Intel has picked Magdeburg, a city in the north of Germany, as the destination for a mega fab that will employ 3000 specialists with an initial investment of €17bn. The site will represent what Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger called the Silicon Junction for its ambitions on the continent.
In announcing the decision, which is the result of a project to find a suitable European site for around a year and which comes a matter of weeks after the European Union unveiled its €43bn Chips Act, Gelsinger said a new fab needed to be built around an existing ecosystem. The German fab will not be far from an existing chipmaking hub Dresden as well as the leading supplier of lithography equipment ASML in The Netherlands.
In a video made for the announcement, Gelsinger said details of the financial support package were still to be finalised, but Keyvan Esfarjani, chief global operations officer at Intel, said the company had obtained support from the German federal government...