The American Broadcom will invest in a chip factory in Spain. A project valued at 1,000 million dollars (nearly 920 million euros).
The plant will produce semiconductors and will be the first of its kind in Spain. Broadcom is a designer and manufacturer of a wide range of software products. Headquartered in California, it is listed on the Nasdaq, with revenues exceeding 32,000 million and around 20,000 employees.
The talks between the president of Broadcom, Charlie Kawwas, and the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, began in January. The operation will be supported by the Perte Chip program, which aims to strengthen the design and production capacities of the microelectronics and semiconductor industry in Spain and advance Europe’s strategic autonomy.
The Perte of semiconductors is the largest economically, with an endowment of 12,250 million (a figure that corresponds to almost 10% of European funds). It is also the one that has a longer deadline to present projects, until the end of 2026, due to its high strategic interest for the European Union. The rest of Perte must be allocated at the end of 2023.
The exact location for the new plant has not yet been determined. Several communities can be recipients of this investment, including Andalusia, Valencia, Catalonia and Castilla-La Mancha.
The Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence, Carme Artigas, Jaime Martorell, from the Commissioner for Chip Loss, the Vice President and Minister of Economy, Nadia Calviño, and the Secretary General of the Department participated in the negotiations. of Economic Affairs, Manuel de la Rocha Vázquez. Calviño considered yesterday that “the operation demonstrates the confidence of international investors in our country”.
Semiconductor factories require large investments due mainly to the complexity of the microchip manufacturing process. Spain also aspired a few months ago to attract Intel, which finally opted for Germany with a mega investment. Intel has announced that it would build an industrial complex with two factories in Magdeburg with an investment of 17 billion euros, 17 times more than what Broadcom announced yesterday.
Europe, which at the beginning of the nineties produced semiconductors in its territory, has gradually abandoned this industry over the years and left it in the hands of Asia, especially Taiwan.
Last year, the European Commission presented its European Law on Chips, which planned to mobilize 43,000 million euros of investment with the aim of 20% of the world’s semiconductors being produced in Europe by 2030.
This explains why several European countries have begun to compete with each other to attract an investment that is strategic, taking into account the future developments of the digital society. If Intel decided to bet on Germany, already at the last meeting at the Economic Forum in Davos, the Prime Minister held several talks with different companies to attract investments and regain some sovereignty in a key industrial area.
Pending to know the details of the investment, Broadcom is a group that specializes mainly in the design and marketing of semiconductors rather than manufacturing as such. It is the second largest company in the United States, behind the giant Nvidia, by market capitalization, but it is smaller than the Korean Samsung or the Taiwanese TSMC.
