TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant | Hacker News Reader

TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

asia.nikkei.com

699 pointsstereoradonc436 comments

If you consider GlobalFoundries to be a valid competitor, then that move would make a lot of sense. Infineon and AMD used to do a lot of research and production in Dresden. The AMD fab has since become a part of GlobalFoundries. But there's still a healthy ecosystem of university research and medium-sized software companies. Or at least there was, when I visited GlobalFoundries in 2014.

Also, there has been a growing amount of research activity into chip design in Germany lately, driven in no small part by CERN's needs.

For example https://ohwr.org/project/white-rabbit/wikis/home used by the Control and Timing System at CERN and GSI

Very interesting. Clicking around seems they have open hardware suppliers in the EU.

There's also Texas Instruments in Freising (near Munich), which I think is ex-NatSemi, and AFAIK now their only European fab after the closure of their one in Greenock (Scotland).

Also Apple is heavily investing into chip design in their Munich campus.

Yeah, just thought that they probably pick munich / near munich.

We don't have enough water anymore in Dresden

Didn't stop Intel or TSMC from building in Phoenix...where there is literally no water and they are having one of the worst droughts ever.

They'll just get a government bailout so it's no real problem. We are big on corporate socialism

Corporate socialism. What a loaded phrase. I can't wait to use it in different connotations to bring more attention to the flip flopping of perspectives on fiscal policy between individual and corporate.

Proof?

https://www.umwelt.sachsen.de/umwelt/infosysteme/ida/q/eg

I don't see GlobalFoundries as a realistic competitor to TSMC. Also CERN's needs cannot be compared to the needs of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and the likes. That right there is a huge chunk of the world's economy and they all rely on TSMC directly or indirectly.

My guess would be this is more about diversifying. I think it makes a lot of sense to have factories in the US, Europe and Asia, especially given China's stance on Taiwan.

Actually there is a lot of current semi activity in Dresden. It's the biggest cluster in Europe.

Notable fabs in Dresden: Globalfoundries, Infineon, Bosch (recently opened), X-Fab, First Sensor, Plastic Logic (now defunct). May be noteworthy that some of these fabs are among the semi fabs with the highest degree of automotation world wide.

Add to this many bigger and smaller suppliers, universities, reasearch institutes and so on.

https://www.silicon-saxony.de/nc/en/members/sorted-by-alphab...

There are also plenty of Fabs in other parts of Germany: Infineon, Bosch, Nexperia, TDK, Osram, TI, X-Fab, Vishay, Elmos and some I forgot probably.

There are also many design companies. Especially noteworthy is probably Apples modem team that keep growing and growing...

CERN certainly stimulates some semi research, but it is rather specialized.

In my opinion, the critical role of CERN here is to create demand for cutting-edge production runs which can then be combined with other research projects for cost savings. In the PCB industry at least, it is quite common to pool designs from different customers onto one sheet.

Also, CERN heavily promotes open source software development, among other things by getting students super excited (high school trip to a super collider) and by raising research funding for PhDs to work on said software.

They'd additionally have a closer base to ASML HQ and more opportunities for cross-pollination of talent.

Any historic reason for the cluster to be in Dresden? I would have expected the most sophisticated areas to be in Western Germany area. Maybe govt encouraged development there?

Dresden was the seat of Robotron since the late 60s, which was the biggest (and pretty much only) East German electronics company. In some ways, East Germany had built a more advanced (or let's just say "bigger") semiconductor industry than Western Germany during the 70's and 80's, because Western Germany could simply buy its chips cheap from all over the world, while the Eastern Bloc was under emgargo and had to produce their own. East Germany focused on Zilog clones, while the Soviets focused on Intel clones. After the reunification most of this industry collapsed because it wasn't internationally competitive, some niches and especially the "engineering tradition" and universities survived though. I think this planted the seed for Dresden to become a semiconductor hub again since the early 2000's, of course supported by the Saxon government (AMD building a fab there at the end of the 90's was a big deal for Saxony).

When I visited GlobalFoundries, they said the location was chosen for its low rate of earth movements, the stable rocks underground that things can be anchored to, and the stable wind conditions.

If you're fabricating things at 30nm, a strong gust of wind against the side wall of your factory might be enough to waste some wafers. If I remember correctly, they have a rubber shell to protect against it...

TSMC is really the keystone for everything else done that ends up getting talked about on this website. They are constantly at the bleeding edge of computer manufacture and pushing it further still. We should feel some sense of amazement to be alive still in the middle of the computer revolution.

Overall semiconducting industry seems to be way more exciting than boring computer industry

ha! I guess you haven't worked as a designer or verification engineer, designing chips then? let me tell you: you work with a commitee-designed c++ like abomination language with 300 non-composible keywords that make no freaking sense. all of that crap grew from legacy-upon-legacy of crutches as an attempt to fix the goddamn broken-by-design verilog. Ultimately, this craplanguage + library that is 90% non-debuggable macros, works only with ~3 vendor simulators (all 3 would do different stuff on big designs and you are locked almost forever). When you simulate you designs, most of external components would be either encrypted blackboxes or be calling "magic" functions (called system tasks) that are absultely opaque to you and do some global side-effects. All of this multiplied by the fact that every statement is executed in parallel in your huge design and evolves in time. Oh, did I mention how crappy the actual tools are? Think of 90's era with outdated and moronic UI/UX, some poorely integrated quasi-TCL interpreter for configuration & ability to crash that tool in <3 clicks. Ah, you will be paying 15kUSD/year per license, thank you very much. You will be needing lots of them (> 50).

Hmmm, isn't there people pushing for better standards, language, tools?

Yes there is. But moving at enterprise speeds. Python considered "new" and young. Codebases are 30 to 40 years old

there are some developments, but mostly you would get new additional tool on top of existing stack, rather than a new stack.

Problem 1. patents. in early FOSS days people got momentum to push hard for corporations to give up compiler patents and other obvious nonsense and let GCC flourish. same situation is here in hardware, the very idea of simulating circuits is a mine field of patents and you'd be sued out of existence.

Problem 2. features. there are a lot of features that you need to push out a working chip into an existence. open source tools or alternatives are SO far behind that they cannot be used or can be used only on something really small.

Problem 3. verification. there are no (VIABLE! that python coco stuff doesnt count!) open-source alternatives to UVM (uvm as a library is open source, but there are either no simulators that can run it). If we had some of the older verificaion languages to go open source (like specman, vera), maybe we had a chance.

> the very idea of simulating circuits is a mine field of patents and you'd be sued out of existence.

Doesn't that apply to basically every kind of software? How's it different for HDL simulation software?

the point is that for FOSS there was an active movement that forced IBM and old megacorps to forfeit such "nonsense" patents. So if you roll out a brand new c++ compiler you may have some buffs with intel if you try to go to their turf about some propreitary x64 specific optimizations, but, say, IBM wouldnt sue you because you dared to create "a program/method of transforming source code into machine code" that violated 250 patents from their portfolio.

I get that, but you wrote:

> the very idea of simulating circuits is a mine field of patents and you'd be sued out of existence

Do you think a startup selling a new HDL simulator is any more at risk of getting sued than any other software-based startup?

Not trying to be combative, I'm genuinely curious.

Yes. Happened twice? already

Really? Wow! Do you happen to remember their names?

one remember - "magma automation". they were sued to pieces and then bought out

Thanks!

According to their Wikipedia page, they paid 12.5 M$ to settle in 2007 and continued to operate for another 4 years before being bought for half a billion USD. Not exactly what I would consider "sued to pieces" ;-)

https://clash-lang.org/ http://www.clifford.at/yosys/

I am hoping we can start proving many if the things they brute-force model check today, too.

Or working with a 40M Loc codebase started in the 80s with 50% code duplication. Because it's so mission critical that nobody really touches existing code. Or that everything needs to be rubber-stamped by a ton of people and even a rename takes months to make it in the codebase. Oh well. That's probably every enterprise

As somebody without any experience in that field: When you say "codebase", what is that? Is it code describing circuit blocks (e.g. an ALU) that is reused in different projects or is it code for the tools that you use? (in-house tools, plugins for commercial tools, etc.)

There are several machines required to make a chip, and many steps involved. Those machines are crazy complex and accurate (i remember having a precision of around 3 atoms of silicon, femtometer scale). I meant firmware fot these machines, in general. Crazy complex (and amazing) tools with complex software

That's probably every enterprise

Yep, pretty much any industry or individual organization that's been around for 40 years will have decades-old cruft complicating attempts to make changes. That's why it's good to have some sort of skunkworks unit as well.

Any thoughts on Chisel?

as much as it pains to say me, but IMO its a wasted effort. we don't need new design languages. VHDL/Verilog "pain points" as RTL are tiny and don't require solving, we pretty much figured out design. Verification, on the other hand, is still an evolving (now stagnating) mess that needs inputs.

The biggest offender on that project list is FIRRTL. Cleary outgrew as someone's university work of "hey, lets do IR, but for RTL" without knowing anything of the industry, tools, etc. At best you can do the same with one reduced canonical simplified verilog source-to-source translation. at worst it does not do the primary function of "being" IR for RTL, because it should've been a graph, not another language with simplified syntax.

Chisel's being hooked into the Java / Scala tool chain give makes setting up automated verification pipelines much easier:

- You can use SBT or MVM to pull in dependencies

- You can wrap up designs as .jar files

- Powerful testing tools like QuickCheck come ready made

None of the above is rocket science, but simply by being there things become easier.

   without knowing anything of the 
   industry, tools,

It's pretty difficult for a student to find out about what is actually used in industry. The semi industry's secrecy doesn't help. But software and hardware people really don't even have a shared language, and misunderstand each other's abilities and pain points. The very term "verification" is understood quite differently between the different communities.

> At best you can do the same with one reduced canonical simplified verilog source-to-source translation.

Parsing Verilog and generating valid Verilog is fairly difficult. If you want to stay with Verilog, the most realistic alternative to firrtl right now is the RTL-IL representation used inside of yosys.

> at worst it does not do the primary function of "being" IR for RTL, because it should've been a graph, not another language with simplified syntax.

Canonicalized LoFirrtl (i.e., the representation the compiler lowers Chisel to) is essentially SSA (single static assignment) which encodes a dataflow DAG. So on a per module level, firrtl does represent the circuit as a graph.

What you might be talking about is the fact that this graph isn't global. Having a global circuit graph could make some analyses easier, but it might require essentially in-lining the whole circuit which is something a lot of designers are opposed to. Even small optimizations like removing unused pins from internal modules are often times opposed.

Chris Lattner and others are currently working on an "industry" version of firrtl as part of the CIRCT hardware compiler framework: https://github.com/llvm/circt As you can see they did not decide to go with a global graph based IR and instead opted to just represent local data-flow graphs as SSA.

What's the compensation / benefits / work-life balance like?

My experience in this industry is that it pays well, good benefits, but it ebbs and flows much like the defense industry with large boom times and slower times with large layoffs.

From FPGA design point of view SystemVerilog is OK. I think it gives high enough level of abstraction to create even complex systems. It can also be readable after some years if care is taken to keep the code clean.

But I believe we need LISPy syntax - mainly for simplicity, also for easier parsing and static analysis. I think LISP is a natural way to describe data flow. Unfortunately none of the attempts to write functional synthesizable code that I found so far make the code simpler.

BTW I'm preparing a talk on simplifying RTL code. Can I cite some of your posts in this thread?

Pure sarcasm, but no :)

> Overall semiconducting industry seems to be way more exciting than boring computer industry

The most groundbreaking things all tech must be about are cat video websites, and internet companies :D

People completely forget that were Morris Chang (the previous CEO of TSMC,) not been polite, and ethical to a fault, the industry would've still be dominated by monster big semis, manufacturing every chip around, and who would've milked all big chip users like internet companies to death.

I can't imagine Panasonic, Toshiba, Motorola, or AMD of old not scheming to squeezing their clients to the last cent, and strategizing to prevent clients from gaining negotiating power.

TSMC's benevolent stance in comparison to that would be almost bordering on charity.

I've worked on hard science problems and while it's more bleeding edge it's all very, very slow moving. You're not shipping anything in less than a year, max. And that's OK. It's just very glacial and you go VERY deep into the topic.

Not to mention the people who design many of the machines that TSMC use in their plants: ASML.

"The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre" <https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-becam...>

You forget Imec in Belgium, which does a lot of the R&D in semiconductors.

I suspect lot of the production facilities would want to be near them.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-13/u-s-and-c...

Extremely naive question, but I always wonder how you can "bootstrap" this kind of precision — intuitively for something to be this precise, the tools and equipment that "create" it should also have to be more or less equally precise.

Or is it a matter of manufacturing it, testing it, and rejecting some percentage of things that don't fit your requirements due to imprecisions?

Are there any good background resources on how some of these things are done?

Look at the «Whitworth three plate method». As far as I understand, it should allow a «gain» in precision.

On a very high level, a good place to start is on Metrology — the science of measurement [0].

Test, measurement and calibration equipment for new technologies (think 5G/UWB, mmWave, even up to CERN LHC) can be right on the cutting edge of technology. Companies who specialize in these areas tend to have large budgets on research and commercialization.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrology

From what I've seen as an amateur that is yet fascinated by mechanical engineering: iteratively work up to the precision limits with your current methods then try to find/research a (slightly) better way of measuring and/or manufacturing. Since humanity has worked up to this point over centuries/millenia, you wouldn't need to "bootstrap" it from the beginning anymore, just choose the appropriate level of (manufacturing/measuring) precision for your usecase. Otherwise start with a surface plate.

Nice summary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58 ("Origins of Precision" by "Machine Thinking")

This is a beautiful video!

You might enjoy this video, 'Origins of Precision'. https://youtu.be/gNRnrn5DE58

Take three somewhat flat stones to start out. Alternate rubbing the surfaces together in a random fashion. As you continue the high spots of the stones will be ground down and the surfaces will become flatter and flatter. In the end you can get very precise flat surfaces.

Two stones is not enough, you can then end up with two spherical surfaces. With three this isn't possible (imagine two of them are convex, when you rub them together they will grind eachother down and become less convex).

With images: https://ericweinhoffer.com/blog/2017/7/30/the-whitworth-thre...

That is, one plate remains stationary while the other is lapped against it, and then the opposite is performed

Is it a strict requirement that one plate remains stationary?

In relative terms, one of the two plates remains stationary even if both are moving.

Obligatory machine thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58

Altough, I disagree with the "random fashion". Alternating the pairs AB -> BC -> CA seems more logical to me.

It is necessary to grind in a random fashion (OP is talking about the method of grinding, not the order), or you will end up with imperfections. Lots of info about this if you look in to grinding mirrors for telescopes.

Also, the order being random wouldn't effect the end result.

If it's a machine doing the grinding, what is the source of randomness?

input

function setPostion(float x=random(), float y=random()){}

I imagine the PRNG they use for this is a rather thorough implementation. Unless perhaps it is even necessary to used a cryptographic chip to generate true randomness.

pseudocode my man, pseudocode. ignite the imagination, and let the reader run wild.

however, now my imagination is now running, and thinking about how overkill "true" random might be for this application. something "random" like an orbital sander would probably be enough. you're just trying to get away from side-to-side, left-circle, right-circle, up/down patterns. you're doing this to 3 different surfaces, so they would grind out any slight patterns which is the point. seems like a try crypto random would be as "effecient" as my roomba appears not to be.

