By Wojciech Kosc in Warsaw
© IntelliNews
Intel, the world’s largest producer of microprocessors, will build a semiconductor assembly and test facility near the southwestern Polish city of Wroclaw, the US company said on June 16.
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The €4.6bn project is the largest foreign investment in Poland’s history, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told a press briefing held with Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger.
The plant in Poland will be an element of Intel’s plan to build an end-to-end semiconductor value chain in Europe together with the company’s existing wafer fabrication facility in Leixlip, Ireland, and its planned wafer fabrication facility in Magdeburg, Germany, Intel said.
The Polish plant will work on wafers manufactured in wafer fabrication facilities – so-called ‘fabs’ – to cut them into individual chips, assemble them into final products and test them for performance and quality. The finished chips are then shipped to customers.
The Polish plant will create some 2,000 jobs on-site while also creating estimated thousands more for contractors of the US company.
The announcement from Intel comes on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic shock of disruption to the supply of semiconductors, a critical element of today’s economy.
To address that, companies began reshaping their supply chain, moving facilities to nearer and friendly countries in what has become known as nearshoring and friendshoring.
‘Poland is already home to Intel operations and is well positioned to work with Intel sites in Germany and Ireland. It is also very cost-competitive with other manufacturing locations globally and offers a great talent base that we are excited to help to grow,” Gelsinger said in a statement.
Intel’s investment in Poland is also in line with the EU’s Chips Act, a €43bn plan to boost the EU’s share in the global semiconductor value chain from the current 9% to 20% by 2030.
The factory near Wroclaw will cooperate with Intel’s planned $32bn (€29.3bn) microchip manufacturing site in Magdeburg. The factory reportedly received €10bn support from the German government.
It is unclear how big the support from Poland will be for the plant near Wroclaw.