Federal government wants more weight in global chip market

The black-red federal government has adopted a new microelectronics strategy. Following the debacle surrounding the failed Intel settlement in Magdeburg and the reallocation of planned chip billions to other areas, the federal government wants to improve Germany's role as a chip location.

The Federal Cabinet therefore adopted a microelectronics strategy that appears comparatively small after the large, but largely unfulfilled, plans of the traffic light coalition and focuses on key areas. Federal Minister of Research Dorothee Bär (CSU) said: “We want to make Germany the European center for chip design and specifically strengthen the transfer from science to business.” Federal Minister of Economics Katherina Reiche (CDU) sees the goal as “ensuring that Germany remains not only a user but also a developer and manufacturer.”

Transfer to be accelerated

As measures, the strategy primarily envisages strengthening chip design activities, and the transfer from semiconductor and microelectronics research to manufacturing is to be accelerated. For example, pilot production lines for quantum chips are to be built. In addition to better skilled labor acquisition and other long-known objective descriptions, the federal government is primarily focused on the financing side of the capital-intensive industry; simplifications are to take place here to encourage private investors to invest, for example. Small companies should be able to access state-supported financing more easily.

In line with this, the industry association Bitkom published a survey according to which 92 percent of companies would view the danger of an escalation between the People's Republic of China and Taiwan with concern. Taiwan plays a significant role in the global chip ecosystem. The federal government sees the diversification of chip markets as an opportunity. Demand should be met from EU production as much as possible, the paper states: “Measures that concentrate on key positions in the global semiconductor value chain (from chip design to manufacturing) and reduce dependencies in important sectors (automotive, communication, digitalization, medical technology, AI, defense) will make a decisive contribution.”

Germany is among the EU states that have recently publicly distanced themselves from the previous EU goal of “20 percent market share by 2030,” which was considered unrealistic by experts from the outset and was enshrined in the European Chips Act. The central legal funding instrument for the promotion of chip factories and semiconductor ecosystems is to be revised in 2026; the federal government's microelectronics strategy anticipates Berlin's priorities here.

(vbr)