I suppose I went a bit overboard (no pun intended). 1 KB implementation should be more than enough for their precision.

Maybe some code then, instead: https://www.dwitter.net/d/20446

When grinding the concave plate why didn't that make then other flat plate convex again?

It did – but less so than the original was concave. By rubbing them together, you're effectively “averaging out” the convex / concavenesses.

As the sibling comment explains, it does make the other flat plate convex, but by a smaller amount. Their shapes sort of average out.

I'll add that this depends on the materials having similar properties, so when ground together, they are grinding each other. This means whatever residual shape you have in one of them, it won't be transferred completely to the other.

If the materials had very different hardnesses, one of them would dominate over the other when they're ground together.

or a long-form textbook on the foundations of mechanical accuracy. Someone linked to this a year ago and I found it a fascinating deep dive:

https://pearl-hifi.com/06_Lit_Archive/15_Mfrs_Publications/M...

> intuitively for something to be this precise, the tools and equipment that "create" it should also have to be more or less equally precise.

Very reasonable assumption that I used to have too. (Un?)fortunately it's also wrong, or at best, incomplete. :-) e.g., maybe you don't have the technology to make precisely straight lines, but if you can make a flat surface (like paper), then you can fold it in half and get a straight line. Then fold that in half and get a pretty-close-to-90-degree angle.

I also vaguely recall that feedback can increase precision in a system... like you can get 2% accuracy with a circuit that has only 5%-accurate resistors by using feedback (or something along those lines). Unfortunately I no longer recall how this is done. I just remember my mind was blown when I learned it.

>Extremely naive question, but I always wonder how you can "bootstrap" this kind of precision — intuitively for something to be this precise, the tools and equipment that "create" it should also have to be more or less equally precise.

You can build a machine like that and most machines are built like that because simply reproducing the precision that is already in the machine is cheaper than building a complex intelligent system that knows how to compensate for flaws in precision. Think about how many 3d printers do auto leveling in software rather than simply make the bed perpendicular to the print head by hand. Those old manual milling machines and lathes didn't have all that fancy software so they simply reproduced their own flaws.

Well, given a smart enough human he can compensate for the flaws in the tools and get to a higher degree of precision.

> Extremely naive question, but I always wonder how you can "bootstrap" this kind of precision

Scraping https://www.toyoda.com/news-events/rpd-blog-the-importance-o...

Simon Winchester's book "The Perfectionists" [1] is a good popular level intro to Maudsley, Whitworth et al.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Exactly-Precision-Engineers-Created-M...

NB: I guess he changed the title to Exactly for the paperback release.

> Are there any good background resources on how some of these things are done?

For a cultural history of precision see The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectioni...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvOEcyYsiHc

Yup, seconded. I was going to recommend that book.

On a related note, there's the powerful technique of doing things in a way where the factor(s) that are difficult to measure or control cancel out.

Examples of this is the device[1] used for the redefined kilogram[2], LIGO[3] and many others.

[1]: https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/kilogram-kibble-balance

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_ba...

[3]: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/LA/page/faq (first question)

You mention it already - bootstrapping. Always optimising, always correcting for yet another flaw in materials, processing, environmental conditions, quality control and usage procedures. Usually, it is helpful that there are multiple ways to do a particular thing that can be used to calibrate each other. Also, there are physical processes that can produce high-quality surface finishes that can be used for calibration tasks, for example by splitting crystals. The resulting shapes are dependent on the crystal lattice, and improvements in material purity reduce any irregularities.

A more general approach is to understand measurement as a process where a minute signal has to be amplified to be more easily evaluated. There are many such methods.

In the case of surface metrology, Coherence scanning interferometry is such a method which uses the properties of interfering light waves to directly visualize surface anomalies as bands of lights. Another, more direct method is to drag a stylus across the surface and to amplify variations in position. Sort of like a turntable does.

and ASML works together with Trumpf (lasers) and Zeiss (optics).

And the silicon ingots come from Wacker-Chemie.

Looks like countries are the intuitive units to capture deviations at this level of scale. From NASA's web page about the mirrors in the James Webb telescope [0]:

"That means if the continental United States was polished smooth to the same tolerances, the entire country – from Maine to California – would not vary in thickness by just over two inches!"

Given the US is roughly 27 times the area of Germany, looks like semiconductor manufacturing requires roughly double the accuracy of space telescopes (1 mm * 27 is slightly more than 1 inch)

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/webb-craft.h...

Hm, I think the magnitude in the z direction would scale with the magnitude in the x direction or the y direction, rather than with the area (x*y), right?

Those mirrors (like all of ASML's optics) are actually developed and made by Carl Zeiss. And the lasers come from Trumpf.

That's a good start, but ASML may want to call in Rick [0] on this one to go a little further

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQoRfieZJxI

And don't forget to mention imec in Leuven where lot's research and development gets done for ASML: https://www.imec-int.com/en/about-us https://www.imec-int.com/en/infrastructure

Don't forget DARPA, DoE, and US semiconductor industry funding EUV LLC in the 90s:

https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1997/CN0911...

How big would the bumps be if the layers were scaled to the size of Texas? :-)

Don't know about TX, but somewhere there was a comparison like that if the mirror would be laid over Germany. Was under a mm IIRC.

Nobody has yet come up with a better approach to generating focused soft X-rays than that tin plasma nightmare. The "light source" today is the size of a 3-story house to get 250W on target. One of the main reasons wafer fabs now cost so much.

There must be a better way.

> The "light source" today is the size of a 3-story house to get 250W on target. One of the main reasons wafer fabs now cost so much.

Yes, EUV machines are said to increase fab electricity consumption few times over, over regular UV steppers.

> There must be a better way.

The better way may well be worse. The alternative proposal is to build the whole fab around a synchrotron.

There are several "tabletop synchrotron" projects, but as yet none with the right output for an IC fab. Hopefully someone will solve this problem.

Synchrotrons would not be better by much. Efficiencies will still be just above single digits, which still means multimegawatt light sources.

That's still better than tens of megawatt light sources.

>still in the middle of the computer revolution Are you implying it will end? Either Moore's law leveling off or an externality (unrest/war/climate change) that ends it?

Just recently we've discussed "faltering" talks in Europe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161217 and "eyeing" Japan https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/TSMC-ey...

I wonder if this media noise is more to do with negotiation tactics than with real intentions.

They gotta talk about something…

and for that they need to amplify the smallest signal into a trend! I mean noise…

I think that they are, in fact, intending to open new fabs in both Japan and Europe. Given the presence of GlobalFoundries and others in Germany, that would make sense for a European base.

This doesn't mean that it's not _also_ intended to help with negotiations, of course. It can be both true, and stated out loud for the purpose of seeing what other offers come up.

they are building one in japan

This is a major geopolitical decission. TSMC is responisble for 1/3 of chips worldwide (in an industry with few players). China's claim on Taiwan has a lot to do with that.

If i were TCMS, i would not invest in Germany. But as a german, living in Germany, i am happy that they consider an investment in Germany.

Why not? From my POV Germany seems good at manufacturing. E.g. Siemens. And cars.

Probably red tape?

In general investment in the "old" EU countries is less profitable due to higher taxes, salaries, and other costs. That's why most of the European companies choose to build their new factories in Central Europe: Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, etc. TSMC should do the same.

I wish :) There's no infrastructure or know-how in Poland regarding microelectronics. The only related field is ASIC design - a few offices of American companies like Synopsys (>100 employees), Silicon Creations (a few dozen employees), Cadence (a few dozen as well). Intel has a massive R&D site but they don't do hardware design here, maybe except FPGA.

I'd bet that if they were opening actual edge fab in Poland, then the priest would appear to sprinkle EUV machine

Somewhat related though, that Poland has the only memory module fab in EU:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik

https://www.goodram.com/en/

In the more distant past, i.e. up to 1990, all the Eastern European countries, including Poland, had semiconductor plants and many people, both engineers and workers, with good know-how.

However, after 1990, the plants have been closed and most of the skilled people have gone to USA, Canada or Western Europe.

So for the present time you might be right, it could be difficult to find enough experienced workforce, unlike many years ago.

You can find it in the west... But then you have to pay them a lot heh

This is more relevant when you're building lower technology items (toasters, gasoline engines, etc)

Personal cost in semi factories is much less relevant (and you actually want the higher-cost employees because they know how to drive the multi-billion dollar machines)

TSMC would go to Dresden if it decides to invest in Germany.

Bosch just opened a new chip fatory in Dresden.

https://www.bosch.com/stories/bosch-chip-factory-dresden/

Globafoundries and Infinion are there, too.

https://gfdresden.de

https://www.infineon.com/cms/dresden/en/

The Dresden/Saxony area is said to have in semiconductor manufacturing "2,300 companies with roughly 60,000 employees active in the industry in Saxony and generating revenues of some €16.5 billion last year."

Apple invests heavily in a Chip design center in Munich.

https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2021/03/apple-to-invest-ov...

Customers for the TSMC chips would be in the automotive industry.

Tesla builds a new EV factory in Brandenburg near Berlin... Volkswagen has several factories working on current and future EVs, ... for example the ID.3 is being manufactured in Dresden, too.

https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/press-releases/id3-st...

German engineering gave us BER

What does the (mis)management of a public infrastructure project have to do with Germany's attractiveness as a base for manufacturing?

Plants don't pop up overnight to the obliviousness of the state. This proposal brings into consideration vast amounts of money, tax revenue, and employment opportunities that the government will care about. All with unique infrastructure requirements and long roadplans.

To flip the question around: what does the ability to produce executive cars have to do with Germany's ability to fix the problem Intel have been stuck on for the better part of a decade?

Everything?

The lead of construction for BER was a dutch company

Imtech? It was their German branch. Regardless, at least they could rely on Siemens and Bosch to nail the fire system, PG BBI to do the planning, and GMP for the architecture.

Labor laws would still be sort of OK for a high-tech factory like TSMC.

But I think environmental policy would be really hostile to a large fab. Politics seems really fickle about it too. For "old school" industries like coal they try to bend over backwards to make exceptions, but when it comes to new players especially local politics will have little reservations to tanking your multi million dollar projects.

This can obviously be a huge benefit to the population, but if I were in the position to choose a location I'd factor that in heavily.

Problem with new players imho is the high level of corruption in certain parts of government and industry. While you cannot usually bribe a policeman in Germany, construction, permitting and industry subsidies and politics are heavily corrupt. Old-school industries are propped up by an old-boys-network and revolving doors between political parties, unions, administration and industry. Many politicians who did well by the coal industry for example got their comfortable retirement position in the boards of energy giants. Same for the car industry. Parts of those industries are even still owned by the state or federal government, e.g. Volkswagen is partially owned by the state of Lower Saxony and Germany.

That is also possibly the reason Tesla is in such trouble over their new factory. While they are a car manufacturer, and a modern, hip and green one at that, which politics openly hails as good, secretly they are damaging established interests by the traditional German car manufacturers and their allies in high positions. So the administration will nod and smile, but try to find ways to hinder them.

I think Tesla is just in such trouble because they were building their factory without having all permits. They were allowed to do that, but had to get all the permits in the end. As I understood it Tesla then build stuff that are not usually allowed, I suspect Tesla was trying to establish facts and thereby trying circumvent regulation.

I don't really see the german government here at fault. They were eager to get the factory up and running and were working with Tesla to get it built quickly. If Tesla wants to build first and get the permits later, it also has to retroactively improve things when they were not up to code. You can't just get permits because you've built something.

You get some local activism against individual factories, but generally Germany is huge in building specialized industry and they manage to push companies to clean things up. For me that's all a win.

You can find giant chemical and manufacturing plants all across Germany.

Thinking Germany is problematic is a very narrow worldview, in most countries you have huge political/corruption/business continuity risks, from unsteady electricity to broken roads to terror threats - Germany is a safe and stable bet.

It sounds like a positive incentive to cleanup the processes involved. Where there is a will,there is a way, etc. I don’t think that offshoring dirty industry is anything but NIMBYism and ultimately we need to cleanup electronics fabrication

Then why hasn't this been an issue for any of the existing fabs? Semiconductor manufacturing has been a large welcome prestige thing pretty much anywhere.

Bosch recently built a fab in Dresden (afaik), so it has to be possible.

Siemens was good 30 years ago. More recently, they seem a little bit too tied up with politics, hiring ex politicians, getting caught bribing (e.g. in Greece). It's not a pretty sight IMO and I wouldn't want to work there.

As a German myself: Why would you not invest? Infrastructure, state of mind?

I'd really love to see more high-tech companies invest here, after we've managed to kill the solar companies... :-/

As a German Permits, the government is V slow. And labor is expensive. Also sounds expensive to use all the water they need, since they would need to clean it up very good and align the temperature with the rest of the attached rivers or what they use. And other climate relevant regulations.

Germany has plenty of water. Certainly more than Taiwan.

That's what Elon Musk said too about the Brandenburg Facory ("Doesn't look like a desert so it must be ok")

But environment groups are saying that ground water levels have been decreasing for years and the factory would demand too much from the water network.

So who is in the right here?

I assume Tesla was just trying to be cheap. As soon as the water supplier said Teslas expected demand (372 m³ per hour) wouldn't be possible, the demand suddenly shrank to 243 m³ per hour. So my guess is that Tesla tried to reduce capex by employing more wasteful water usage but now has to work more efficiently. https://www.quarks.de/umwelt/wie-problematisch-ist-der-bau-v...

I think the demand was peak demand, so all you need to reduce that is a) accept it as a bottleneck and slow the most water intensive process to spread the peak out, or b) add a buffer pool.

Germany gets round about 750mm of rain a year, Taiwan 2500mm.

Taiwan is a tiny area compared to the diversity you get in Germany, which has very diverse weather across regions, significant rivers, accessible groundwater, etc.

In Berlin there is water which even the city doesn't want. :))

http://allsinkscherman.blogspot.com/2013/02/berlin-water-pip...

I am not sure that it is a bad thing that a company, any company really is not allowed to play fast and loose with the environment they operate in.

It’s not that the relevant laws are a secret and used to club you over the head once you nicely settled in and set up everything to your own advantage

What happened to the solar companies in Germany?

We spent a lot of money on solar, lots of German companies started to fill the demand, the Chinese came in and dumped prices, Germany decided not to import-tax -> lots of German tax payer money spent on installing solar power, but all the German solar companies were priced out of the market by Chinese companies.

Basically, Germany built Chinas solar industry, let our own die.

100%, sadly this is exactly how it played out.

Import taxes are decided by the EU, so it wouldn't have been simple for Germany to quickly react.

Germany entered a subsidy bidding war with China and eventually decided it's not worth the extreme skewing of the market and pulled out. This had the consequences that solar panels are now manufactured in China. IDK but from my point of view, solar panels are more dependent on salaries than chip manufacturing is.

It's also low-tech compared to chip manufacturing.

