer is not going to buy a new phone/laptop/etc. this year. If the latter go missing, agriculture and manufacturing companies (e.g. the automotive industry) go broke. The former have more profit, the latter are more important.
>The former have more profit, the latter are more important.
That's a massive contradiction stemming from ignorance, based your skewed and subjective definition of what's more important.
With more money from selling the former high-profit stuff, you can just buy the latter low-margin stuff from a sea of suppliers/countries locked in a race to them bottom to sell to you. Which is how the US economy works and grows.
And the later being less profitable is at constant danger from rising competitors in Asia meaning EU companies have more competition and less margins and why their wages are lower.
If you're still confused on how you judge what's more important, in essence, making more money IS what's more important, not making low margin trinkets that you subjectively see as being more important. Like the arab states don't make jack shit, but they still get to buy the most cutting edge shit they need thanks to their massive oil money.
Because with your logic, making shoes would be more important, because without shoes people wouldn't be able to walk outside their houses, when shoes are actually low margin commodity readily available from thousands of sweatshops, not something any country takes pride in manufacturing domestically anymore, for better and for worse.
If I was Queen of Germany, I would put everything into a platform like Arduino or RaspPi which can be widely used across industries and education. Some amount of taxes will be allocated to buy these boards and guarantee demand for manufacturing. Then every citizen gets such a device in return. Basically mandatory purchase. The education sector can completely lean in on the platform, abundance will have it dominate DIY projects and may create additional demand as reference platform. Whoever doesn't need it, can sell it or give it away to charity. This will stabilize a critical industry and aid digital education, engineering and so on. I feel like people would be more easy about a tax, if they get a physical product in exchange.
Over time this program would be extended to include and bring back other critical industries and manufacturing capabilities, ultimately leading to citizens being able to choose their mandatory product to some extent and preference. For example it would be really cool to have a basic, but very robust and repairable sewing machine, 3D printer, ... which all aid survivability/adaptability of the collective in crisis, if widely distributed. These products would also set the baseline for quality and accessibility expectations.
Of course this goes hand in hand with a 4 day work week, so people can actually learn to appreciate their mandated crisis hobbies and indulge their family and friends doing so. And if all of this doesn't pan out economically, I would simply plunder and enslave a neighboring country <3
Good, that you are not. An overpriced variant, running on marketing, of a cheap non-customizable product, riddled with design errors in the hardware and non-existent to actually broken software, without any liability and support, basically only suitable for consumers with too much time and interest, being mandatory for the industry is surely going to help.
As I mentioned about this before [0], this is a compound semiconductor fab - a very critical bottleneck for European industry and a much more worrisome NatSec issue than sub-14nm logical chip fabrication or arguably even AI.
This is not directly related to AI or logical compute, so kvetching about GPUs, SoCs, TSMC, AI, and other buzzwords is dumb.
I would also like to see local PCB manufacturers - pcbway etc like. Modern production facilities might even be locally competitive given the amount of automation that can be had.
The company seems to be primarily in Germany (Aachen), with headquarters/holding company just across the border in The Netherlands (10km away in Lemiers, right on the border). That region is pretty economically integrated and I believe setups like this are fairly common to make use of the "business climate" of The Netherlands. Think taxes but also less bureaucracy. It looks like at least one of the founders also studied in Maastricht.
They should, but sadly it's extremely difficult for PCB board manufacturing to return to Europe.
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.
Let's see the state of this project in 5 years. Experience tends to show European projects dragging forever and then suddenly closing whilst funds mysteriously move into semi public companies with boards full to the brim with retired political figures
You say this like it is a bad thing. But I think it is good, that less people in the food industry get exploited and get a proper wage. This means that the food can't be price competitive with other regions who don't pay a proper wage. And I am very glad, that we still produce at least some amount of food, even if it is inefficient as far as market theory is concerned, because I rather still want to eat something, even when some foreign nation determines we shouldn't get their food or there is some supply chain event again.
I also prefer to be able to go to the doctor and not be broke, because modern medicine is fucking expensive and nearly nobody would be able to pay for that alone. Also even for the few rich guys who could afford it, it gets cheaper that way, because otherwise there would be far fewer people on whose shoulder the fixed costs need to be split.
The issue with the pensions is also not the pensions per se, but the very unhealthy population structure. That's a problem nobody has a real solution for, but that doesn't mean pensions are bad.
Why should people in food industry have a special threatment compared to people working in other industries?
If I was paying a market price for my medical insurance, I would probably pay a third of it and be able to get a screening sooner than in a half a year as a cancer patient.
Pensions are a special case in my country, because we have just state pensions and almost no private funds. Everyone in my age - late 20s or early 30s know, that we pay a great share of our income to current pensioners but we won't be able to get it because of the demographics.
EDIT: Apparently it's a different plant.
It's not just Infineon - it's called the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC) and is a joint venture by TSMC, Bosch, Infineon, and NXP, with TSMC being the majority (70%) shareholder.
I've met one of the engineers designing the piping for that plant. Hardest project to date for him and mainly because TSMC was setting the pace.
