The italian authorities have announced that they will allocate 4,600 million euros to boost chip manufacturing in the country. It is, without a doubt, a nod to intel so that they choose the country to build one of the chip manufacturing plants that it plans to build in Europe in the coming years.
According to Reuters, Italy plans to invest the money from this fund between now and 2030 to attract more investment from technology companies, and allocate them to finance part of the investments that would be necessary for a technology company to settle in the country to manufacture chips. Specifically, if Intel finally decides to open a factory in the country, it would invest some 8,000 million euros over a decade.
But Intel is not the only tech Italy is thinking of to boost the chip manufacturing industry. In addition, the Italian authorities are negotiating with a Franco-Italian company, STMicroelectronics. Also with a Taiwanese holding company, MEMC Electronic Materialand with Tower Semiconductorwhich Intel has announced that it is going to buy a couple of weeks ago.
Apparently, the negotiations with Intel are being quite complex, since the group brings quite tough demands under its arm, according to Italian government sources. However, they trust that the new financing rules for innovative facilities for the manufacture of semiconductors announced last month by the European Commission with the so-called Law of Chips can facilitate the arrival of an agreement.
Thus, Brussels has allocated 15,000 million euros more in public-private investments until 2030, in addition to the 30,000 million euros of public investments already planned and coming from national budgets and plans NextGenerationEU and Horizon Europe.
Meanwhile, Intel has already assured that it could invest up to 95,000 million dollars in Europe over the next decade, to build several chip factories in the region. The group has already chosen the German city of Magdeburg a few days ago as the site for a new chip manufacturing plant. And Italy, in addition to the announced fund, has already decided to allocate to support the development of technology and the manufacture of components in the country 150 million euros in 2022 and 500 million euros per year from 2023 to 2030. This money will come out of the package of 8,000 million euros with which it will count to boost the economy and mitigate the effects of the rise in energy.
This is part of the Italian government’s plans to promote «research and development of microprocessor technology and investment in new industrial applications of innovative technologies«. Likewise, it confirms that it will also use the amounts that it will allocate to finance projects of this type to transform existing industrial points and favor the construction of new plants. With this, it hopes to contribute both to the advancement in the manufacture of components in the country and to collaborate in the European Union’s plans to reduce dependence on China and Asian countries in terms of semiconductors.