Practically all went bancrupt between 10 and 12 years ago. Starting around 2000, Germany began to heavily subsidize private solar panel installations with guaranteed prices around 1Eur/kWh (later falling to 0.5Eur/kWh, now around 0.1Eur/kWh). With subsidies falling, demand dropped. And initial high subsidies (some claim, see [0]) made the industry too lazy to get competitive abroad, so around 2008 China began to ramp up production for cheaper panels at dumping prices. Politicians failed to react with import duties until it was too late (around 2013). Falling domestic demand, lower prices and higher production in China and political failure to protect domestic production all lead to the death of Germany's solar industry. Even big names such as Siemens solar branch, who could have easily weathered the storm and buy up their competition on the cheap, got out as fast as they could. Because political flailing signaled imminent doom and no betterment in the long term.

Of course nowadays there is again political hypocrisy mounting around the need for shorter transport routes, domestic independence, more capacity, etc. But even so, measures to prop up European solar manufacturers are very weak, import duties have been lifted and China's production has now become too strong to oppose. So there is a little useless promising before an election, then silence.

[0] https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/studie-zu...

I knew the Government mess up the solar market but I never knew just how much incompetence was at play there. Loosing industry to China (I am still furious about KUKA) is apparently a recreational sport for the CDU.

You got it wrong. The policies that heavily subsidized the solar industry were written by Merkel when she was the Minister for the Environmental Affairs in the 90s, but put in place by Minister Trittin from the Green Party after the '98 elections. The death of the German Solar industry was the result of KEEPING those subsidies TOO HIGH FOR TOO LONG. If the government makes sure that the demand is increasing at a very high pace, all you will do as a manufacturer is t put all the cash you can get your hands on into scaling your production with the current state of technology. You'll stop all R&D, because the immediate ROI of selling "state of the art crap" is much higher. In the mean time, China created competitive technology with lower cost and finally, at some point in time, they've even created the better solar panels.

Thats sadly wrong, Chinas solar industry was heavily subsidized by the state to purposely crash the market prices of panels and ruin the solar industry of western countries. Once they succeeded they raised prices again to make profit.

Have prices actually increased? Lazard's Levelized Cost of Energy analysis shows a steady decline in cost https://www.lazard.com/media/451447/grphx_lcoe-09-09.jpg but that also includes operating costs. I can't find a source for the solar panels themselves.

They just didn't decrase as fast as they could have, given falling prouction cost. But then again, the market was heavily distorted by German and Chinese subsidys anyways, so it is hard to know what the subsidy-free "real" market prices would have been.

So Chinese subsidies are “purposely crashing the market”, while German subsidies are... what exactly? Well, they did not crash the market, but they crush innovation and competitiveness, while China improved.

Top technical talent scarcity and cost.

In Silicon Valley, you can find a dozen 600k$ engineers relatively quickly to scale up a random startup.

In Germany... the salaries these people would be making would be < 100k$ because they are engineers, not managers. For some reason the only way to slightly increase your salary in Germany is to become a manager, but good luck with scaling up a start up by hiring 12 managers that don't have anybody to manage.

This disparity in the valuation of top engineers cause many to emigrate, and once you are in the US, it is impossible to financially justify taking a 5x pay cut to go back to Germany. (You can justify it "non-financially", but these other justifications would need to offset the 500k$ yearly that you are leaving behind).

So... finding top talent in Germany is hard. If you were to find them, hiring them would be 2x more expensive than in the US. Which makes a good that's very expensive, twice as expensive.

This is one of the many reasons why the startup scene in Germany is poor. Nobody wants to be the engineer that actually builds the stuff, everybody wants to be a "manager".

It turns out that many of the engineers that get to build the stuff become excellent managers once the company grows because they know it inside out.

---

TL;DR: if you are a tech company that needs top engineering talent to grow a super high tech facility up, you can't find enough talent there, and the one you find is twice as expensive as somewhere else.

As others have mentioned, the price of talent is insignificant for TSMC compared to the price of their machinery, so they can afford the 2x increased costs, but the lack of talent is harder to offset.

You're saying in SV, they're 600k$, but in Germany they're only 100k$, but it would be 2x expensive to hire them?

Why don't you pay 600k$ gross then, they get 300k$ net, and thus 3x what they'd get otherwise in Germany, but don't have to move to the US? Seems like a feasible strategy to me.

Paying somebody 300k/year doesn't make them "top talent".

The top talent is in the US, Taiwan, etc. designing the 3nm plants, operating the 5nm plants, doing research, etc.

Why would a 600k$/year engineer relocate from the US to Germany for a 300k$ salary pay cut ?

I've always made more money at my next job than the previous one.

If a company wants me to leave my life here behind and move 15000km, they better offer me more, like 700k$ or 800k$. In Germany, that would cost the company 1.6 million $ yearly.

I mean, it's not like it's impossible to assemble a team that can become top talent.

But they need the ability to "level up" (by working with already existing high tech). And then they leave for the US anyway heh.

This is a bit of a doubled-edged sword for German companies actually.

For example, Bosch has a research campus in california to try to achieve this.

The problem is, that after being 2 years in the US "becoming top talent", you now have the option of staying there making $$$ or coming back to germany.

Even companies like Bosch that invest a lot of money in these types of systems, have huge problems making competitive offers for the people that consider going back.

Do you think they're not paying any tax in the US? That 600k gross is at most 500k net (probably less)

Also you assume they are a) happy to stay in the US b) have no immigration issues to deal with c) don't have a crazy CoL on SV that eats most of that 500k...

Yes, it's not a clear-cut move, but not too bad neither. Salary is not everything.

For reference: 600k USD is 508k euros. 500k USD is 423k euros.

We're already down a notch. People tend to assume $1 = 1€ in this thread.

When you are making 600k$ a big part of your compensation is stocks.

There are lots of ways to pay fewer taxes in the US when holding stocks. Plus you have 401k, backdoor Roth, etc. retirement saving plans that are non-existent in Germany.

Backdoor Roth?

It’s a thing.

Mega backdoor Roth is an even bigger thing:

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Mega-backdoor_Roth

I don't know of a single person in my Master's degree class in Computer Science in one of Germany's top tech universities who went to the US. And I have most of them as contacts on LinkedIn. I'm not buying your premise.

The thing about not coming back is probably true (30% the salary?!), but yeah, not many leave in the first place.

Adding to that, is there any general reason for a German, besides money, to go to the US? So if the ones that go mostly do it for the money, they'll most likely stay gone.

I know people who came back after having worked a few years in the USA. Seems like a smart move to me, considering how large bay area home prices are compared to home prices in Germany. From my limited point of view, Germany is a way better and way less expensive place to raise your child than the USA. There is way more social peace. You don't have massive gun violence. Etc.

I know people who emigrated to the USA decades ago, and now send their children to German colleges because those are practically tuition free for EU citizens (you need to pay rent tho). If you want to move back more early on, you can use your savings from your time in the USA to get the bulk cost of buying a house in one of the regions with good tech jobs like Munich out of the way. Then you can live a great life in Germany even with the limited German tech salaries.

Note that I'm not saying that you shouldn't go to the the USA in the first place. In fact, I'm still strongly considering it myself. But the less healthy, young, single, and childless you are, the more advantages does Germany have for you.

Personal development.

Working with people that are much smarter than you generally makes you better at your work.

So from that point of view, going to the places where the concentration of super smart people is the "highest" makes sense.

There are plenty of smart people and high tech companies in Europe though, so there's no reason to take the job insecurity and parental leave hit for that alone.

You'd have to be in a niche where there's only a few teams world wide that are any good, and the US one is the one that's hiring.

> There are plenty of smart people and high tech companies in Europe though,

Its like comparing a top German tech university with MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley.

Sure the German tech universities are really good, but from the set of people I know with offers from MIT or Stanford, none of them rejected them, because they were a huge boon for their careers.

The impact is pretty much the same with tech in SV.

> so there's no reason to take the job insecurity and parental leave hit for that alone.

Parental leave is usually _orders of magnitude better_ in SV than Germany.

All SV employers I know offer you 4-6 months of fully-paid parental leave, and allow you to take more months, but unpaid. If your salary is 600k$, your paid parental leave is ~300k$.

In Germany you get max 1800 EUR netto / month of Elterngeld. If you take it for 14 months, that's 25000 EUR. Somebody making 5000 EUR netto/month (e.g. 120k$ brutto), and deciding to stay at home, looses 3200 EUR netto per month. Most of the people I know making slightly over 100k$ in Germany with kids went back to work as soon as possible (women in less than 3 months... which is nuts), because they have bills to foot (mortage, etc.).

Money isn't everything to many. Life in Germany is good enough, and there's no guarantee that it would be betted in the US. Sure, more money is nice, but the pay in Germany is still decent, and the perks are considerable: 22% fewer work hours, for instance.

It's not, and that's perfectly fine from a societal standpoint, but people who are worried about working 22% fewer hours and are fine getting a "decent" salary are not the engineers you want to hire when trying to bootstrap a new enterprise.

They can run your company steady-state, but they are not going to build anything internationally competitive.

This is simply not true, as German tech companies have built more than just a few success examples.

Why do you think you need people who don't care about having a life outside the workplace to build something competitive?

Germany has 80 million people. The US has 330 million.

Can you really tell me with a straight face that Germany has 25% of the success examples that the US tech industry has?

Not in IT, but Germany has quite a few market leaders in "old tech": Cars, logistics (DHL, Schenker), retail (Aldi, Lidl), and a whole lot of B2B niche products.

IT isn't a fair comparison, no country in the world can compete with FAANG right now, that's hardly Germany's fault. And still, there's SAP and Deutsche Telekom. Telekom has 50% of Google's revenue. Sure, the market cap is another story, but still.

China is 100% competing with FAANG. India has a lot of close-second competition.

Most of the companies you listed were founded before 1950. That's not at odds with my thesis -- these engineers can continue to drive an already-successful business but will not be able to start something genuinely new.

I'm fine with that. I value employees having balanced lives more than GDP bragging rights.

For the record, yes they're the sort of engineers I'd want to hire. If we're making broad assumptions about a country's workforce, I'd want a happy, well-rested workforce that's not held hostage by their company's health insurance plan.

You say that as if valuing your free time is a sort of moral weakness in an employee.

This might also help explain why so few startups survive in Germany.

If a German startup has a nice idea and start working towards it with 4 ppl 30h/week each, at say 50k$/year/employee, a US startup:

- has access to most VC funds

- the German startup might have proven that there is money there, which helps getting VC funds

- has access to (0) a lot of (1) top and (2) absurdly hard-working talent that will put as much time as necessary for the startup to out-compete everybody else,

- has access to an ecosystems of startups around that might help them,

- has access to better way to compensate these employers, like almost tax-free equity, etc.

- has access to better ways to cash out, IPO, SPACs, etc.

Once these startups outcompete and survive the competition, then and only then they can and do switch to 35h/week, etc.

Some of my friends from MSc. in Germany work there at startup incubators. They have 50k$/year salaries for 40-50h/week, and B2B startups get funded for 2 years, die, and they just move to the next one.

Most of them are trying to switch to bigger German companies like car manufacturers to get a 35h/week job that's higher paid, and are pretty burned out of the life of attempting to build stuff that ends up in nothing because they get outcompeted by the US, China, etc. every single time.

This type of international competition didn't exist 100 years ago at this level, and many DAX companies are that old. AFAICT the youngest company in the DAX is delivery hero which is 10 years old. The most valued company is SAP which is 40 years old.

Compare that with the 30 most valued companies in the S&P500....

The question is "what values are we willing to abandon to stay competitive?" If America can compete by squeezing more out of their labour and operating in a deregulated environment, do we really want to walk down that path?

> "what values are we willing to abandon to stay competitive?"

That's a good question.

In the US, if you are founding a startup with 4 people, while all 4 are "employees", you are way closer to "self-employed" than to "9-4 employee at Siemens", and the startup more than handsomly compensates the employees with equity, to actually make it so: "you are working as an employee for a company that you own a big chunk of".

In Germany, it does not make financial sense to give a sizable chunk of the company to your employees. Many companies offer equity, or equity purchase plans, but as a "minor" perk, and not as the main part of the compensation.

OTOH, how long do you think self-employed people work in Germany? I know some that work 15 hours per day 7 days per week, and the system is perfectly fine with that.

So good question indeed.

My opinion is that Germany values with respect to "work" are incoherent and unsustainable.

Incoherent because Germany is fine with self-employed people working themselves to death for a miserable salary (most post man and DHL sub-sub-sub-sub contractors in Germany), the system itself keeps them miserable, while simultaneously preventing salaried employees to make the decision of how much do they want to work, and giving any freedom to their employers to appropriately compensate employees that perform better. The goal seems to be to squash the outperforming outliers, to try to broaden the average.

That's unsustainable, because cash cows (BMW, VW, Daimler, Siemens, Bosch, ....) come and go, but Germany can't generate them anymore. To the point that the German government essentially has to "co-conspire" with its cash cows (e.g. Diesel Scandal, etc.) to avoid any risks of them dying. The German people complain about the cash cows doing lots of lobbying, having lots of power, etc. but the reason this is the case is because, like the Germans call it, they are "of crucial relevance for the system".

Sorry, but just because they were in your Master's degree class does not necessarily make them top talent.

I know several that went to FANGs from TU Darmstadt and are in the situation as described by parent. They even feel socially isolated from Germany as their salaries and wealth are incomprehensible to their former friends and so are met with envy.

Personally I regret not leaving Germany earlier, it's much harder once you have kids.

I know almost 20 engineers personally, who moved out from Germany, only because of low pay. But all of them were expats in a first place. Not all moved to US, some to Switzerland and some back to home country(for higher managerial positions).

Anecdotal evidence: I did my BSc, MSc, and PhD in Germany.

None of my PhD colleagues (from my and other top3 tech universities) is still in Germany, they are all in the US, except one which is now a Prof in the UK.

Most of my BSc and MSc colleagues are still in Germany, some spreaded out through europe, and few to the US.

Its pretty hard to some of us actually have work-related conversations with old friends still in Germany. They always ask about the salaries in the US, and guess something "absurd" like "you are probably making more than 200k$, 250k$?", to which the only thing you can actually say is "yes" kind of in shame, because making >500k$/year is "absurd"/"beyond imagination" by German standards.

We have all worked in Germany in industry before moving to the US (both internships, but also between MSc. and PhD, or briefly after the PhD), and there is just no comparison about the quality-level of the work and intellectual-growth in the US and Germany.

In my German employer, our 15 ppl team was 2 PhDs, and many MSc, all from different skill levels, doing a good job, etc.

In my US employer, our 50 ppl team has > 40 PhDs, couple of Stanford / MIT / Berkley / .. ex-Professors, pretty much all of them infinitely smarter than me, all giving me feedback, punching holes through my work, discovering my flaws, and teaching them to me, etc.

The difference in the amount of stuff you learn per day of work, the quality standards, etc. between both employers is abysmal.

> the startup scene in Germany is poor. Nobody wants to be the engineer that actually builds the stuff

And nobody wants to fund a startup run by engineers. Double whammy

This is funny, because the most successful startups i know in SV where all founded and run by engineers early on.

So you're living in SV now?

If you would offer $600k for an engineering position, there would be no problem finding any numbers of engineers in Germany. They all would have to line up behind me of course :).

Yes, to quickly ramp up, you would have to pay more than teh average market salary, but as you pointed out, engineering positions are not as highly paid in Germany as in the silicon valley. There is nothing preventing you from paying good salaries though.

