Berlin, 19 April 2023 - 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 states:
"The EU Chips Act is long overdue and must now take effect as soon as possible. The US 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 and is putting less on the line. It is therefore all the more important that we lose no time in implementing the Chips Act.
Bitkom supports the goals of the resolution to double the EU's global market share in semiconductor production to 20 percent by 2030 and to strengthen 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. In addition, the bureaucratic burden on companies building these large chip factories must be significantly reduced. Only in this way can large and also smaller projects be realised quickly, which plays a key role in global competitiveness.
Time is pressing: In Germany alone, nine out of ten industrial companies depend on semiconductors for their production, 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 quickly become more independent - and thus strengthen central areas of the digital economy, including telecommunications, data centres, cloud and edge computing as well as the classic industrial sectors of automotive or mechanical engineering."
