The American Broadcom will invest in a chip factory in Spain. A project valued at 1,000 million dollars (about 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. Based in California, listed on the Nasdaq, with revenues of more than 32,000 million and about 20,000 employees.
The talks between the president of Broadcom, Charlie Kawwas, and the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, began last January. The operation will be able to count on the support of the Perte Chip program and its objective is to reinforce the design and production capacities of the microelectronics and semiconductor industry in Spain and advance the strategic autonomy of Europe.
The part of semiconductors is the one with the largest economic scope, with an endowment of 12,250 million (which corresponds to almost 10% of European funds). It is also the one with the longest term to present projects, until the end of 2026, due to its high strategic interest for the European Union. The rest of the Perte should be allocated by the end of 2023.
The exact location for the new plant has not yet been revealed. Several communities may be recipients of this investment, among them Andalusia, Valencia, Catalonia and Castilla-La Mancha.
The negotiations were attended by the Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence, Carme Artigas; Jaime Martorell, from the commissioner for the Part of the chips; the Vice President and Minister of Economy, Nadia Calviño, and the General Secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs, Manuel de la Rocha Vázquez. Calviño considered this Thursday that “the operation demonstrates the confidence of international investors in our country”
Semiconductor factories require large investments mainly due to the complexity of the microchip manufacturing process. Spain also aspired a few months ago to attract Intel, which finally leaned towards Germany with a mega-investment. Intel has announced that it would build an industrial complex with two factories in Magdeburg with an investment of 17,000 million euros, 17 times more than that announced this Thursday by Broadcom.
Europe, which in the early 1990s produced semiconductors on its territory, over the years has gradually abandoned this industry, leaving it in the hands of Asia, especially Taiwan. The European Commission presented its European Chip law last year, which planned to mobilize 43,000 million euros of investment with the aim that 20% of the world’s semiconductors are produced in Europe by 2030.
This explains why several European countries have started to compete among themselves to attract 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 Davos Economic Forum, the President of the Government held several conversations with different companies to attract investment and recover some sovereignty in a key industrial area.
While waiting to know the details of the investment, Broadcom is a group specializing above all in the design and marketing of semiconductors rather than manufacturing as such. It is the second US company behind the giant Nvidia by market capitalization, but it is smaller than the Korean Samsung or the Taiwanese TSMC.