These are different plants, that are situated in the same quarter.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1191197175 vs. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/583767292
You're right, honest mistake. I checked this several times, thinking "surely there aren't two chip plants built at the same time, in roughly the same location with the same company involved?".
Apparently there are.
There are actually more than these two. There is also GlobalFoundries also on the same street, and also Bosch, although I am not sure, whether the latter is really separate from the ESMC joint venture.
I wonder how these will fare in Saxony. I presume it's an industry which will attract and depend on highly qualified foreign workers. Dresden itself may be fine, but parts of Saxony are sadly no-go areas for anyone remotely non-white, or even moderately liberal. It's a really brain-damaged region outside of Dresden and Leipzig, and even those cities are not exactly welcoming examples of diversity. Given a historic chance of prosperity, I think odds are eastern Germany will shoot itself in the foot epically with this.
> but parts of Saxony are sadly no-go areas for anyone remotely non-white
Which is of course exaggerated as usually and if you are referring to the AFD, my take is that the focus on the eastern part is just cope by the western part, they are rising the same in the western part, the eastern is just ahead of the curve. This is very much a problem of the complete country. If the administration(s) manage to bring back the economy, than the AFD will also go away, if they don't then this will be the far bigger issue for any industry rather than the public perception of the workers.
> I think odds are eastern Germany will shoot itself in the foot epically with this.
How are they shooting themself in the foot, by investing into semiconductors? Even if it eventually fails, how would this be worse, then not having done anything? Also the odds of this failing (like the one in Magdeburg) are rather small. This is the news that the construction is finished, and it is a new module in an already existing factory of an already existing company in exactly this place. I don't believe the company is going to axe it, AFTER the factory is built and the costs were spent. This doesn't make any sense.
> Which is of course exaggerated as usually and if you are referring to the AFD, my take is that the focus on the eastern part is just cope by the western part, they are rising the same in the western part, the eastern is just ahead of the curve.
Sure buddy. https://www.raa-sachsen.de/support/statistik/statistiken/rec...
There is a reason, every young person with half a brain moves to Leipzig/Dresden, or leaves Saxony completely. Cope...The problem with right wing extremism in the area predates the AfD, Saxony was always in the top three for right wing hate crimes. Maybe read criminal stats or Verfassungsschutzberichte instead of crying injustice. Dude, you can't blame lack of decency and empathy on the economy forever... And it won't get better by ignoring shit feeling entitled to outside help fixing your mess.
> How are they shooting themself in the foot, by investing into semiconductors?
Maybe read the comment you replied to. The investment into semiconductors is the great chance for prosperity, reactionary politics and xenophobia how they ruin it.
Public perception is already brilliant: https://www.fr.de/politik/vorsicht-ostdeutschland-11150062.h...
> Sure buddy. https://www.raa-sachsen.de/support/statistik/statistiken/rec...
> Im Jahr 2024 verzeichneten Opferberatungsstellen in Sachsen 328 rechtsmotivierte Angriffe, von denen mindestens 446 Personen direkt betroffen waren.
According to https://www.statistik.sachsen.de/html/lebenserwartung-gestor... there were 56.968 dead people in Saxony. Assuming all of those attacks killed all people which they didn't, you are 120 times more likely to just die, than to be in one of those attacks. According to https://www.lpr.sachsen.de/download/Lagebild_HGW_2024.pdf, there were 10.202 cases of domestic violence in the same year.
I'm not saying it does not exist, I am saying that while there are dangerous people and situations in a society and this is one of them, there is no reason, to act like this is dominating entire landscapes. What I find way more concerning is the 32.3% increase in the same year.
Btw, there were 3612 cases in Bavaria[0] in 2024. This means there were 8 cases per 100k inhabitants in Saxony and 27 in Bavaria[1] Do you also want to claim, that Bavaria is a dangerous shithole? It doesn't seem to hurt the industry there.
> Cope...
That was referring to the common trope, that the AFD is solely an issue for the dumb Eastern part and it would never happen in the oh-so-educated Western part.
> Dude, you can't blame lack of decency and empathy on the economy forever... And it won't get better by ignoring shit feeling entitled to outside help fixing your mess.
I don't think political ignorance and frustration directly correlates with day-to-day empathy. But I do think 60 years of propaganda do something to a population and this issue is massively ignored and underestimated. Thinking this doesn't have any effect is saying they sucked at their job, which I think they really didn't, they were professionals in their own kind.
> Public perception is already brilliant: https://www.fr.de/politik/vorsicht-ostdeutschland-11150062.h...
That is exactly what I mean with exaggeration and cope. This is an example of the Western part claiming the high-ground and planting the idea, that this can never happen in the West and is just these stupid Easterns, ignoring that there is very much a radicalism tourism, with people also coming from the West. I do live in Dresden, no there are no "no-go areas". That's just fear mongering and lying.
[0] https://www.gruene-fraktion-bayern.de/themen/demokratie-gege... [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demografie_Deutschlands#mwKak
My man, I didn't even bring up the AfD. So think about that for a moment and do some introspection. You are projecting a lot.
And downplaying those numbers with all cause mortality... Maybe think about that too, hm?!
