Intel had planned to build a local packaging plant in northern Italy to process the computer chips manufactured in Magdeburg. But that won't happen in the near future, as Italy's Minister for Economic Development, Adolfo Urso, explained a few days ago. A packaging plant was planned for 4.5 billion euros in the municipality of Vigasio in the Veneto region of northern Italy.
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Last week, Urso said during a meeting with reporters in the northern Italian city of Verona that Intel has “abandoned or postponed its investments in France and Italy, unlike others it is planning in Germany.” Intel is still welcome in Italy for European investments, Urso said, according to Reuters. “If it decides to complete these projects, we are still here,” he said. Intel itself did not want to comment on this when asked.
Packaging plant is logistically conveniently located
In a packaging plant, silicon chips are married to their carriers. The typically green carriers – so-called substrates – serve as a bridge between the semiconductor component and the circuit board: They provide the contact surfaces with which a notebook manufacturer can solder a processor to the mainboard. With the proliferation of chiplet designs, such as processors with several different chips such as AMD's Ryzen CPUs with Zen 5 architecture planned for 2024, packaging technology has become more and more important.
Intel planned around 1,500 direct jobs in an Italian factory. An additional 3,500 jobs should be created by suppliers and partners. The municipality of Vigasio is logistically well located, as the next largest city, Verona, is connected to the Brenner railway line, which runs through the Alps to Magdeburg. There is also the Brenner motorway.
Alternative to Intel: Silicon Box and others
However, Urso was able to convince another chip manufacturer to invest in Italy. The semiconductor startup Silicon Box from Singapore wants to build a packaging plant for future chip generations in northern Italy with government support for $3.2 billion. According to the minister, this is the largest foreign investment in this area and “more will follow in the next few months”. Urso added that his government has also spoken with groups from Taiwan in recent months.
To complement Intel's chip factory in Magdeburg, which is scheduled to begin operations at the end of 2027, Intel has planned a $4.6 billion chip processing plant in Poland. This fab in Wrocław for semiconductor “assembly and test” is also intended to strengthen the European chip supply chain. The factory is supposed to process the wafers previously processed in so-called front-end fabs into individual chips, i.e. test the numerous silicon dies on a wafer, separate them, “pack them” into housings (packaging or assembly) and test the finished components.
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