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- Tade0EDIT: 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.
- usrnm> The plant will produce chips for intelligent power management> The company ... sought to capitalise on the massive AI investment boomThese 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?
- petcatMy understanding is that these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses?
- jijijijijIf I was Queen of Germany, I would put everything into a platform like Arduino or RaspPi which can be widely used across industries and education. Some amount of taxes will be allocated to buy these boards and guarantee demand for manufacturing. Then every citizen gets such a device in return. Basically mandatory purchase. The education sector can completely lean in on the platform, abundance will have it dominate DIY projects and may create additional demand as reference platform. Whoever doesn't need it, can sell it or give it away to charity. This will stabilize a critical industry and aid digital education, engineering and so on. I feel like people would be more easy about a tax, if they get a physical product in exchange.Over time this program would be extended to include and bring back other critical industries and manufacturing capabilities, ultimately leading to citizens being able to choose their mandatory product to some extent and preference. For example it would be really cool to have a basic, but very robust and repairable sewing machine, 3D printer, ... which all aid survivability/adaptability of the collective in crisis, if widely distributed. These products would also set the baseline for quality and accessibility expectations.Of course this goes hand in hand with a 4 day work week, so people can actually learn to appreciate their mandated crisis hobbies and indulge their family and friends doing so. And if all of this doesn't pan out economically, I would simply plunder and enslave a neighboring country <3
- hyperionultraInfinity neon! A nice company name.
- alephnerdAs 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
- TheChaplainFunny that the article didn't mention it.Infineon got €1bn of tax payer money to open the plant (~$1.1bn).