And your source states Bavaria had 144 violent right wing crimes, which is the number to match. Don't even sweat, for other reasons I would call it a shit hole too. But please, redo the math and be sure to not contrast the total population but the relevant potential victim populations. You know, since xenophobic violence isn't threatening everyone the same...
I live in east Germany and speak from experience. So maybe you are the arrogant one trying to ostplain the world to those seeing just fine.
Hello, GP here. I'm Polish, living in lower Silesia, so not that far from Saxony. My colleague, who worked on that plant, is also originally from this region, but moved to Dresden several years ago.
Either the same problem is much worse over here(possible[0]), or he isn't affected by it.
[0] On the flip side Koreans working at the LG plant here and associated Korean-owned businesses don't seem to mind.
Tbh, for living in the East you sure have the clichee of the arrogant and ignorant 'Wessi' internalized to a P. The idea that there are 'no-go-zones' in Saxony is just silly (I have grown up in one of those apparently 'nazi-infested' areas, my entire family lives there and I visit every couple of weeks). Yes there is a significant far-right problem, and no I don't have a solution either, but as far as hardcore neonazis go, that problem was far worse in the 1990s and early 2000s than now (this was when the 'old nazis' from West Germany moved into East Germany to build their networks - sowing the seeds basically).
Today there are plenty of 'non-white' (as you call them) refugees and asylum seekers (mostly from Syria and Afghanistan) and many more Ukrainian refugees (which for a while were the main target for Russian/AfD propaganda in East Germany) living in Saxon small towns, and 'somehow' it seems to work out (just travel by train or bus through the more rural areas of Saxony for a bit and you'll see).
In conclusion, your black and white world view and generalized insults towards East Germans are quite frankly disgusting.
Wrong comment? I wasn't talking to you and you didn't address any argument made, just reiterating the ever same Ossi vs. Wessi blabla.
> I have grown up in one of those apparently 'nazi-infested' areas, my entire family lives there and I visit every couple of weeks.
And are you even targeted by racism to make yours a relevant experience? Do you even try to understand the problem?
Man, and you even got some refugees! Saxony has one of the lowest shares of migrants and people with a migration background in all of Germany. Even Leipzig and in particular Dresden show up at the bottom compared with other German cities. That's facts.
* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrationshintergrund * https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel...
In contrast, as shown above, Saxony has one of the highest rates of violent crimes motivated by right wing extremism (going on for decades). Tendenz steigend. All together, this makes Saxony factually one of the most dangerous and unwelcoming places to be for anyone targeted by racists. And dude, this is violent crimes, it doesn't even consider the daily verbal hostilities etc..
Maybe, just maybe, if people there would care as much about this very real problem as they care about its perception, things would change for the better. Making yourself the victim is what's disgusting.
As a Western German myself (who doesn't vote AfD), I'm inclined to agree.
Division and looking down on people, especially using attributes like "braindead", is arrogant and also just adds to the political capital of the far right.
Things that are not direct calls to violence or tearing down democracy must be acceptable parts of the discussion. And calling people who have opinions you consider hostile or wrong "stupid" has never helped anyone. Even when these opinions already cross the line of what's acceptable or are really "stupid" in your best-faith interpretation.
The Ossi/Wessi thing is especially problematic to bring up I feel. Also, the German East has been attracting industry and science facilities for quite a long time. And parts of Western Germany still seem to have issues with losing their perceived cultural hegemony.
But this process should be welcome to anyone who honestly wants a united Germany state.
Sowing division by looking down on the "former DDR" is a poison to democracy, just like yearning for autocracy.
The term "former DDR" is only recently going out of style in Western Germany, and that already says a lot.
Looking down on the AFD is understandable when you detest right-wing ideology, but it is no more helpful than laughing about people who were nostalgic about parts of the former DDR.
Adding arrogant arguments about wealth, the economy or cosmopolitanism will only increase this division and also the success of the AFD in the West.
For example, rejecting to celebrate and awe at cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism is not "Nazi".
That being said, yes, there are violent Nazis in Germany, many but not only in Eastern Germany.
Pointing fingers at only this problem just further sows division though, and it should also be clear that the far right that is active in the East is not a seperate entity from the far right in Western Germany.
Some regions in Western Germany also have strong far right hegemony, or are shifting to it, especially the poorer regions.
Sowing division about wealth and relating it to xenophobia is not helpful in increasing tolerance or decreasing frustration of working people.
And there is a shrinking part of the German left that ostentatiously is about human values, but has an ambivalent relationship towards capitalism, while rejecting any and all remotely critical sentiments regarding immigration. Often, even rejecting the German state: considering themselves leftists, but at the same time being deeply intertwined with the dominant cultural and political currents, and often enjoying a lot of wealth.
The arrogance of this "wealthy liberal establishment" as an issue is not much different from what helped Trump get elected, I feel.
The contradictory combination of being anti-right, pro-immigration, demanding of material wealth and at the same time claiming the moral arrogance of being on the morally "good" side will not slow down the decline of the left party of the political spectrum.
> I wonder how these will fare in Saxony. I presume it's an industry which will attract and depend on highly qualified foreign workers.