Europe has a great supply of electronic engineers and physicists. The only challenge would be that currently a lot of semiconductor investments happen in Europe, but these investments don't happen because Europe is such a bad place to invest in. Including a great supply of engineers.

> If you would offer $600k for an engineering position, there would be no problem finding any numbers of engineers in Germany.

I'm baffled at some of the answers.

Paying somebody 600k$ does not make that person a good engineer.

You could pick an undergrad, offer them 600k$, and they could take the job, but that won't make them top talent.

No company out there paying their engineers 600k$ is going to give an engineer 600k$ if they are not worth each $ of those 600k$.

---

It's not about finding engineers that are willing to have a 600k$ salary (who wouldn't if someone offers it to you?), but about attracting the best of the best engineers of a particular field, many of which already do have that salary. Why should they move to Germany?

I think there are plenty of engineers in Europe and Germany to find. Europe has a healthy semiconductor industry, just not so many fabs. And why wouldn't a lot of people want to move to Germany? Considering how many of my colleagues have moved to Germany for the job, I don't see a special obstacle there.

Also: wherever they build their new fab, if it is outside of Taiwan, they probably have attract the engineers to move there, which place would be better suited at the moment?

> You could pick an undergrad, offer them 600k$, and they could take the job, but that won't make them top talent.

But that's exactly what is happening. People are paid these insane salaries because they're either born American or got a green card. Do you think the 20 something hired at $200k+ in the Silicon Valley are worth 5 times the seniors devs at $40k in Thailand, Spain, Poland? The only difference between a 5 digits salary engineer and a 6 digits salary engineer is a green card.

> But that's exactly what is happening. People are paid these insane salaries because they're either born American or got a green card.

Not really. Lots of people from everywhere in the World apply to Google for US (and German) positions. Most of them don't get the job. Google has offices everywhere in the world. If they want to hire you, they just hire you in your local country, and after 1 year you can transfer to the US without a green card.

> Do you think the 20 something hired at $200k+ in the Silicon Valley are worth 5 times the seniors devs at $40k in Thailand, Spain, Poland?

A 20 something hired by Google in Germany also makes 200k$. (160k EUR). For Google, these 20 something programming-competition winners and phds are worth more than most senior devs doing management with no programming, or cruft apps, etc.

Not all of these 20 something will end up making 600k at google though. But in Google they have the chance to develop into that.

My general impression is that Germany is not innovative, dynamic and backwards in technology among developed nations.

For example: http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17307.jpeg

Also, they've made some seemingly stupid decisions such as closing nuclear power plants. And I'm not a fan of their climate change policy, they should push for a worldwide carbon tax instead of forcing EVs.

Von der Leyen is pushing CO2 tariffs on the EU level to force CO2 taxes world wide.

> closing nuclear power plants

Making electricity more expensive, leading to A/C being expensive, leading to beer being sold unrefrigerated, leading to a general cognitive decline.

Butterfly effect :D

I don't know why you're under the impression technological backwardness has anything to do with abandoning cash. There's a lot of things to critizise the german government for - 16k broadband lines for newly built industrial parks anyone? - but not replacing cash is certainly not it.

IDK, this chart looks like a lot of German regions are pretty innovative: https://ec.europa.eu/growth/industry/policy/innovation/regio...

Also, Germany pushing for a worldwide carbon tax? That's neat, but I doubt it would cause more than a yawn in Washington, Beijing, or Delhi.

Germany is positioned excellently for chip production, why would you consider that a bad investment?

Genuinely curious why Germany's position is excellent for chip production?

Because it has one of the two largest clusters for that industry in Europe: Dresden/Saxony. The other one is Grenoble, France.

https://www.dw.com/en/bosch-is-the-new-star-in-silicon-saxon...

There are already quite a few plants (Globalfoundries, Bosch, Infineon, TI, Osram, ...) so the qualified work force is there.

Germany is also pretty heavy on high tech production, so there's a big existing supplier network.

Key suppliers like ASML are nearby (Both the Netherlands and Germany are part of the Schengen Agreement, so logistics-wise almost as open as cross-state transports within the US).

Minor nitpick: Schengen does not matter, membership in the customs union does. For shipping, availability and quality of infrastructure is more important.

Schengen and in the customs union is still a little better than non-Schengen and in the customs union (eg Ireland), but yeah, the customs union is the main thing.

its not. you have to have _TEST HOUSES_ nearby. and this would mean, like for most of germany semiconductor output, that these wafers are flown to china for testing & assembly.

Seems strange they have to do that when there is: https://www.imec-int.com/en/applications/advanced-semiconduc...

How about Fraunhofer, IMEC, Amkor, AEMtec, ICsense, Infineon...?

Countries that have semi factories in Europe: Germany, Italy, France, Ireland, Netherlands, UK, Austria, Belgium, and Hungary (with different capabilities and sizes)

So it would be natural that it ends on the countries with existing factories and expertise.

The German (or even we might say, "north-european") self-deprecation gets old sometimes...

I have never heard of german self-deprecation. Do you have any examples of it?

German self-deprecation? I wish! My impression is that Germans feel to be top notch no matter what. I rarely heard self-deprecation from them, humble brag is what come closer.

Yeah it's not so obvious or evident.

What you're mentioning do happen. But there's a bit of a cultural theme to "play it low" and "be humble"

I wouldn't be as harsh, but indeed that decision is a bit weird. They cannot really count on cheap labour, or "friendly" economic incentives. And seeing the case of Tesla factory, it's not so easy and fast.

One great thing about Germany is the central location within EU with good logistics overall. Not sure it matters for semiconductor manufacturing.

I wouldn't say Teslas Brandenburg factory shows a problem with red tape per se, but it does show that ignoring it won't save you time in Germany.

Also, salaries usually only account for low single digit percentages of opex in high tech production, so ready availabilty of the needed specialists is probably more important.

For those companies involved in semiconductor industry, where machines cost 100M usd EACH... People are just a rounding error. Should we hire 100 more? 1000 more? Whatever

Keep in mind that for a high-profile engineer or lead who expects to make 400k at least per year, the company would actually have to pay him 800k to make that much net. Labor cost in Germany is sky high. That times a thousand is not insignificant.

According to [1] if you make 400k a year your employer has to pay 413k in total

[1] https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-...

no engineer makes 400k a year in Germany. This is not the US, sadly.

Yes, if you get 400k gross, your employer has to pay 413k, but you only get 221k net after deduction of taxes and obligatory insurances (according to that very same calculator).

I assume they mean 400k net, if the employer pays 413k you only get 206k after tax. While the tax burden seems huge in this case, it's not that different in the US, though. For example you'd get around 225k in California (with no deductions).

"net" is the keyword here.

sure, but that's an unfair comparison then, when people say they make 400k they mean before taxes

And that 800 is what you see on your paycheck. The company pays around double that in total.

No, there are only very little payments beyond the pay check. The employee does of course only get payed out a large part of the pay check, the rest goes to taxes and social insurances.

Huh, I may have (wrongly) assumed it'd be the same in Germany as in Austria.

I don't know where you get the 400k number for an engineer, typical salaries are rather about 100k, somewhat more, a lot less.

400K in Germany is upper management level, not C-suites, but most certainly not engineering either.

To be precise: 400k or higher is a salary only paid at the top 30 (Dax companies) to C-Level executives.

If you own the business there are other tiers of compensation available, but employees in Germany very rarely make more than 150k in any position. CEOs of medium sized businesses up to 500 employees would likely not be compensated more than 200k. Other C-level even less.

That‘s different from the US how exactly?

$800k/year in San Francisco as a single is $436k/year net. In Germany that’s $431k/year net.

You should argue with lower (more realistic) salaries. Social insurance (including health insurance, pension) is capped, meaning if you earn above a certain level you won’t have to pay any more. This means that those aspects play a diminutive role (about $15k) at your named salary level.

Germany just committed to put billions into a chip IPCEI, so lots of funding incoming.

> And seeing the case of Tesla factory, it's not so easy and fast.

Its not actually delayed much. The incredibly optimistic plan was to be ready in September, but that was Elon Time.

So far the bureaucracy has not really held them back that much.

If you compare progress in China, Texas and Berlin so far its not clear that Berlin is meaningfully slower.

Taiwan as a country was not allowed to buy vaccines (since China views them as an administrative sub-unit, Taiwan should not be engaging in international relationships from their perspective) and are still getting hit hard by COVID. At one point recently TSMC itself was negotiating with an EU pharma company for vaccines (to be purchased through a Chinese intermediary) as a proxy for the national government (due to the aforementioned "china says we're not a country" politics) and I wonder if these two things aren't linked. Give us a fab so we aren't wholly dependent on Taiwan for supply flunctuations in our automotive industry, and we'll grease the skids with China and make sure you get your vaccines.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3140662/tsmc...

I guess arguing against that idea is the fact that Japan also got a 28nm fab recently and I dunno if they've done anything particularly special for Taiwan lately in return.

But up until recently TSMC was very much "negotiating via the press", protesting that Germany was not a good location due to lack of supply chain, etc (despite GloFo having the Dresden fabs nearby and all - certainly not cutting-edge anymore but they are 14nm/12nm fabs, they aren't chopped liver either).

There clearly has been a sea change lately though with TSMC and their policy regarding fabs outside of taiwan. The US got a 20k wafer/month fab (later upgraded to a 100k wf/mo "gigafab") based on the cutting-edge 5nm node, which would have been unthinkable even a year ago. Japan got a 28nm fab for their automotive industry as well. Clearly the chips shortage has been a factor in all this but particularly the change in position on the 5nm fab is pretty stunning - the exclusivity of TSMC's cutting-edge nodes in China is effectively part of their national-defense strategy and there must have been some pretty good trades made in order to get that fab in the US. That is not an automotive fab and it's completely contrary to the well-established policy of TSMC never to let their cutting-edge nodes outside Taiwan to use the potential damage to the world economy as a suicide bomb should china try to invade.

> done anything particularly special for Taiwan lately in return

Hinted they might come to TW aid in event of invasion.

> some pretty good trades

Or coercion. Subsidies and vaccine diplomacy are good carrots, but TSMC is wholey dependant on US/EU tech and JP supply chains. Push comes to shove, US/EU and even JP will get their fabs. Only US has enough leverage to get the crown jewels. Even US weapons sales aren't scheduled to be delivered after fab completion. Though one has to wonder if these expansions are serious, whether TSMC/TW will try to delay/undermine for national security.

Germany is a great place to invest. So is most of Western Europe. The #1 thing you are looking for is _stability_ and a good engineering job market. Both is available.

For this kind of automated high-tech manufacturing, nobody cares about salaries. They are <<1% of the cost.

Is Germany really stable considering Tesla story ?

Chip making isn't clean by any standard.

The Tesla story had two sides - Tesla was aware about the high standards that would be applied to their factory, but somehow thought "we're Tesla so they'll create all kinds of exceptions for us if we pay the right politicians". Turns out not every country is as corrupt as Tesla's home country.

Maybe. But I think all the politicians Tesla could have bought are already owned by their German competitors.

There aren't any competitors in the state, and there has been basically no politically influential pushback, so that line of argument doesn't really make sense.

There is no overt pushback. That doesn't mean that there is none. And the presence and activity of the usual environmental NIMBY organisations like Deutsche Umwelthilfe, NABU, BUND, etc. point to at least some covert opposition, since those organisations happily serve as fronts for non-environmental interests.

And state politics, especially in the east, is rife with people using it as a stepping stone to the federal level. Famously there once were more prime ministers from the west governing the east than eastern-born ones.

Anything that's not just wild speculation of what people could be doing, although to no apparent effect?

Since it is about corruption, of course there is only wild speculation. Maybe in 20 years someone will confess in their posthumous memoirs or something. Until then, there is only speculation, inference and the recognition of parallels to cases in the past.

I mean, if the options are (a) a grand corrupt conspiracy or (b) Tesla turns out to be bad at doing a thing, I think Occam's razor would suggest (b), especially given that it's _Tesla_. This would not be their first rodeo with screwing things up.

Wait, got any source to back up the claim that those environmental organizations are corrupt fronts for business interests?

I don't think there is any other car factory in Brandenburg. So there would only be interference from the federal level down. Which wouldn't matter that much in my opinion.

Oh thats so not true. The Brandenburg (the state) Ministerpräsident (like Gouverneur) and his team really like to be a big car producing Bundesland. We have Baden-Württemberg (Mercedes, Porsche), Bayern (BMW, Audi) and Niedersachen (VW HQ) and to some extend also NRW (biggest EU plant of Ford) and Sachsen (VW plant). But there is not a single plant Brandenburg. So to be in the game is something they really wanna happen. Especially with something that hyped like tesla. But still there are rules, and you have to follow them.

Yes, and I remember that the people watched the project with a skeptic eye. It was neither pessimistic nor optimistic, just cautious. It's just an impression though.

They don't have to buy politicians, because every politician knows that Germany's economic fate is directly tied to them. Which isn't the case for Tesla and never will be. German auto manufacturers long know that the real competition for E-mobility isn't Tesla.

You could be right. It's Tesla, so the thinking was probably more along the lines of "Germany will do whatever we want because we're Tesla."

Lofty talk from the home of VW AG.

Tesla's plant is in the federate state of Brandenburg, VW is based in Lower Saxony.

VW AG isn't based in Brandenburg.

> we're Tesla so they'll create all kinds of exceptions for us if we pay the right politicians

Based on what? Tesla makes extensive use of an existing capability to move on development with per-approval.

They have not received any kind of politicians helping them to avoid bureaucracy that I know of. Some local politicians have talked in support but the bureaucracy is just moving at its normal pace.

I guess they paid a fine for installing a few tanks to early but that seems like a planning issue, not some kind of 'we gone install the 2 tanks because we have political backing'.

Its not like the plant is majorly behind.

> Turns out not every country is as corrupt as Tesla's home country.

Again, based on what? What corrupt thing did Tesla do in Texas that is so different? Texas doesn't require a public meeting for input but the overall process is not actually that different.

Maybe the standards are different, but it doesn't have anything to do with corruption.

What's the Tesla story?

They are building a factory as fast as possible, pushing the authorities to work as fast as possible and until now they only had minor difficulties which each other, considering how hard Tesla is pushing and how "slow" German bureaucracy is.

Tesla's problem, from the outside, looks like they didn't ask for expert advice, or ignored it if they got it. Which seems to be a recurring problem with Telsa in technical fields, but it's interesting that it comes up in business and regulatory fields.

What problem? What could they have avoid if they had asked experts? I have been following the process in a lot of detail, as I speak German. I have no idea what you are referring to.

One issue is that the factory is located within the boundaries of the Wasserschutzgebiet Erkner/Neu Zittau, which means they have extra strict environmental safety requirements to avoid contaminating the water.

That seems like it could've been avoided, since Brandenburg doesn't have that many Wasserschutzgebiete: https://maps.brandenburg.de/apps/Wasserschutzgebiete/ (The WSG Erkner/Neu Zittau is the big blob south of Erkner, southeast of Berlin. If you zoom in far enough, you can see Tesla's factory at the blob's eastern border.)

Telsa knew very well about the Wasserschutzgebiet. The additional measures you have to take is not actually that relevant or expensive.

