Germany Redirects Intel Funds
Germany Redirects Intel Funds
Germany has quietly launched one of its most consequential semiconductor funding efforts since the start of the EU Chips Act. Originally intended in part to support Intel’s long-delayed €30 billion (approximately $34.8 billion) megafab in Magdeburg, billions of euros in federal and state money are now being re-channeled into a diverse set of technology projects, ranging from mature-node capacity in Dresden to quantum-sensor-based metrology equipment in Munich.
The catalyst was a late-2024 federal call for projects to fall under the EU Chips Act, a mechanism Germany had never used in its semiconductor policy. Up to then, major undertakings—Infineon’s power semiconductor expansion, ESMC in Dresden, Wolfspeed in Saarland, and Intel itself—had emerged through direct negotiations rather than a competitive public call. For the first time, Germany opened a structured process, intended both to accelerate high-priority microelectronics investments and prevent semiconductor-earmarked money from being cannibalized for unrelated parts of the federal budget.
Frank Bösenberg, managing director of Silicon Saxony, believes Intel’s delays played a decisive role. “This was already after Intel did not appear to be full-speed,” he told EE Times in an exclusive interview. “It wasn’t yet canceled; it was just delayed. So, I guess the motivation was to implement something—and to have a fair, more or less transparent process for getting money.”
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