Saxony has had a decently-sized or large (by German standards) microelectronics sector for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Saxony
As you'd probably guess, they're mostly situated around Leipzig and Dresden.
I know about the historic connection, but that doesn't change the political/cultural climate in the area.
As a matter of fact, the chairman of Silicon Saxony is concerned as well: https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2024-02/afd-sachsen-silicon-s...
Not to mention federal politicians doing their best to kill the German economy and motivation to work at all, it's quite hard to imagine why any foreign engineer would chose to move to Saxony of all places. Have you been to the countryside in the Bundesland? It's bad. Neonazi and racism all over the place. Literally visible to the casual observer, you don't even have to talk to anyone. T-shirts, stickers, graffiti, stupid notices, ... people there don't hide it.
Dresden and especially Leipzig are quite nice though - lots of culture, music and art. Also close to Berlin. It's not exactly like you would have to travel through the countryside by carriage to get anywhere. I agree that the political and cultural situation outside the cities there is sad though.
I am frequently in Leipzig, it's indeed a very nice city. But it's also immediately obvious people with a (visible) migration background are a smaller minority than elsewhere (which is backed by stats). So for a lived experience, I would strongly suggest talking to those minorities. The reports I heard speak of a lot of casual racism.
While you don't have to travel by carriage, you may even use the airport, avoiding the Umland is still an alienating and saddening state of affairs you can hardly call acceptable. For example, Saxony has absolutely beautiful nature along the Elbsandsteingebirge/Sächsische Schweiz, but those areas are also notoriously hot spots of the violent far right (e.g. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinheads_S%C3%A4chsische_Schw...). For me it felt moderately dangerous, as a white person. As an Indian, are you gonna join your colleagues on "workation" there, are you gonna bring up your worries? It's all fine, bro, racism in Saxony is all Wessi propaganda, bro. Just avoid leaving the safe zones.
> Hardest project to date for him and mainly because TSMC was setting the pace.
I can imagine their pace might be accelerated but better than endless discussions, shuffling and never shipping
Isn't that TSMC joint venture another plant that will open next year?
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How is this a bad thing??? Public names should be transparent and precise. It's the TSMC branch for Europe. This is exactly what the name says. I don't want a fancy name that sounds cool, but doesn't mean anything, so everyone needs to look up, what it means first. Names are supposed to be self-explanatory.
Maybe the Americans reached the quota with the Gulf of America.
> The plant will produce chips for intelligent power management
> The company ... sought to capitalise on the massive AI investment boom
These chips are probably very useful and important, but I don't see what they have to do with AI. Does everything need to have the word AI these days?
Infineon is betting big on the 800V dc power distribution that seems to become the new standard for AI data centers which is directly relevant for the chips that are made in this fab.
Hopefully they can use that tech to expand the EV fast charger network once the AI bubble pops.
I think (but I have no actual insides), they picked 800V dc for datacenter also because that is commonly used for the DC bus in EVs. So, one can share a lot of components across industries. Also, 800V just kind of works well for power transistors like SiC Fets.
> don't see what they have to do with AI
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-...
I think this fab was already in construction before the AI hype, this is just marketing.
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"Process node," in the sense of logic, RAM or Flash density, isn't relevant here. These are power devices. Silicon Carbide FETS and whatnot; bulk current switching and related devices. Not frontier process node logic devices.
That reality is carefully left unclear in all this "silicon sovereignty" narrative. It's a nice plant with new tooling cranking out 300mm wafers, but it's not the same game as a TSMC or Intel fab making cutting edge, high margin silicon, and there are a number of competitors making similar power devices around the world. And yes, the "AI" fluff is pure marketing nonsense; everyone needs lots of power devices for everything. Yes, they'll obviously seek lucrative contracts to supply exotic power devices for AI applications, but that stuff gets commoditized quickly.
there was a buzzword bingo and their application reached Bingo! first.
My understanding is that these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses?
Also suitable for keeping an economy functioning and weaponry in war.
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.
>Also suitable for keeping an economy functioning
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.
Phones and laptops from a few years ago are not suddenly unusable.
Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person. Even gpu inference on older process nodes is perfectly doable. The HPC space absolutely prefers newer chips but hasn't ripped out their 2018 chips in their clusters because they still deliver value.
And sure, the latest best things sells for higher margins for now, but with the way consumer prices are going, people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less.
The greater danger to a working economy is not absence of the absolute must cutting edge chips but lack of independence which this initiative seems to seek to curtail. Good for Germany.
>Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person.
Except, it's the cutting edge that makes more money than making HW from 2016. And EU would definitely like to make more money rather than less.
Plus, Germany and EU doesn't even make 2016 levels of PC HW to have sovereignty there. They still depend on importing US chips made in Taiwan even if they want 2016 HW.
>people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less.
Doesn't really matter what people are choosing, the high margin parts are going towards datacenter customers now, not to consumers. Consumers have little choice now.
And with new consumer stuff seeing price increases, even old used HW is also seeing price increases due to supply and demand. And none of this is a win for Germany and the EU since they don't capture much value from this.
Maybe you just woke up from a coma but here in Europe we’re ramping up our industrial base for a shooting war with Russia after the US withdraws from NATO. I don’t think smartphones are the biggest concern.