The location they ended up with, was suggested by the government of Brandenburg. It was one of a few locations.

And selecting a location has many, many, many factors. Tesla simply decided that the extra cost for that environment was less important then the other factors. Such as transportation infrastructure and likely many others.

Simply suggesting that they didn't know what they were doing because of the location they picked is not really defensible.

We also have no indication that the regulatory approval is delayed because of that specific issue.

But Tesla is the problem here, not Germany. Tesla is notorious for breaking government rules.

Chip making is relatively clean: sure, it uses nasty stuff, but it's nicely contained and cleanup/recycling is part of a fab. Fabs also aren't exactly a new thing in Germany (XFab, Globalfoundries (formerly AMD), ...)

And the Tesla story of ... Tesla getting quite generous permissions to rush-build a factory, Tesla rush-building the factory, sometimes going over what#s permitted and thus having some minor squabbles with the local authorities? That "story"?

The Tesla story is widely exaggerated. So far they have gotten basically every approval they asked for quite quickly. Local politics is quite supportive of the project, because it brings a lot of jobs in an industrial-weak region. It is also not clear that the project has actually suffered any significant delays beyond some of the time plans being overly optimistic. There has been some attempts to block this project from some environmental groups and some groups posing as environmental, but their their injunctions have been quickly cast away by the courts. It is also not clear to which extend Tesla changing their plans in flight have created some delays. As the system works, some of the plan changes do reset the approval process to some extend.

While the original plan seemed to aim for starting production without a local battery plant this summer, there is no sign of starting production yet. On the other side, they already started to build a giant concrete foundation for what looks like a battery plant, this might come much earlier as initially planned. And this proceeds, like most other parts of the factory, at a very quick speed.

Germany has strict environmental regulations, but most places in the world have those by now. As long as you plan to fulfill the regulations, there should be no reason not to build in Germany.

> There has been some attempts to block this project from some environmental groups and some groups posing as environmental, but their their injunctions have been quickly cast away by the courts.

Tangent: how can environmental groups be against an electric car manufacturer? You would think they’re somewhat fighting the same fight?

A couple of general examples why environmental groups may have concerns, none specific to the Tesla story in particular, but I know have happened elsewhere:

- The location has a unique/endangered flora or fauna and building in the specific location would be a significant blow to those species.

- Ground water issues when a large area is paved, roofed or otherwise covered.

- Noise/light pollution affecting nearby residential and/or environmental areas.

- Increased traffic though connecting roads causing related issues.

It's as far as I see never about the specific industry building in the place, but rather the local effects of building in the area that need to be addressed.

Quite a few environmental groups have explicitly expressed support for the Tesla plant, as they see it as a net win for the environment. Those groups which are protesting seem to have very one sided view. They oppose any change of state, even if the trees that Tesla did cut down for the buildings were scheduled to be cut down for wood in a few years anyway. And Tesla financed planting of new, more varied trees in other areas. And some groups definitely are just pretending to be environmental while driving a political agenda.

Might be true, but in Germany, the salary you pay to your employee is also about 1% of all the labor cost for him or her. Which is hyperbole, of course, but Germany is one of those countries where the actual net payout is usually significantly less than 50% of the salary the company provides. I'm not criticising it as I think Germany is a good example of a well-working system but net salaries are low for most.

Germany has free schools, universities, low cost good child care, a relatively good health infrastructure, and more. Some regions do not even need debt any more to finance all this. The high taxes do not just evaporate, but sure could be used more efficiently.

If I'd have the choice between US and Germany, I'd probably prefer the old Europe model.

It’s probably true that the net salary is lower than some other comparable countries, although Denmark for example has also a quite low net salary.

I feel the important bit is what you get for the net salary deduction. In Germany you have: - Free Education including University - A decent mostly free health system, health care insurance - unemployment insurance so your life does not completely unravel if you are made redundant and others are dependent on your salary - elderly care insurance - child care (could be better) - police that is not completely reduced to the absolute minimum - infrastructure that mostly works

All of this is not perfect by any means, but you do have the feeling to get something back for your deductions. YMMV In some other even well developed countries it often feels like public services run on a shoestring and are just enough not to collapse.

And some public services are in my opinion easier achieved if the state runs them, like infrastructure, transport, health and welfare services or police/security. You can go with private services and the lowest bidder but my feeling is that’s a downward spiral of what you get out of it in the end.

So if you feel you get adequate services or services that otherwise are difficult to achieve I think it’s ok to have a higher salary deduction. Obviously this is a quite subjective subject, not one sock fits all.

Even if you take the gross salaray it is MUCH lower than what the company actually pays. Last time I looked it up, the company pays about as much in insurance, taxes and such as your gross is.

That’s still an exaggeration. Non-wage labour costs are about 21% of the gross salary with most of them capped around 80k EUR of gross salary (meaning the employer pays 21% of 80k even if you make 200k). FWIW this includes health insurance.

Now you do you have to count with some other potential expenses, like covering up to 6 weeks paid sick leave. I’m spire there’s some rule of thumb how to average that over a workforce but I’m not aware of it.

I would be _ecstatic_ to give up half of my salary for such a system which assures that irrespective of my employment/financial status, age or health, I'll get the care I need, until I die.

Same. For me in the states, the argument is an easy one, because the plan in the states is pretty much "sell your house to afford your medical bills even after insurance and hope you don't run out of cash before you die". Our cultural attitudes towards elder care are most glaringly obvious in our healthcare system.

Sounds great doesn't it? Too bad in reality with public insurance you get the basic care, while with private insurace (more equivalent to the US system) you get much more.

For example you can find German news articles about how public insurance doesn't cover some tests that confirm/deny if you have some life threatning condition or not, even if you have all the symptoms and the doctors says that's the next step - while private insurance does cover additional tests.

And private health insurance is only available to individuals earning well above the average German salary.

And Germany is one of the countries with relatively good public coverage.

I am in the UK, we don't get medicine for some things because it is too expensive: HRT has been in shortage for years, we don't get most newer cancer drugs (it is unrelated to efficacy, it is just too expensive to treat people), epilepsy drugs are the same. Because drug prices here are so low, pharmacies get drugs, and then ship them to Europe to flip. I have relatives who are sick and don't get treated because it is NHS policy not to treat conditions properly (the most well-known one is CFS, the UK's approach to CFS/ME is...unique, and governed heavily by cost). And ofc, lots of money thrown into "cheaper interventions" like public health advertising (coincidentally, the people who run these campaigns are friends with people in the NHS...which is nice for them). Mental health is another area: too expensive, massive underinvestment, even today most of the mental health system is nurses who get a couple of weeks training from psychologists, psychologists are too expensive (somehow, almost no-one who studies psychology in the UK ends up doing clinical work).

There is no trade-off. Someone has to pay because doctors don't work for free. The US has a relatively optimal system with targeted universal healthcare that is heavily subsidised by the wealthy. Germany is a derivative of that system with a relatively large private component that subsidises the rest of the system. It is far better to overproduce healthcare for the wealthy, then underproduce it for everyone else. Ofc, "free healthcare" sounds very nice (unless doctors start working for free, the cost of a US public health system would largely be what it is already...Medicare and Medicaid is cheaper...but not by much because doctor and nurses, for one, are relatively well paid...in the UK, nurses make the equivalent of $25k, again no trade-offs).

The UK per-capita expenditure on medicine is very low. It's also hamstrung by the choice a few years back to balkanize the NHS (stopping financially successful hospitals from subsidizing unsuccessful ones).

My feeling is the NHS is a good institution in an unfortunate political culture. The UK is an essentially conservative state (they have been the ruling party for the vast majority of the last century) which is a poor fit for a pretty radical socialist healthcare system.

Right, but there is no concept of "financially successful" hospitals because no-one is paying for anything (success is measured in terms of input/output...the UK also does poorly here because we overpay massively for doctors, and underpay everyone else). The reason why medicine expenditure is low is because the system is managed for cost. Systems like Germany, US, Netherlands, Australia are more effective because there is a huge element of subsidy...the UK is about giving everyone the same defective product.

Also, the NHS is one of the only things on which there is almost no real political debate in the UK. The BMA is probably the most powerful lobbying group in British politics (and this isn't good, they are one of the more sources of stasis, they have opposed every change in health policy...they also opposed the introduction of the NHS). So the problem is the opposite: if anyone tries to reform the NHS is any way then the political opposition is instant (and the only way someone like Blair did reform at the edges, was to pay off doctors...which ended up costing massive amounts of money and leaving the system in a bigger hole). The main conservative force is the NHS itself...it isn't really radical, it is just a system that doesn't really work but Brits have this weird tribalism built up by tabloids telling people that someone is trying to privatize it (and btw, this is the conclusion of anyone with a brain...the NHS doesn't work well, the wealthy and middle-class need to subsidise the system more heavily but people want a Nordic size state with US taxes...and btw, what people don't understand is that we have US taxes with a public health system that is half the size of the US public health system...so we don't even do that properly). I also wouldn't call it "socialist" either, there is no real subsidy, US healthcare is way more redistributive, it is universal but lots of other healthcare systems in Europe achieve universality with large private systems...so universality really isn't the dealbreaker that people in the US think it is. But most people are die-hard NHS supporters, so it clearly isn't "socialist".

Do you seriously think there is a single health secretary or government in the last fifty years that wouldn't privatize the NHS if they thought they could?

Sajid Javid literally reads The Fountainhead twice a year - and he's not much more neoliberal than his predecessors.

My feeling is it's hard to succeed as an organization when your boss really would like your organization to fail so the free market can step in. And that's been the NHS's situation for most of its history.

Nonetheless, there are inherent inefficiencies of private healthcare, even subsidized private healthcare, in that it results in horrific paperwork multiplication and information siloing. In germany, where I live, the amount of paperwork you need to get insurance is insane. There are literally offices full of people in every city doing basically senseless work just to make sure people don't get more healthcare than what they paid for. It's also a strong reason why the UK had such an easy time doing a vaccine rollout - the NHS could just send everybody who was in x age a letter. They also pay far less for medication, because the negotiating position is much stronger.

Sure, you can't get a homeopathic suppository from your heilpraktiker, or give birth in a giant bath that's shaped like a vagina, but it delivers a good service for a low price.

No. 100% of them wouldn't. People get their views about politicians, generally, from people who are opposed to them: that person is an X, they must believe Y because they are an X. It is ludicrous. I would rely on first-hand evidence. And what people also disregard is that the UK hasn't introduced things, like patient charges, that are common in other universal systems (we have a very low income tax base, so it is generally relatively wealthy people who are refusing to pay for things they use...this isn't how any other universal system operates). So a lot of the "ideological" opposition is totally nonsensical (and has resulted in very poor patient outcomes).

The view that the NHS is being stitched up is another common conspiracy theory that is "common knowledge" and totally wrong. The NHS (and the BMA, particularly) have been given all the rope needed to hang themselves. Attributing malice to incompetence is at the root of most conspiracy theories.

An inefficient system that achieves patient outcomes that are many times better than the UK. I would take that any day. It is great to sit in a country that can provide good healthcare and marvel at ideological purity (it isn't ideological purity, it is conservative/reactionary thinking that drives everything in the NHS)...it is less great to actually be in that country, and be sick and not get treated. The UK achieves good outcomes given the cost...but that cost is very low and the outcomes are also very low (the UK's healthcare system is more comparable with middle-income countries, we are nowhere near most developed countries...and nowhere close to a top rank country like Germany). And btw, the UK is massively inefficient...we overpay massively for doctors (our wages are roughly equal to Germany), there are reams of middle managers in the NHS, any system will have inefficiency (and it is far more dangerous to have inefficiency in a system that isn't redistributive like the UK because it is largely poor people who pay for it).

And no, it isn't about insufficient homeopathy. I don't think people who have healthcare understand what it is like to have none. I am sick right now, I don't get treatment (in one case, the waiting list is too long, and in the other the cost is too high for the NHS to treat people). Most of my relatives that are sick, have either had bad treatment at one point that has almost resulted in death (in one case, multiple times) or don't get treatment for anything but basic illness (and then it is usually bad: for example, doctors will prescribe insulin for overweight people with type 2 diabetes because actually getting people to lose weight is too expensive...the UK also loves "public health" programmes because they are cheap, they don't work either but they are cheap). You call up for emergency treatment, you will wait 6-12 hours for help, and when you get taken to a hospital you can wait as long as a day to be admitted (most stats that are reported on this are fake, the hospital local to me has always hit their four hour target, I have waited in their four hours when it has been totally empty...it was recently discovered that all their stats were being faked by management). If I need to speak to my GP, there is so much demand that I need to call at 8 in the morning, by half 8 there are no more slots. If I do call at 8 then I will be triaged by someone with no medical training, and likely told that I can't speak to anyone. If you do go to a GP, you likely won't get referred to a specialist if the cost is too high (a big category here is mental health, people usually come into the system only once they attempt to kill themselves/have a psychotic episode/etc.). If you do get referred, you will likely be waiting months or years. If you need medicine, it will be low-cost and anything complex is either not available at all or is sold into markets like Germany with higher drug prices by UK pharmacies (for example, most cancer drugs aren't available...it is why the UK has the worst stats on cancer treatment in the developed world, by far...same for epilepsy). And the vast majority of GPs are exceptionally bad at their job. I have moved around the UK, I have had maybe 10-25 GPs, most are clueless...as an example, I know someone who had a stroke, and the GP wouldn't refer to a stroke clinic (and btw, because obesity/strokes are so common, they just give you drugs because everything else is too expensive). I don't actually know anyone who has had a high level of contact with the NHS who has a positive opinion of the level of care (this includes people working for the NHS too btw, the support that people have is mostly theoretical...until they get sick, and realise how bad it is).

I am aware of the meme about German doctors. But what you don't see is that waste is a sign that things are working (and btw, the UK still wastes more than anyone, I am in favour of wasting money on doctors...if the outcomes are there, but they aren't and nurses get paid starvation wages because of this overspend). If you attempt to reduce all waste in healthcare, people die. It isn't like other things.

Spaniard here. Define "basic". Because here you can get even cancer threatament for free.

What a load of bs. Yes private insurance will give you preferred treatment in non emergency / non critical cases but that’s about it. Private insurance is luxury for people who do not want to wait for non critical doctors appointments.

Source: me, capable of going private insurance but it’s a complete waste of money.

There is something nice about living in a civilised and decent country. I have learned about myself that I simply can't handle seeing homelessness and poverty every day. I want to live in a society.

"A decent mostly free health system"

Where in Germany is that?

You either pay a lot for private insurance (especially when you get old) or you pay a lot for state-backed insurance (which is a lot if you earn above average as most techies do).

Since insurance is capped at around 5k salary you will at most pay 15% of that (750 EUR) for health insurance per month in the universal insurance system. If you make higher salaries then you won't be affected.

> Since insurance is capped at around 5k salary you will at most pay 15% of that (750 EUR) for health insurance per month in the universal insurance system.

Does the employer pay any of that? Is that the total for the entire family?

Yes, it includes your spouse and any number of children up to the age of 26 I think. So the classical family model with a stay-home spouse and children will be covered by the breadwinner's health insurance.

If any family member works full-time, then they have to cover their own health insurance. Exceptions apply.

