Recently, it has been reported that Intel has successively announced the establishment of factories in Poland and Israel, German factories have also received government subsidies, and TSMC has actively evaluated the establishment of factories in Germany. Competitor Samsung has also been moved and began to have the idea of setting up factories in Europe.

According to Korean media BusinessKorea, since Europe announced plans to target industries such as advanced semiconductor equipment and automotive semiconductors, with a view to exerting influence in the global supply chain, advanced semiconductor companies including TSMC and Intel have successively prepared to carry out large-scale operations in Europe. Investment, which also makes Europe the latest competition area for the semiconductor industry after Asia and the Americas.

A key partner for European semiconductors is Intel. On June 18, local time in Europe, the company announced that it will invest 25 billion US dollars to build a new semiconductor factory in Israel, which is expected to start operation in 2027. This is the largest foreign investment in Israel's history. Despite its location in the Middle East, Israel is actually classified as part of the European semiconductor supply chain.

In addition to Israel, Intel already operates large semiconductor factories in Ireland and Germany. In addition, Intel also announced not long ago that it plans to build semiconductor production and testing facilities in Poland, which will cooperate with the construction of advanced semiconductor packaging and assembly plants in Italy to assist Germany, Ireland and Israel fabs to establish one-stop services. Intel also plans to Establishment of research and development centers in France and Spain.

Intel was once known as the semiconductor leader because it dominated the PC semiconductor market, but it has been facing bottlenecks since the 2000s, failing to keep up with the pace of new business models and products such as third-party wafer foundries, memory chips and GPUs. slide. The financial report shows that in the first quarter of 2023, under the circumstances of sluggish sales performance, Intel reported the largest single-quarter loss record in its history, with a loss of US$2.76 billion.

In Europe, there are world-leading semiconductor equipment companies and advanced technology research institutions such as ASML in the Netherlands and IMEC in Belgium, plus the fast-growing power semiconductor and automotive semiconductor markets led by European companies such as NXP, Infineon and STMicroelectronics. People in the industry pointed out that these companies are limited to certain fields and lack advanced process technology, so the production of related products has to be entrusted to Samsung or TSMC for production, so that the market is still controlled by others.

The EU's decision to build advanced semiconductor production facilities is the last piece of the puzzle in the semiconductor ecosystem. The purpose of the cooperation with Intel is to rebuild the leading position of the foundry, so that Intel has a strong position in cooperation with European car or component manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Bosch. TSMC has recently negotiated with the German government on increasing subsidies, because TSMC is preparing to invest 10 billion euros in the construction of a fab in Derles. Although the German government initially stated that it rejected further subsidy requests from Intel and TSMC. However, according to the German government's current increase in financial subsidies to Intel, the increase in subsidies for TSMC seems to be a matter of course.

Competitors have rushed to Europe to grab the market, and Samsung seems to be excited. Kyung Kye-hyeon, head of the semiconductor business (DS) department, recently visited Tel Aviv, Israel, Munich and Stuttgart, Germany, Geneva, Switzerland, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to understand the local business conditions and to consider investment plan. However, Samsung has not announced any plans to build a factory in Europe.