Smartphones(apple and google) make a lot of money, money which you need to finance the war with Russia.
And the non-Apple, non-Google smartphone, like Korea and China have, create the backbone of supply chain electronics that enable the Korean and Chinese military tech to be so advanced and cheap.
How thick can you be to not see the importance of such an industry in the defense sector? You say Europe woke up from a coma, but from your argument, I can safely say we're still deep in it and there's no way we're ever waking up if the average Europoor thinks like you.
I’m fine with taking back sovereignty on the smartphone side as well since we can’t really rely on Apple and Google to not do whatever the guy in the White House asks them to do but we have to walk before we run.
If this thing evolves into a global war who would we export to?
When it comes to war with Russia, all the Fabs in Dresden are also primary targets for a strike with ballistic weapon systems. In the worst-case scenario, these will be attacked with conventional warheads or rather with a small thermonuclear warhead (EMP?). Probably the Fabs as a tactical target are even more in danger than MBDA in Bavaria or the tactical HQ of NATO in Rostock. Let's hope for a miracle that calms the escalation.
They are the most profitable, but you don't need much of those. While you need tons of cheap chips for robotics in manufacturing. If you want to focus on profits, you focus on the former, if you want the backbone of your industry to be more resilient, you focus on the latter. In a case of an embargo, the consumers can use yesteryear's hardware just fine, while the robot with a fixed deprecation schedule needs to be replaced.
> the consumers can use yesteryear's hardware just fine,
Eu can't make yesterday's HW either. Nor HW form yester-dacde.
Europe's economy has a higher share in the industrial and agricultural sector. The US isn't the sole "western" benchmark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_secto...
A drone will work with 30nm chips just fine, but it won't work with no chips at all
All it has to do is get somewhere and explode, the cheaper the better.
How do you design the drone using 30nm chips in the fist place?
Also, in that case, manufacturing capacity is what counts and EU lacks that too.
Others have explained the gaps in your thinking, all over this thread. Why are you here?
> these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses
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...
>Heck, the only countries with Gallium Nitride fabrication capabilities and knowhow are the US, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and India.
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.
> EU also restricts ASML EUV machines to China
It's actually the US that restricts ASML from selling EUV machines to China. The EUV light source itself is American technology developed and produced by Cymer in California. ASML was only permitted to acquire Cymer in 2014 under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government.
It's why, for instance, ASML's next generation research lithography machine is currently being installed in upstate New York and not somewhere in the Netherlands.
>It's why, for instance, ASML's next generation research lithography machine is currently being installed in upstate New York and not somewhere in the Netherlands.
Or more likely because there's already a semi fab in upstate new york and no fabs in the netherlands.
Nope. OP's right (and the only other person other than me who has pointed this out on HN).
ASML was one of the founding partners in Albany NanoTech in collaboration with SEMATECH which became the Upstate NY Semiconductor Cluster back in the mid-2000s [0][1].
It was out of SEMATECH that DUV and EUV Photolithography was productionized and licensed to ASML.
Much of the underlying IP used by ASML is licensed and firewalled under JVs with the US DoE and/or the SUNY Consortium (primarily their D/EUV light source work) or firewalled and export controlled by Taiwan (primarily their metrology work)
Btw, that tidbit has become one of the main vetting techniques I use now to see whether someone is blowing hot air or has actual experience in the Semiconductor industry.
[0] - https://www.eetimes.com/asml-to-build-400-million-us-researc...
[1] - https://www.eetimes.com/asml-sematech-team-on-manufacturing-...
Ah man, too bad you spent half your comment thumping your chest and dissing others, just to flex on your incomplete semi knowledge, because if you would have just stayed humble when explaining things without throwing accusations, you'd come out looking better.
If you actually knew as much as you claim, you'd have known that ASML bought SVG in 2001, and became ASML US, so in 2004, it was ASML US, former SVG, that was investing in SEMATECH, not the Dutch ASML. It may have the ASML label, but it still remains a sovereign US operation, like you said firewalled form the rest.
I could be wrong about some of this, but if so then it's another good chance for you to flex again on how you know more than some of us.
The SVG acquisition was still part of the initial CRADA. Nor does it undermine my nor OP's point.
And it's not about flexing. I've gotten tired of reflexive Euro- and American nationalism on HN by people who don't work in the industry.
People dissing fairly hard European initiatives like Infineon work building a GaN wafer fab instead of one dedicated to logic ICs or going the complete opposite and postulating the EU can be completely cut off from the US and replicate every technology from scratch are both constantly brought up on HN and are ridiculous positions.
> So basically all major industrial powers
ASEAN doesn't have the capacity yet, but this is changing in 3-5 years as Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam have gotten IP transfers from European, Korean and Japanese technology partners.
Neither does the rest of the Europe excluding an Ireland-UK-UAE JV called ChipX (but the team is largely located in the US, UAE, Malaysia, and Japan) and the portion of STMicro in France that was part of state-owned Thomson Semiconducteurs before it was privatized.
Neither do any of the major industrial states in the Americas like Canada, Mexico, or Brazil.