If you make more than 40.000 EUR / year you have the option to get a private insurance policy with more "benefits". Then, the employer will pay out the amount that went to the public health system and you will use it (and whatever you can afford on top) to your private health insurance.

When you go private, you're in the wild west, meaning you'll need to be extremely cautious of what contracts you sign. Or you'll end up with a 3000 EUR per month plan at old age, with no way back into the public system.

Many people end up poor after retirement because their whole 401k and savings go towards the health insurance which is way to luxurious for their needs and isn't capped.

Is that 750 EUR for an individual or a family? Sounds like a lot.

For comparison in California, a 35-year-old SF resident earning $250k/yr living alone purchasing insurance through the public marketplace can get a Platinum-level Kaiser Permanente HMO plan for around $650/mo (but over $2000/mo for a family of four).

YMMV but I've found KP's service quality to be extremely high, and that plan comes with $0 annual deductible and very low copays.

>YMMV but I've found KP's service quality to be extremely high

Multiple studies have shown that Kaiser is more efficient and effective than the UK NHS for about the same cost.

Examples:

* https://www.bmj.com/content/324/7330/135

* https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7426/1257

Fascinating! Thank you for sharing those 2002/2003 articles. For completeness, it looks like a 2004 rebuttal claims that this is due to a healthier population: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1266198/ but frankly that does confirm that relatively healthy, employed populations would prefer Kaiser to the NHS.

It's 14.6 % of the gross income, capped around 58k income / year. Half of that (7.3 %) is paid by the employer, the other half by the employee (deducted from monthly wage payments).

For that, kids (no matter how many) are covered unless the other parent has a private insurance. Spouses are covered if they don't have their own insurance.

Based in Germany, I'd say the best part of it is that it's truly social: The healthy ones pay for the sick ones, all with the same tariff, no questions asked. That's especially true for people who become sick, old, or both: For them, private insurances tend to raise their tariffs exponentially, and there's no way to get an affordable insurance any longer.

Ah, so more like 350€/yr, including all dependents, for an employed person. That is a much better deal than (self-employed) KP, assuming the quality is good!

No, nowhere closed to that. There seems to be some confusion because Americans tend to quote things in yearly rates, while Germans tend to quote things in monthly rates. I pay just over €10k/year for my public health insurance in Germany, which is the maximum rate. (I'm self-employed, so I pay the full rate.) But that covered my whole family (wife and two kids) when my wife wasn't working. Now that she's a full-time employee, she pays around half of that (because her employer pays the other half).

Ah, ok. Thanks for the more apples-to-apples comparison. Sounds like the high-end California equivalent would be around $25k/yr, more than twice as much for a high-income self-employed head of household.

A couple other interesting points:

- You get that same coverage level at any income.

- There's no co-pay on anything (with some exceptions for higher-end elective dental work, e.g. if you want an implant instead of a bridge). What something costs is never a factor in treatment. The doctors simply decide what they think is appropriate.

- Prices, again, at the same coverage level, drop down to next to nothing if you have no income. I paid €1,400/year when I was living on savings and starting my company.

350€/mo*

Yes. Which ... I am sorry is not "free". We can argue about it being cheap or not cheap or whatever. Sure.

But I don't get why I got downvoted for pointing out that it's not free, when that's 100% true.

750EUR public (which doesn't cover everything) or depending on age anywhere from 400 to 1500EUR private isn't "free healthcare". That's on top of high taxes etc.

Germany has a lot of great things. Free healthcare ain't one of them. Let's stay honest.

I don't think anybody says it would be free (what is free except air and love anyway?). But it is universal and also available if you are not working, are unemployed or retired. If you are not earning any money, then you still receive the same level of care.

You are right that it doesn't cover everything, but in my experience these are primarily things where there is a high level of own influence or electivness (dental implants, lasik, glasses) and or cost/benefit isn't proven. Since a basic level of care is provided I don't mind that.

> child care (could be better)

Dresden child care is specifically good and affordable, probably due to Eastern German (Socialist) heritage.

It's also has one of the highest number of kids per family.

Eh the salaries are alright. It seems to me like the salaries are higher in America, while in Germany they're lower but include things American end up paying for: pensions, insurance, and education.

If I were American, a part of my net income would still end up going to health insurance, student loans and other things. My employer might pay less benefits, but pay a higher salary to compensate for those costs.

I think that a direct comparison is very difficult in that regard. That doesn't even include different expectations regarding work life balance, and legal requirements regarding parental leave and sick leave.

You are right except the german pensions they are a ponzi scheme and will fail in the future.

This applies to all public pension systems, not only the German one.

I'm not sure that any public pension systems in any way satisfy the definition of a Ponzi scheme. While public pension systems may be flawed, in no way are they fraudulent or otherwise non-transparent at the very least in democratic regimes.

This also applies to private retirement investments. My comfort in retirement is contingent on the economy, and hence, the stock market, growing. If the 'ponzi scheme' of limitless growth collapses, I'm not going to be any better off than the pensioner.

I hear this a lot about social security in the US as well, that it will fail. I would characterize it as degrading instead of failing. If the workforce declines there will be fewer payers into social security or pensions, then folks paying into social security will have to pay more, recipients will get fewer benefits, or the government will print money

It is not a "Ponzi scheme" at all, rubbish. The pension system is not an investment theme. Currently working people provide for current pensioners. No "investing" involved. That, in the light of a shift in age distribution, this works better when the economy and productivity grow is orthogonal, the pension system payments are not for economic growth but directly for current pensioners.

Unless you find aliens or a time machine to shift goods and also services through time, always and everywhere the currently working take care of the current pensioners. There is nothing "Ponzi" about it, that is the universe.

People who pay now do not pay for their future pension, they pay for the current pensioners. What is transmitted to the future - when they become pensioners - is not what they pay now, it is merely information. That information is then taken into account when the then living and working working people pay the pensions of the then pensioners. The information about how much somebody contributed in the past is taken into consideration to see how much a share of the overall pie everyone gets, but the pie itself always is created in the present by whoever works now.

Which also makes the headlines a little silly that claim that because in the future there will be more of an imbalance between nr. of people working and those getting a pension something needs to be changed now. It makes no sense: The current payments into the system immediately go to the current pensioners. If there are less paying and/or more receiving the funds that can and is always balanced at whatever the current time is. There is no need to do anything now when the current payments are enough to pay the current pensioners. If next year there is an imbalance they adjust what the payments (in and out) are at that time. It makes no sense to change payments now when the problem is not right now.

Any finance-based scheme cannot undo the universe (except, aliens helping out or time machine). "Private" funds change nothing of the underlaying truth that current pensioners live from what current workers produce in both goods an services. It only changes who is responsible: More winners and losers (and then "it's your own fault, why did you not buy stocks - the right stocks too of course") with the finance based system, with one huge winner the financial industry.

Yet how many people, even well-educated ones, have this balanced view on salaries? Most people see the bottom line on their pay statements. They "conveniently" forget that they still have to pay for health insurance, pension funds, etc.

A big figure on the pay slip is a status symbol. If Germany wants to attract foreign high-profile human capital like the US does, they should create a similar system: Pay them their full salary without deductions, and then charge them the mandatory cost instead of their employers. It could work wonders.

You opine on a system you clearly don't understand.

Each of these deductions are clearly shown on your pay slips. They can be calculated in advance from your gross income.

In the end, the amounts you pay (reduced by half because of employer contributions) are relatively low.

In any case, it's impossible to have a balanced view on compensation, because of the huge differences between the countries you compare. I lived 6 years and Germany and the rest of my life in Canada. I still wouldn't venture to compare what a salary means in either country.

"In the end, the amounts you pay (reduced by half because of employer contributions) are relatively low."

I typed 100k/year into brutto-netto-rechner and it shows that Netto is less than 65k. Basically over 35% of your salary gets confiscated by the state, of course this doesn't include further taxes like 19% VAT you pay every time you buy anything at all.

How is that "relatively low"?

He's completely wrong, is why.

Maybe I wasn't being clear enough. What I meant was to simply hide the deductions on the pay slip. Or go one step further, do not deduct them from the salary at the time of payout, but just postpone them and deduct them from the receiver's bank account (and make the bank responsible for making sure he doesn't send the money to Switzerland before it happens).

So the employee sees the huge number being transferred into his account. He can go on the internet and brag about how great salaries in Germany are.

Also, you are wrong here: "Reduced by half because of employer contributions". This only applies to very specific insurances like private pension funds, where there's a split.

Costs for health care aren't split like that, the employer deducts the full amount.

But thanks for the patronising comment. American?

Americans have a government-provided pension (Social Security) that pays about the same as the German one, paid for by employment taxes.

US employees also commonly have health insurance, typically covered by the employer in the tech field (or any median+ full-time job). Somehow foreign posters on HN constantly fail to recognize this fact. One would think after more than a decade of it commonly popping up here, the false narrative would stop (and it's corrected in every thread where it comes up).

It usually goes like this:

US tech salaries are great, but you have no health insurance. Or: yeah but you have to pay $12,000 per year for your own health insurance, so you have to deduct that to get a fair accounting on salaries.

When the reality is: if you work in tech you're likely receiving good health insurance coverage from your employer, and you're simultaneously paying lower taxes than in Germany.

Which is another way of saying that US salaries would be even further beyond peers if one takes an accurate accounting of the health insurance benefit + taxes.

Once you go through the effort of pointing all of this out, then they'll revert to: yeah but the quality of life is still superior so there. Having watched that forever process here across more than a decade, I've learned that people - even intelligent, seemingly knowledgeable people - often just shoehorn whatever lies or false narratives they need to feel good about their context when they lay their head on the pillow at night. And that's why no matter how many times it's corrected, the false narrative in question will never end.

> When the reality is: if you work in tech you're likely receiving good health insurance coverage from your employer, and you're simultaneously paying lower taxes than in Germany.

Just the fact that you need to add the "in tech" to me suggests that US system isn't that great. It's pretty good, assuming you're in tech. The other problem is that when you look at your W-2, you can see how much your employer pays for your health insurance - this is the amount that you should also treat like a tax, even if you do want to add it to the total comp (it's money your employer spends on you that you don't get to see). The fair way to compare wages & tax rates would be to look at the total cost of employing a person vs how much of that money this person actually gets. And even then there's VAT & sales tax that needs to be taken into account...

Are there any sites that attempt to do those kinds of analyses / comparisons?

> When the reality is: if you work in tech you're likely receiving good health insurance coverage from your employer, and you're simultaneously paying lower taxes than in Germany.

As long as you don't get fired and as long as you don't get sick. But yeah. If you are young, healthy and in tech you have good health insurance in the US. Congratulations.

So, maybe, when we foreigners talk about this aspect of the US healthcare system we understand completely how it works and just don't see it as equivalent.

> Eh the salaries are alright. It seems to me like the salaries are higher in America, while in Germany they're lower but include things American end up paying for: pensions, insurance, and education.

While that's true, above-average earners like engineers/doctors/laywers definitely come on top in the US. Also for most of these people health insurance is paid for by the company.

The trade-off is for everyone else basically, who get a much shittier deal in the US compared to what they would get in any EU country.

I'd still consider quality of life because of vacations, sick days and parental leave.

Skilled US jobs pay more, no matter how you look at it. I'm just thinking that above a certain income level, other perks become a lot more valuable.

I have nearly unlimited free time now, and you'd have to drag me back kicking and screaming to an office. Even if you doubled my salary, I wouldn't go back to 2-3 weeks of vacation like my parents back in Canada. The extra 3 weeks I got when I moved to Germany were life-changing.

There's are also finer points about the differences in work culture, but that's not really a guarantee. There are plenty of overworked Germans, even if they're allegedly rarer.

It's really hard to compare what amounts to different values. It's just important to understand that total income isn't the only thing employees are chasing, especially if it involves relocating to a different continent.

Maybe I'm very lucky then, but I have:

- 400k salary

- 4 weeks of vacation + 12 holidays (low by EU standards but not by much)

- Free top tier health insurance for family

I agree 6 weeks is nice, but usually employers will let you take an extra week or two unpaid if you want the extra time.

A well-working system? Germany only has an income tax but no wealth tax, unsurprisingly there's a huge inequality in wealth. If you earn your living in Germany through work you are basically a sucker: You have to hand on average 38.9% to the state. Taxation on capital gains, interest and dividends is 25%. This difference is compounding every year so the net effect over a lifetime is huge.

By well-working system I mean there are still enough checks and balances in place to make the rise of a figure like Trump or Putin very unlikely. And this of course is tied to economic well-being.

Well, they could use a term limit for chancellors. The position is not as powerful as the US president (the term limit is really the most important check to the president's power), and most people will agree that Merkel did at least a decent job during her tenure, but long office terms tend to fossilize the political system.

They don't do so in Germany though. I'd hate it for someone like Merkel being limited just because "her time is up".

Is the wealth inequality larger in Germany than in the US?

Also, you still end up paying for all those things. And private health insurance will simply always be more expensive

It's comparable to the US. If you look at the roster of billionaires in Germany, and then look at their national median wealth figures, it's stark.

Klause-Michel Kuehne scaled from Germany's economic size to the US economic size would go from $37b in wealth to $195b. That's Jeff Bezos.

Dieter Schwarz scaled similarly would go from $26b to $135b. That's Bill Gates.

Susanne Klatten scaled similarly would go from $24.6b to $128b. That's Zuckerberg.

Thomas and Andreas Struengmann scaled similarly would each go from $21b to $109b. That's Warren Buffett.

Stefan Quandt scaled similarly would go from $21b to $109b. That's Steve Ballmer.

And so on. Germany has 30 of the top 500 largest individual fortunes globally; the US has 159. Interestingly that's the approximately correct scaling if you account for the difference in economic size (although one would expect it to increase even further with scale, and given the US also has other things in its favor (eg global reserve currency, military superpower); so Germany is more than pulling its weight in relation to the number of US billionaires at the top). Overall Germany had 153 billionaires as recently as 2019, while the US had 788 that year; once again that scales roughly correctly for the difference in economy size.

So yes, the incredible wealth at the top in Germany is every bit as lopsided considering the size of the German economy.

Germany's median wealth figure is below the US. That's despite the US massively debasing its median with tens of millions of poor immigrants from Latin America over the past 40 years (meaning those people are starting from scratch, typically with no valuable labor skills or education background, and often without even knowing English). Comparing apples to apples, US demographics to Germany demographics, US white people are drastically richer than German white people at the median. And it's also despite the US not having the much vaunted labor protection that the Germans enjoy.

Germany, given its immense economic output, relatively stable culture and politics, high productivity, and strong labor protection, should have extraordinary wealth at the median. It doesn't (France and Britain both far exceed Germany in that regard; Germany is only slightly ahead of Portugal by comparison).

According to World Bank, wealth inequality is lower in Germany compared to the US. See Gini coefficient column: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_...

You linked to the income Gini where Germany is 126th - so pretty far from being the most unequal. But if you look at the wealth Gini then Germany comes in as 20th: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...

Ah, rookie mistake, thanks! 20th place for Germany vs 4th for USA, even though the absolute difference in the coefficients are pretty small.

Which other European country would you suggest? I mean, if ASML can thrive in The Netherlands, surely Germany must be fine for TSMC?

