Bitkom on the EU Chips Act

The European Parliament and the European Council have reached a preliminary agreement on the EU Chips Act in the trilogue negotiations. Bitkom President Achim Berg explains:

"The EU Chips Act is overdue and must now take effect as quickly as possible. The USA has already presented its Chips and Science Act in the summer of 2022 and released funding of 52.7 billion US $. Europe is comparatively late in the game and is putting less on the line. This makes it all the more important that we lose no time in implementing the Chips Act.

Bitkom supports the resolution's goals of doubling the EU's global market share in semiconductor production to 20 percent by 2030 and strengthening the entire semiconductor value chain. Now the EU Chips Act must find its way from paper to practice. A faster and more efficient release of state aid for the construction of the so-called 'first-of-a-kind' fabs is crucial for this. The bureaucratic burden on companies building these large chip factories must also be significantly reduced. Only in this way can large and also smaller projects be realized quickly, which plays a key role in global competitiveness.      

Time is pressing: In this country alone, nine out of ten industrial companies rely on semiconductors for their production, and for 80 percent they are even indispensable. Up to now, most of these have been produced in the USA or Asia. The unstable supply chains during the Corona pandemic have shown how dangerous this dependence can become. In view of the further increase in demand, Europe and Germany must therefore quickly become more independent - and thus strengthen central areas of the digital economy, including telecommunications, data centers, cloud and edge computing, as well as the classic industrial sectors of automotive or mechanical engineering."