> that's standard practice that the EU and US also do
My point is that states need to build domestic capacity where possible. And the EU is not a state. France continued to protect their GaN fabrication IP closely (not even sharing it with Italy despite STMicro being a French-Italian JV), and same with Germany to a certain extent.
In 2024 Belgium closed its only semi fab, which had recently pivoted to GaN.
Germany doesn't design high end SoCs or x86 processors so why would they build a fab for them?
Bad take.
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.
Designing a secure platform is possible within the EU[1].
[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.
Siemens has bought together a bunch of EDA tool makers, most notably Mentor Graphics. It doesn't really bring the know-how to Germany, but at least some kind of control over it.
It's not just high end CPUs that use the latest processes. Power, Performance and Area is important to all chips, including microcontrollers, FPGA, etc.
they may low-density, but low-tech?
Still pretty useful to build in EU
“Only for industrial uses” is kind of a crazy thing to say when you say it out loud, don’t you think? You might as well say “only for having real-world impact”.
And 3nm CPUs, GPUs, phone SoCs don't have "real world impact"?
One could say they have an even bigger real world impact.
You do not need a 2nm processor to run an engine, perform an ultrasound, drop a missile on someone's head, make 10 million parts in a factory, or fly a plane. The vast majority of the increased processing power we've developed since the mid-2010s gets pissed away rendering 30MB websites or generating AI cheating fruit husband videos. Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago.
We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year at never-before-seen speed, but every single day, hundreds or thousands of times a day, you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so.
>You do not need a 2nm processor to [...] drop a missile on someone's head, make 10 million parts in a factory, or fly a plane.
What a silly argument. You DO NEED those 2nm CPUs and GPUs to run the CAD and CAE work to design an effective missile and run the battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing to decide when and where to drop that missile. Otherwise if you stay low tech on 20 year old HW, you end up like Russian army today.
Look at EU supercomputers that run these tasks along with the computation needed for high-margin EU industries like pharma such as Novo Nordisk, and it all runs on low-nm US chips made in Taiwan, not EU made microcontrollers and mosfets. Where's EU domestic sovereignty there?
>Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago.
An out of touch argument on manipulating a definition of "real work". Work done by industrial controllers isn't "more real" than that done by CPUs and GPUs. By this definition the janitors and handyman in the hospital does more "real work" than the x-ray tech sitting looking at cat videos between looking at x-rays all day. Our economy, yes even in the EU, works on who and what creates more added value to the economy, not whose job is more tough and gritty getting their hands dirty. Work smart, not hard.
>We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year [...] you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so
Again, more ignorance. Jobs on vibe coding a SaaS pays way better in Europe and gets you better perks and working conditions, than writing the code of a PLC. Ask me how I know(former embedded programmer here in the semi industry). Or just look up the salaries on the jobs market. The SW industry just pays way better than the industrial controller HW industry. Yeah, the latter is important too, but clearly not important enough when you see the salaries you're offered, meaning they don't actually value it as much.
Your luddite comment just reeks of the typical German/European ignorance and arrogance that made us fall behind the tech race, the EV race, etc leading to the EU losing a lot of GDP and influence on the world stage: "We don't need this battery EV car shit, you can just use diesel engines from 10 years ago", "we don't need this fancy self driving shit, our drivers love driving our cars themselves".
>You DO NEED those 2nm CPUs and GPUs to run the CAD and CAE work to design an effective missile
We've been able to do intensive CAD and CAE to make effective missiles for a long while now. Modern process nodes are not required. Iran has been doing appreciable missile damage to US bases, and has never entered the TOP500.
> and run the battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing to decide when and where to drop that missile.
We have current, ongoing conflicts where it's clear that battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing is taking the backseat to just shooting people, blowing people up, and blowing obvious buildings and installations up. I know that is a gross oversimplification, but militaries worldwide have been chasing after sci-fi shit that's going to be The Future of War just for 99% of the ideas to hit the scrap pile while the remaining 1% develop into incremental improvements in doctrine. The most impactful idea to come out of the Russia-Ukraine war has been strapping an RPG-7 round to an ATmega328-controlled quadcopter, no Nvidia H200s involved.
>Otherwise if you stay low tech on 20 year old HW, you end up like Russian army today.
I'm sorry, but I don't know how you can say with a straight face that technological issues are even close to the top of the list of issues for the Russian military.
>Look at EU supercomputers that run these tasks, along with the computation needed for high-margin EU industries like pharma such as Novo Nordisk, and it all runs on low-nm US chips made in Taiwan,
Something being high margin doesn't mean it's a critical part of European sovereignty. Novo Nordisk making 75% of its profits on selling weight loss drugs to overweight Americans is indirectly good for the bloc because money is generally useful, but it's hardly a matter of security. A lot of low-margin businesses are massively subsidized for this reason. Why do you think the US has such massive subsidies for farming?
>not EU made microcontrollers and mosfets. Where's EU domestic sovereignty there?
The MCUs and FETs are what allows any semblance of day-to-day life to continue. If you had to choose to be a nation with only power electronics and MCUs, or a nation with only high-end CPUs, any sane person is picking the former. It follows that you focus on making sure the former is in place first.