(Ignoring the comparative suitability of European countries) It bears mentioning that TSMC and ASML are fundamentally different businesses in terms of their clientele, costs, inputs, institutional knowledge, sales volume, and other key characteristics. They operate at very different stages of the semiconductor supply chain.

Even if you care about salaries, German engineers are cheap. If you are looking for the best engineers they are as cheap as India (India has a lot more bad engineers for cheap, but they have plenty of good ones that demand and get a good salary).

The real downside of Germany is lead Engineer is a non-union position so you end up with the majority of your engineers refusing to lead the project (despite the higher salaries, the union benefits are considered worth it - as an outsider I don't know what these are). Thus you end up with a lot of great mid-level engineers who try to stick to their own area of expertise instead of growing to make a better whole.

Why you think that Germany has a lot of good and cheap engineers? I think the biggest problem that low salaries are causing there is that people with some(5+ years) experience are moving either to Switzerland/US or to freelance for Switzerland/US companies.

So, there's big deficit of experienced engineers. German companies are trying to solve it by inviting Eastern European/Indian/Asian workers, that are cheaper, but that results in mediocre one staying and exploiting job security system and good ones moving to Switzerland/US or back to native country(where foreign experience can help them to get to higher managerial positions).

As I said, the union has enough benefits that the value of higher salary positions isn't worth it to many. In the union you are not allowed to work more than 36 hours a week (I might have the numbers off a bit?) and they check to ensure that. Non-union can work longer hours, in practice they don't, but they are allowed to. There are a number of other things like that, the one lead engineer I work with in Germany doesn't think they are worth it, but the majority do.

The above is about great engineers who are holding themselves back. I have no doubt that those who are willing to not be in the union are also willing to leave the country leading to some brain drain, but many are also holding themselves back as well.

What's "the union"? I never heard about it. Not a single engineer that i know personally is in this union(or at least they are hiding that). And literally all of them planning to leave Germany once the good opportunity arrives. Also, i know personally almost 20 engineers who left the country only for better pay and that's during pandemic only.

Labor Union. But if a Lead Engineer needs a Labor Union for his benefits, then he does something clearly wrong.

Depends on the industry, different industries get different unions. I believe the ones I work with are in the steel workers union, but since I don't live in Germany I'm sure. I just know they find their union worth it.

Many German companies (BMW, Siemens, Bosch, BASF, ...) historically cooperate with unions like "IG Metall". Unions win benefits for their members, but companies usually pass these benefits on to all employees. These benefits typically include: 35-hour work week, regular and performance-independent salary increases for all employees, at least 6 weeks of vacation per year, parental leave beyond the legal minimum, training and job placement if your current job is eliminated, etc. If you are a developer working for one of these companies, the union contracts will always affect you, even if you are not a union member.

It is hard to tell if you are in a better or worse situation as a developer when you work in such a company. Many employees in such companies would like to have a 40-hour week, because that would result in higher pay. Unions, however, push to allow 40-hour weeks only to a small percentage of the workforce on the grounds that if the workload is higher, it should be compensated by new hires instead of overtime for existing employees, since more employees also means more union members and thus more power for unions.

> regular and performance-independent salary increases for all employees

What country are you talking about?

Germany, if the collective agreement for the metal and electrical industry applies to you [1]:

4.3 % pay increase for all employees in 2018, 2.0 % in 2017, 2.8 % in 2016, 2.2 % in 2014, 3.4 % in 2013, etc.

In addition, there are individually agreed salary increases depending performance.

[1] https://www.igmetall.de/ueber-uns/geschichte/die-tariferfolg...

That's funny because a lot of experienced engineers move to Germany from France, Spain, Italy, the UK, etc to get better salaries.

Engineering salaries in Germany are high compared to most of western Europe.

Is that true even if sum up higher taxes and cost of living in Germany? At least in Eastern Europe(specifically Russia, Belarus and Ukraine), average salary for mediocre software engineer is about 3k$ per month after taxes which is already comparable with German average SE salary. But cost of living in EE is a lot cheaper, apartments in Moscow are 3 times cheaper than in major German cities. Food, on average 2 times cheaper and transportation(taxes, public transport and fuel) sometimes up to 10 times cheaper than in Germany.

This. Quality and extended costs of life are definitely vague but important aspects when considering a move to Germany. There is no perfect lunch let alone free lunch.

Cost of living in Germany isn’t significantly higher than other western European countries. And for engineers, after-tax income is easily 50% higher in Germany compared to the countries I mentioned.

They are low compared to the world. However moving is NOT easy for personal reason. If you are going to move from the countries you listed Germany is going to be easier just because it isn't as hard to get back to visit family.

I think the reason why some Germans think it's a bad place for companies is the bureaucracy. Any time you want to build something, the NIMBYs come out, find some sort of protected frog, and your project is on hold for an extra 5 years of paperwork on top of the basic 3 years.

Now, this may be a complete misconception, but that's what my perception of doing business in Germany is.

Another German here, I agree. The regulatory hurdles are insane, the sentiment among the population is anti-business and I see the chance that the Green Party will be in the Next government as another negative point for businesses.

While I get the sentiment, regulatory issues would be only one factor to decide and in some cases not that big (medical for example is heavily regulated the world over).

The fact that you guys have a large pool of talent for advanced manufacturing (for this kind of thing probably the biggest consideration), and central location with easy access to all other parts of Europe were the likely elements to win out.

Don't sell yourself short.

It's not like it's very different in the rest of western Europe, and eastern Europe probably doesn't have the know-how to do it. If you want to be in the EU, Germany is far from the worst place.

Aah, the self-deprecating German, so common it's almost a meme now.

Remember, grass is always greener on the other side.

Germany is hands-off the best country to invest in all of Europe.

As a German, you'll pay for the subsidies with your taxes.

Tesla has had a million issues come up with attempting to build a factory in Germany. It's a regulation nightmare; Latest issue; snakes and trees.

Also, according to article linked below (in German), Intel is considering building a semiconductor factory in Germany. The had plans in 2003, but the project failed and cost the German taxpayer a small fortune.

I am very sceptical regarding the plans of Intel, but the TSMC plan sounds promising. If I were to decide, I would build a factory in Saxonia near Dresden. People there are traditionally inventive, labor costs are far lower than in the Munich region, and there is a lot of skill available due to the previous AMD investments.

Link to article: https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/mensch-metropole/chipfabrik-...

This is a good move for TSMC. A lot of action happens through ASML ( Netherlands) and IMEC ( Belgium).

Germany is relatively close to both.

Why would the locations of those research organizations matter?

Because while TSMC is production, the innovation happens mostly with those companies.

Ya but why does it matter that those organizations are in Europe? The distance does not matter and in any event TSMC is not contemplating building a leading edge plant in Europe

Depending on how close the interactions are, having similar timezones can be pretty important

TSMC's innovation on production is impressive as well like the on chip water cooling.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/324625-tsmc-mulls-on-c...

3nm and the future 2nm and 1nm is all with research from Europe.

just pointing out TSMC's innovation is on the process/manufacturing side.

off the shelf equipment get you nowhere if you can't make it. Intel is the perfect example, it struggle with 10nm for so long and delay on 7nm.

if all you needs is equipment. China already dominated the foundry business with its big fund back in 2014 before trade war.

Halve of that is still based on naming things . TSMC's naming is still very optimistic about size.

This feel like corporate geopolitical diplomacy.

It sure does, the EU announces they're going to invest X tens of billions in chips, and the next thing you know, the largest backer and beneficiary of EU gets this new factory.

Yup! My favorite Stratechery post is on this very topic, Chips and Geopolitics: https://stratechery.com/2020/chips-and-geopolitics/

Germany has the highest electricity prices worldwide. I wouldn’t build any larger factory there these days:

> https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...

Energy hungry industries don't have to pay all the energy taxes+fees. For them, Germany is a rather cheap place to be.

I'm wondering about Italy. They have an established industrial base. They manufacture a surprising amount of high tech, but don't brag about it like Germany. Many good European neighbours to provide a broad range of skilled workers and researchers.

Italy is tech hostile like most of southern Europe, engineers are paid horribly compared to other professions so they usually leave north.

Make it Munich, make it Munich, make it Munich

Wouldn’t Dresden seem more likely? I think after AMD built the first fab there in the nineties a lot of suppliers settled there as well?

I would also like that, but its highly unlikely :) Saxony is actively pushing towards becoming "Silicon Saxony". Munich established itself as a design hub.

Munich does have Infineon as well and it's closer to lots of the eventual customers in the automobile industry.

But is the automotive industry really the main customers for TSMC? Judging by all the news I read about the company, the main reason for the hype is that they are always on the bleeding edge of semiconductor manufacturing, which isn't usually something that you'd find in the automotive sector.

And assuming that the automotive industry is the target customer: Volkswagen has their biggest plant in Saxony, which is their main EV plant. Also, Saxony is reasonably close to Brandenburg where Tesla is currently building their factory.

Looking closely at the net of motorways, any part of germany is in close distance to VW, BWM, Daimler and Porsche.

Automotive chips are less than 1% of TSMCs volume, but they can shout the loudest, have big pockets, and lobbying power.

"Big pockets" isn't really true in this aspect. Part of the problem with the automotive chip crisis is that car companies are stingy customers and treat their suppliers badly, with insane contracts. So when production was stopped, they cancelled orders. When they restarted production, not having any stock, suppliers gave them the middle finger because they had other less stingy customers to serve.

Automotive is influential, but all their suppliers hate them with a passion.

IFX and the split of part of Intel doesn't have Fabs in Munich area - but some testing.

It probably will be Bavaria with subsidies from the COVID relief fund. Intel has plans to that effect, as well: https://www.eenewseurope.com/news/intel-eyes-bavaria-wafer-f....

Please no, my rent is already high enough as it is and more specialized and skilled technical workers in the area won't drive them down.

But this also means that wages would be higher than in Dresden which makes Dresden the more likely location... But ultimately it probably comes down to tax credits :D

Please not Munich. We're dealing already with an overcrowded area where the cost of living and cost of renting apartments is exploding and the market of engineers is literally empty.

North of bavaria closer to e.g. Audi in Ingolstadt or BMW in lower-bavaria would make more sense.

Still, you could reach Munich by train or 30min drive and 30min traffic jam.

I'm all for concentrating the problems in a place where I don't live.

- A Berliner

I hope the German ans EU labour laws atleast make the working conditions bearable. Working at TSMC is hellish. I worked as a tool vendor. It was crazy.

It does make some sort of sense if you're trying to stay clear of the US/China catfight & EU is not a bad place to start in that regard. Plus it ticks the box of EU origin, which is interesting in itself if you want to expand there.

A lot of people seem to think (high, German) Labour costs matter in this desicion. I don't think they do. If TSCM hires someone 1% better than the other guy, he makes them millions more with a better design/brighter idea etc. So paying 50% more on his salary is very affordable. That's the difference between a high tech company and amazon, Walmart etc.

Germany seems like exactly the place I'd look for a highly educated workforce and one with a strong engineering culture. AND a place where workers will stay for a lifetime not just jump ship every 24months or take a fat cheque from China to move there and build them a TSCM copy.

I'd be more worried about German pollution, health and safety etc laws, as this is a dirty industry. And I'd be more worried about getting a big chunk of land and planning permission.

Bad news for Taiwan. The more that's moved off the island the less the West is going to feel compelled to defend it.

not really related but I found this really interesting channel with many TSMC/Taiwan/semiconducting related video, as well as asian geopolitics if you're into that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAlU6vQ1Pn8

Wonder how much TSMC Biontech vaccine deal influenced decision. Assume some level of gov involvement considering Germany was annoyed that US car manufactures got first dibs during shortage.

>TSMC Biontech vaccine deal influenced decision

that'll be really stupid to build billion dollar fab just because of that. Japan can sell/donate AZ vaccine since they have a deal with AZ and American can sell moderna which Taiwan bought. either way, it is a really stupid business decision if that's case.

In context of broader geopolitical developments, it was also "really stupid" for TSMC to build new US fabs after already planning record capex in TW proper in 2019. Few thought TW would erode their silicon shield by allow TSMC to expand fabs abroad. Right now both US/EU wants to reshore semi supply chain, and both have the leverage to coerce TSMC/TW into submitting against their own interests since TSMC is wholey reliant on US/EU tech. Side considerations like semi subsidies and vaccines are there to sweeten pot. The timing is interesting since this follows shortly after TSMC Biontech deal. IMO there was never any doubt EU would get TSMC expansion, question was who had the leverage to determine where. Most of interviews by Morris Chang suggest he's not enthused about fragmenting supply chains, yet we keep seeing new fabs outside of TW being proposed. Whether these proposals are serious or performative is another qusetion.

>it was also "really stupid" for TSMC to build new US fabs after already planning record capex in TW proper in 2019. Few thought TW would erode their silicon shield by allow TSMC to expand fabs abroad.

US is offering incentives for TSMC to build a fab in AZ. the original announcement is a smaller scale production for 5nm that won't come online for couple years. TSMC will be on 2nm by then.

Is EU offering anything? I haven't hear anything. I doubt TSMC will make the move if there is nothing for them consider the cost of a modern fab and labors cost.

>TW would erode their silicon shield by allow TSMC to expand fabs abroad

that's not smart if Taiwan is depend on silicon shield for their security. silicon shield is a media's term that Taiwanese govrt never use. a govrt shouldn't depend on anyone but itself for its own security.

I was curious about this statement:

>"TSMC supplies chips to almost all the key global chip developers, from Apple, Qualcomm and Advanced Microelectronics Devices to Intel, Infineon and Sony."

When exactly did Intel become a customer of TSMC? Is this for a recent process technology or is this only for specific types of chips? I under the impression Intel chips always came from their own fabs.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Apple-a...

Intel has been a customer of TSMC on the small-time stuff for a while now, if you consider the fact that they acquire companies that do business with TSMC (including Altera). However, the leading-edge customer relationship is very new[0]. I read it as a form of defense against AMD in the short term (pricing power and availability) and against Apple in the long term (x86 vs Apple Silicon).

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-to-outsource-some-ke...

Intel has been a TSMC client for many years. Not for their CPUs but for many of the multitude of other chips that Intel produces, from NICs to Wifi chips. Current estimates is that 7.2% of TSMC's revenue comes from Intel, which makes Intel TSMC'S 6th biggest client, only marginally behind AMD (9.2%)

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4414346-samsung-won-t-soon-...

EU has too much bureaucracy, taxes and it's just not a good place to do a business.

its a great news for Germany . If TSMC located their chip plant in there.

Europe has so many great countries. Street reading the comments about Germany and it's internal policies, why not choose elsewhere? Finland, Sweden, Poland, etc etc etc

What policies? Germany is many notches above the rest of the EU when it comes to manufacturing infrastructure and labor force. It's the obvious choice for such a large scale and expensive setup.

I'm not sure why they didn't consider the UK, plenty of high tech here and the Russians won't find us a walk over if they ever do come.

I think there are some obvious trade barriers that the British imposed upon themselves.

That's true that 51% voted didn't give a crap about how this will affect business and trade. Serves them right for cutting their nose to spite others. And I'm half British !

