Germany’s Infineon opens major chip plant as EU seeks tech autonomy

EDIT: Apparently it's a different plant.

It's not just Infineon - it's called the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC) and is a joint venture by TSMC, Bosch, Infineon, and NXP, with TSMC being the majority (70%) shareholder.

I've met one of the engineers designing the piping for that plant. Hardest project to date for him and mainly because TSMC was setting the pace.

> The plant will produce chips for intelligent power management

> The company ... sought to capitalise on the massive AI investment boom

These chips are probably very useful and important, but I don't see what they have to do with AI. Does everything need to have the word AI these days?

My understanding is that these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses?

Infinity neon! A nice company name.

As I mentioned about this before [0], this is a compound semiconductor fab - a very critical bottleneck for European industry and a much more worrisome NatSec issue than sub-14nm logical chip fabrication or arguably even AI.

This is not directly related to AI or logical compute, so kvetching about GPUs, SoCs, TSMC, AI, and other buzzwords is dumb.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557914

Funny that the article didn't mention it.

Infineon got €1bn of tax payer money to open the plant (~$1.1bn).