>An out of touch argument on manipulating a definition of "real work". Work done by industrial controllers isn't "more real" than that done by CPUs and GPUs.
In a literal sense, yes, in most cases it is. You NEED the microcontrollers and power electronics to support the production of critical infrastructure and equipment more than you need the latest phone SoC. Even if you have the cutting edge CPUs and GPUs, if you are cut off from other componentry, you're not getting very far with it.
>By this definition the janitors and handyman in the hospital does more "real work" than the x-ray tech sitting looking at cat videos between looking at x-rays all day.
The tradesmen built the hospital in the first place, and the support staff keep it running. Yes, the x-ray tech would massively outstrip the strategic importance of the people that actually build and maintain the hospitals if buildings lasted forever and you never planned on building another hospital again.
>Our economy, yes even in the EU, works on who and what creates more added value to the economy, not whose job is more tough and gritty getting their hands dirty. Work smart, not hard.
Alcohol, advertising, gambling, and porn create a huge amount of added value. These are of very little interest to national security.
>Again, more ignorance. Jobs on vibe coding a SaaS pays way better in Europe and gets you better perks and working conditions, than writing the code of a PLC. Ask me how I know(former embedded programmer here in the semi industry). Or just look up the salaries on the jobs market. The SW industry just pays way better than the industrial controller HW industry. Yeah, the latter is important too, but clearly not important enough when you see the salaries you're offered, meaning they don't actually value it as much.
Those salaries are massively suppressed by various cultural dynamics in Europe, and a misplaced trust in the US to protect it. Europe is waking up to the possibility that the US may not be a permanent ally. The government that no longer trusts NATO's biggest spender isn't concerned about your wish that they would primarily invest in cutting edge technology that has as-of-yet undetermined returns in national security so that you can have a salary closer to what you would see in an American tech company.
>Your luddite comment just reeks of the typical German/European ignorance and arrogance that made us fall behind the tech race, the EV race, etc leading to the EU losing a lot of GDP and influence on the world stage: "We don't need this battery EV car shit, you can just use diesel engines from 10 years ago", "we don't need this fancy self driving shit, our drivers love driving our cars themselves".
I'm in the US. I don't have a dog in the hunt. I do agree that European ignorance/arrogance has put your nations and you personally in a bad position. I truly am sorry that you can't make the money you want working on the things that will allow you to endure if the rubber actually meets the road. Even though that's all true, prioritizing cutting-edge chip fab over the basics that are supporting your ability to defend and provide for yourselves at the most basic level is just an incorrect move. It is not a coincidence that this stuff picked up steam after the war in Ukraine started, and Trump started floating the idea of leaving NATO.
>Novo Nordisk making 75% of its profits on selling weight loss drugs to overweight Americans is indirectly good for the bloc because money is generally useful
The highest margin businesses in EU run on US IP made in Taiwan. How is that on sovereignty? I literally addressed this twice. It's a massive vulnerability that nobody in the EU is even remotely addressing. Making our own 0,02$ microcontrollers and mosfets is missing the forest from the trees. Why do you think China is making their own GPUs now?
>The tradesmen built the hospital in the first place, and the support staff keep it running.
Except there's more tradesmen than x-ray techs on the market, and training or importing the former from aboard is a lot easier and cheaper than the latter. Flawed argument.
>The MCUs and FETs are what allows any semblance of day-to-day life to continue.
So does having shoes on your feet, yet we don't onshore shoe manufacturing in the west.
>Those salaries are massively suppressed by various cultural dynamics in Europe, and a misplaced trust in the US to protect it.
No, they're suppressed by the EU business elites who want cheap labor. The US is the convenient boogieman so that the Europoors don't guillotine their leaders and oligarchs.
>so that you can have a salary closer to what you would see in an American tech company.
Haha, that's just wishful thinking. HW and embedded SW jobs still pay like shit in Europe because the EU economy is so shit it's too addicted to offshoring and driving labor costs into the ground in the race to the bottom to increase shareholder value. So everyone still wants to be a Saas tech-bro than an engineer because it pays better.
>prioritizing cutting-edge chip fab over the basics that are supporting your ability to defend and provide for yourselves at the most basic level is just an incorrect move.
My brother in Christ, cutting edge fabs can also make 0,02$ microcontrollers and transistors in case of war, they're not stuck making GPUS. There's no logical reason to stay on ancient processes nodes other than because you're too broke to afford cutting edge fabs. Why do you think China is so depurate to make cutting edge fabs and not stay on >7nM?
Your arguments are mostly flawed based on poor understanding of sovereignty, supply chains and market economics.
If the former all go missing, the consumer is not going to buy a new phone/laptop/etc. this year. If the latter go missing, agriculture and manufacturing companies (e.g. the automotive industry) go broke. The former have more profit, the latter are more important.
>The former have more profit, the latter are more important.
That's a massive contradiction stemming from ignorance, based your skewed and subjective definition of what's more important.
With more money from selling the former high-profit stuff, you can just buy the latter low-margin stuff from a sea of suppliers/countries locked in a race to them bottom to sell to you. Which is how the US economy works and grows.
And the later being less profitable is at constant danger from rising competitors in Asia meaning EU companies have more competition and less margins and why their wages are lower.
If you're still confused on how you judge what's more important, in essence, making more money IS what's more important, not making low margin trinkets that you subjectively see as being more important. Like the arab states don't make jack shit, but they still get to buy the most cutting edge shit they need thanks to their massive oil money.
Because with your logic, making shoes would be more important, because without shoes people wouldn't be able to walk outside their houses, when shoes are actually low margin commodity readily available from thousands of sweatshops, not something any country takes pride in manufacturing domestically anymore, for better and for worse.
If I was Queen of Germany, I would put everything into a platform like Arduino or RaspPi which can be widely used across industries and education. Some amount of taxes will be allocated to buy these boards and guarantee demand for manufacturing. Then every citizen gets such a device in return. Basically mandatory purchase. The education sector can completely lean in on the platform, abundance will have it dominate DIY projects and may create additional demand as reference platform. Whoever doesn't need it, can sell it or give it away to charity. This will stabilize a critical industry and aid digital education, engineering and so on. I feel like people would be more easy about a tax, if they get a physical product in exchange.
Over time this program would be extended to include and bring back other critical industries and manufacturing capabilities, ultimately leading to citizens being able to choose their mandatory product to some extent and preference. For example it would be really cool to have a basic, but very robust and repairable sewing machine, 3D printer, ... which all aid survivability/adaptability of the collective in crisis, if widely distributed. These products would also set the baseline for quality and accessibility expectations.
Of course this goes hand in hand with a 4 day work week, so people can actually learn to appreciate their mandated crisis hobbies and indulge their family and friends doing so. And if all of this doesn't pan out economically, I would simply plunder and enslave a neighboring country <3
Good, that you are not. An overpriced variant, running on marketing, of a cheap non-customizable product, riddled with design errors in the hardware and non-existent to actually broken software, without any liability and support, basically only suitable for consumers with too much time and interest, being mandatory for the industry is surely going to help.
Husch, husch, zum Schafott mit ihm!
As I mentioned about this before [0], this is a compound semiconductor fab - a very critical bottleneck for European industry and a much more worrisome NatSec issue than sub-14nm logical chip fabrication or arguably even AI.
This is not directly related to AI or logical compute, so kvetching about GPUs, SoCs, TSMC, AI, and other buzzwords is dumb.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557914
I would also like to see local PCB manufacturers - pcbway etc like. Modern production facilities might even be locally competitive given the amount of automation that can be had.
Does AISLER[1] do the same thing as pcbway? They seem to be based in Germany/EU
[1] https://aisler.net/en
Looks good - will have to give them a go!
Netherlands actually
Company might be registered in NL but phone number + hosting happens in Germany => maybe only tax reducing?
The company seems to be primarily in Germany (Aachen), with headquarters/holding company just across the border in The Netherlands (10km away in Lemiers, right on the border). That region is pretty economically integrated and I believe setups like this are fairly common to make use of the "business climate" of The Netherlands. Think taxes but also less bureaucracy. It looks like at least one of the founders also studied in Maastricht.
double irish dutch sandwich
They should, but sadly it's extremely difficult for PCB board manufacturing to return to Europe.
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.
Infinity neon! A nice company name.
Funny that the article didn't mention it.
Infineon got €1bn of tax payer money to open the plant (~$1.1bn).
The article says:
> The facility was backed by the EU's Chips Act with one billion euros in subsidies
There are worse ways to spend tax payers money.
Let's see the state of this project in 5 years. Experience tends to show European projects dragging forever and then suddenly closing whilst funds mysteriously move into semi public companies with boards full to the brim with retired political figures
You are aware, that this is the report of the factory being completed right?
member the swedish battery superfactory
I member
Still better odds of success than if that money was used to pay welfare for unskilled migrants instead.
Yeah, most europeans are not aware how much do we spend on agriculture, pensions and healthcare.
You say this like it is a bad thing. But I think it is good, that less people in the food industry get exploited and get a proper wage. This means that the food can't be price competitive with other regions who don't pay a proper wage. And I am very glad, that we still produce at least some amount of food, even if it is inefficient as far as market theory is concerned, because I rather still want to eat something, even when some foreign nation determines we shouldn't get their food or there is some supply chain event again.
I also prefer to be able to go to the doctor and not be broke, because modern medicine is fucking expensive and nearly nobody would be able to pay for that alone. Also even for the few rich guys who could afford it, it gets cheaper that way, because otherwise there would be far fewer people on whose shoulder the fixed costs need to be split.
The issue with the pensions is also not the pensions per se, but the very unhealthy population structure. That's a problem nobody has a real solution for, but that doesn't mean pensions are bad.
Why should people in food industry have a special threatment compared to people working in other industries?
If I was paying a market price for my medical insurance, I would probably pay a third of it and be able to get a screening sooner than in a half a year as a cancer patient.
Pensions are a special case in my country, because we have just state pensions and almost no private funds. Everyone in my age - late 20s or early 30s know, that we pay a great share of our income to current pensioners but we won't be able to get it because of the demographics.
But not for british farmers anymore.