From a security point of view, it's interesting that they don't look to build a fab in the UK. Given that the Europe used to be an arena of devastating conflicts - with things like completely levelled down cities, to murders on an industrial scale, the long term investment like this may be subject to a lot of uncertainty as the EU moves closer towards being an authoritarian regime, this may wake up internal conflicts that are deeply embedded in some of the nations.

The last European war was over 70 years ago and today it is one of if not the most stable regions in the world. The idea that they are doom spiralling into authoritarianism is a conspiracy theory that is easy to dismiss.

Were you born yesterday? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe#On...

Did you even look at your link? 5 Eastern bloc countries having independent wars with the USSR in the 80s is hardly a current arena of conflict, weak.

Obviously the middle east or the americas would be a better location, I'm joking obviously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_conflicts_in_th...

I find it surprising that they are choosing Germany - after everybody is seeing what Germany is doing to Tesla's Gigafactory there (embroiling it in so much red tape that Elon wishes he could pull out if it weren't for sunk cost). It seems that Germany has a very good ability to convince and lobby these mega-manufacturers to base themselves there, but a very poor ability to actually let them succeed after making that decision.

TSMC would be wiser to invest in the UK - where there is a strong political will to remove barriers to entry - and it is of course where ARM are already based and therefore has a very strong overlap of skills. There is also far less likelihood of exports being restricted during a possible future crisis by the political whims of failed politicians i.e. it is a politically more stable bet.

There's a bit of a "silicon cluster" around Dresden in Germany going all the way back to the late 60s and 70s (the GDR had pretty impressive chip manufacturing capabilities for such a small country on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain). Also regarding the "red tape", this depends a lot on the state you're in. Brandenburg/Berlin vs Saxony/Thuringia/Bavaria can be very different in that regard (of course it depends a lot on the local government that's currently in place).

I think the government considers semiconductors a key industry to compete with china and I believe that matters. American electric car manufacturers on the other hand are a threat to germany's combustion obsessed car industry. I also think that Elon runs his companies in an unconventional way that maybe doesn‘t fly with german bureaucrats. TSMC will do things by the book and the saxonian government will welcome them with open arms. They won‘t see any of the local government trouble that Tesla had in Dresden.

Germany has dozens of chip manufacturers and great engineering workforce. Certainly much better than UK. Have not seen any wupte about Tesla wanting to pull out, but the factory is already half operational so seems most issues are resolved. Once located it should also be easier to do this kind of projects, but planting a new huge factory is always a challenge.

Well, the UK just willingly put up giant trade barriers with their biggest trading partner. Doesn't really scream "free trade" to most people outside the UK. There is a reason why annual foreign direct investment into the UK almost halved (!) after the Brexit referendum. Probably one of the main reasons why TSMC doesn't consider the UK for this.

Also skilled immmigration to Germany is MUCH easier compared to the UK, which also plays in huge role in these kind of projects.

The UK isn't even manning its customs posts for imports from the EU at present. And there is no tariffs on the vast majority of exports to the EU - and certainly not on semiconductors.

FDI in 2020 was almost identical to France (albeit yes 2nd to France in 1st place) for Europe: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jun/07/uk-second-t... This is counter to your claims concerning FDI.

I doubt it is "much easier" for skilled immigration - do you have anything to support that? How is it even measured?

No one (apart from Brexiters) cares that much about tariffs. EU tariffs are some of the lowest in the world - the average applied tariff for imports into the EU in 2019 was just 1.88%. Compare that to 6% for India or 13% for the US. What really matters are non-tariff-barriers - and this is where the EU really excels. After all, that is what it was build for.

FDI into the UK fell from 101,241m to just 59,137m USD in 2019. Your article doesn't look at the value of the investments but just the number of projects.

"No one (apart from Brexiters) cares that much about tariffs. EU tariffs are some of the lowest in the world - the average applied tariff for imports into the EU in 2019 was just 1.88%. Compare that to 6% for India or 13% for the US."

Bizarre comment. You initiated it by suggesting the UK has erected "giant trade barriers" but then reply saying nobody cares about trade tariffs? And then immediately in the second sentence go on to compare trade tariffs globally? What exactly is your point as it isn't really cutting across?

My point is that UK politicians are obsessed with tariffs and free trade agreements, while in reality those play a minor role (as EU tariffs are generally very low).

What really matters to companies though are non-tariff-barriers (regulations etc). By deciding to leave the single market, the UK has erected huge non-tariff trade barriers with their biggest trading partner (the EU).

As mentioned elsewhere, the tariff aren't the issue for most industries; non-tariff barriers are. I would think the UK's plan for a sort of parallel REACH regulation (REACH is the EU's chemical regulation) after the transition period ends would be particularly burdensome for the semiconductor industry.

Two questions:

Why would copy-pasted (from EU REACH) "UK REACH" regulations present more of a burden to the semiconductor industry than EU REACH?

What NTBs exist that are known to affect the semiconductor industry?

Because it's now two things to care of. Which will diverge eventually, even if only ever so slightly. If not, what's the point of the whole exercise?

It just adds additional friction. Whereas when you set out your supply chains within the EU single market you don't have to deal with that.

That's your take. Business' take is that they are more than willing to invest the time to find nuanced subtle differences between countries regulatory environments so that they can exploit them for monetary gain. The UK REACH and EU REACH regulations apply to production process - not to the finished exportable product. Hence TSMC in this case would only need to implement REACH within the country it has chosen as its production base. Between the choice of the UK or EU - this would mean it is still only "one thing" to take care of. Unless it ever intended to open production bases in both territories - in which case the territory with the "older" version of REACH would almost certainly win any "ease of doing business" test - so probably the UK at some future date once EU REACH Version 2 materialises (and assuming the UK doesn't blindly copy-paste it again).

Given that the UK decided not to make itself subject to REACH, that presumably means it wants to diverge, which introduces uncertainty. Now, it's _possible_ that having its own copy of REACH was just political posturing (if you're taking the cynical approach, you might assume that this is even likely), but I can't imagine anyone would want to depend on that.

> "Given that the UK decided not to make itself subject to REACH, that presumably means it wants to diverge, which introduces uncertainty. Now, it's _possible_ that having its own copy of REACH was just political posturing (if you're taking the cynical approach, you might assume that this is even likely), but I can't imagine anyone would want to depend on that."

There is no difference to TSMC. The UK "diverging" i.e. making changes to its UK REACH regulations, versus the EU making changes to its EU REACH regulations. To TSMC these events would be one and the same. Uncertainty exists at all times. Business recognises this and, like the Internet, routes around it when possible or otherwise just absorbs it and gets on with business.

The UK copy-pasting EU REACH into UK REACH was /obviously/ done for business stability and environmental reasons and because generally it was just the right thing to do. Painting it as "political posturing" is certainly a highly cynical even hyperbolic interpretation.

> The UK isn't even manning its customs posts for imports from the EU at present.

I mean, largely true, but entirely irrelevant to someone planning a factory. That's a temporary situation that cannot realistically continue.

> That's a temporary situation that cannot realistically continue.

It might not be realistic, but it is UK government policy: https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/uk-asks-for-brexit-standst...

Plenty of things that aren't realistic are UK government policy, especially these days. It's not plausible that it'll stay as it is indefinitely.

That's a separate though related issue, btw; that's the border between GB and NI, not the border between GB and Europe proper. The difference there is that the UK controls both sides of the border, so their failure to enforce is seen as more urgent.

> after everybody is seeing what Germany is doing to Tesla's Gigafactory there

Requiring it to follow the rules? As a portion of GDP, manufacturing is a bigger part of Germany's economy than nearly any other developed country. It is even higher as a portion of GDP than _China_ (edit not China, see below). Pretty much everyone except Tesla seems to cope, so I'm inclined to assume that this is more a Tesla incompetence problem than a Germany problem.

> There is also far less likelihood of exports being restricted during a possible future crisis by the political whims of failed politicians

"What is Brexit?"

Dial down your tone - it is unwarranted.

Rules and red tape was exactly my point. Why would TSMC choose to run that gauntlet willingly and potentially fall foul of the same hurdles that Tesla has encountered? One of the big problems Tesla had was around water supply. Do you have any idea how much water a chip fab uses?

My point around export restrictions was in reference to the EU blocking vaccine exports this year because it suited them. There would be heavy incentives for them to do the same for semiconductors in a future supply crisis like there is right now.

> My point around export restrictions was in reference to the EU blocking vaccine exports this year because it suited them.

LMAO

The EU blocks ONE vaccine shipment - while the UK and the US had export bans in place for months and now the EU is the bad guy. smh

The UK did NOT have vaccine export bans in place. Why is this a recurring meme on HN?

Or, more pointedly - why are some people so eager to gleefully regurgitate such misinformation?

It's not misinformation at all.

The UK was just clever enough to hide the export ban in their contracts with AZ (unlike the US which did it more bluntly). The first xx million doses of vaccines manufactured in Oxford/Keele had to be supplied to the UK. Which is an export ban in all but name. But it gave the UK government the opportunity to claim that there was no export ban in place (even though nothing was exported for months).

Please provide a source for this, then.

ed- One thing is organising contracts in a certain way another thing entirely is setting in place an export ban - which, you may recall, is exactly what the EU DID threaten to do when the Dutch-run AZ plants failed to produce what they planned to do, despite the UK funding it to the tune of something like £54M to get production going, which the Dutch government outright refused to do.

Again, because this crops up a lot - I am in no way a flag-waving brexiteer - but i am thoroughly fed up with the shit-eating grinning from people with axes to grind. The UK has a lot to feel ashamed for over recent years, but this is not one of them.

@detritus To quote Matt Hancock directly:

"I wasn't going to settle for a contract that allowed the Oxford vaccine to be delivered to others around the world before us. I was insisting we could keep all of the British public safe as my primary responsibility as the Health Secretary."

So, not an Export Ban. Gotcha. Thanks.

lmao, how is that not an export ban in all but name. AZ literally wasn't allowed to export vaccines from Oxford/Keele until the quota set in the contracts was reached.

I mean, if you're being _very_ pedantic, it's not an export ban. It's just a non-export ban measure which has exactly the same effect as an export ban. If you think that's a useful distinction, well, okay, I suppose, but for practical purposes it was an export ban.

>The UK was just clever enough to hide the export ban in their contracts with AZ (unlike the US which did it more bluntly). The first xx million doses of vaccines manufactured in Oxford/Keele had to be supplied to the UK. Which is an export ban in all but name.

I don't disagree that to country B waiting on doses, the outcome is the same whether or not the cause is country A implementing an export ban or country A having bought up all the doses by having signed the contract first. But there is a difference.

(The US never had an export ban, either. The US did the same thing as the UK; insist that they (which the US signed ahead of everyone else) would be fulfilled in the order they were signed.)

> by having signed the contract first

Vaccines aren't distributed to countries one after another until each order is completed. Instead, the production is divided up and goes towards different orders. What the UK did was to force AZ contractually to only supply the UK from Oxford/Keele for the first xx million doses (while happily importing the vast majority of vaccines from other countries who did not do such thing).

> (The US never had an export ban, either. The US did the same thing as the UK; insist that they (which the US signed ahead of everyone else) would be fulfilled in the order they were signed.)

That's not true. The US government used the Defense Production Act to stop the exports of finished vaccines until some time ago.

>Vaccines aren't distributed to countries one after another until each order is completed. Instead, the production is divided up and goes towards different orders

If I purchase an item before others, purchase by far the most quantities of that item, pay by far the most overall, and pay a considerable amount of money toward funding its development (shades of Kickstarter), I should expect that item before others.

By early June 2020 (<https://web.archive.org/web/20200603171013/https://www.nytim...>) the Trump administration had already identified and was planning to sign the aforementioned huge contracts with Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J, Merck, and Pfizer. (An 80% success rate is fantastic in drug discovery.) By that time the US had already paid $2.2 billion to three of the companies. (Also note the skepticism throughout that any vaccines could be delivered anywhere within the timeframe the administration was promising.)

By contrast, look at Canada as counterexample. Consider Maclean's desperate attempt to spin its procurement difficulties (<https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/where-did-canadas-vaccin...>). If you look past the predictable eliding of the US's firstest-with-the-mostest contracts as an "export ban", the best the magazine can do is admit that

* all Canadian contracts with vaccine providers that actually delivered were signed between late July and late September

* all contracts were signed after the collapse of the CanSino deal, which Canada had loudly bragged about as proof of its savviness at obtaining vaccines ASAP and circumvent any US vaccine export ban (which, again, never happened), and which it has done its best since the collapse to pretend that the attempt to foil the perfidious Americans never ever existed

* the other contracts that the magazine cites as proof that CanSino wasn't the only basket Ottawa was putting all its eggs in are with VBI (Who?) and USask. They may or may not yet deliver effective vaccines, but it's all now a bit beside the point, eh?

>That's not true. The US government used the Defense Production Act to stop the exports of finished vaccines until some time ago.

I specifically said vaccines. The US did invoke the Defense Production Act for certain medical equipment, to further ensure that its vaccine contracts are fulfilled first (<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-24/biden-use...>). But, let me quote (<https://www.ft.com/content/82fa8fb4-a867-4005-b6c2-a79969139...>): "The DPA does not allow the administration to block exports overseas".

The US's vaccine contracts would be fulfilled first regardless (albeit possibly more slowly) without the DPA, because (as I said) the US was the first and paid the most. The US's Pfizer contract explicitly prohibited the company from exporting US-produced vaccine doses until March 31, but that was a moot point because the company only began to export US-produced doses at the end of April because it still had to fulfill said US contract first (<https://www.barrons.com/articles/pfizer-to-export-u-s-made-v...>)

> One of the big problems Tesla had was around water supply.

Sure, but this was a completely predictable problem, and one that should have been assessed before they decided on a site. I would assume that TSMC would do the research before deciding on a site. It feels like another manifestation of Tesla's reluctance to ask outside experts, tbh.

Other chip manufacturers seem to manage in European countries which are fussy about water; notably, GlobalFoundries in Germany and Intel in Ireland both have large facilities.

> My point around export restrictions was in reference to the EU blocking vaccine exports this year because it suited them.

This should actually probably be viewed as a positive. There was a big fuss about the EU blocking, I believe, two or three shipments precisely because it had not previously blocked any; at the time this became an issue the EU and India were the only large producers with no controls on export of finished product (strictly speaking the UK didn't have controls in the conventional sense, but its contracts with its only manufacturer effectively didn't allow export). Both ultimately introduced controls, though in Europe's case they were very limited.

If you've had a Pfizer/Biontec vaccine and you live outside the US, it was almost certainly made in the EU unless you had it in the last month or so (the US has started allowing exports).

For all the fuss about that incident, Europe was _less_ inclined to control export than the other large economies.

> As a portion of GDP, manufacturing is a bigger part of Germany's economy than nearly any other developed country. It is even higher as a portion of GDP than _China_.

What are your sources? That doesn't seem to be true according to both [0] and [1]. Both put Germany at 18-19 and China at ~26.

[0] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/Share_of_manufactu...

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?most_rec...

Oops, yep, you're correct. China is higher. I was thinking of broader industry figures, which also include construction and a few other bits and pieces.

> after everybody is seeing what Germany is doing to Tesla's Gigafactory there

Yeah, the Walmart said the same in the 90s when they tried to concur Germany, only to miserably fail. The thing is that the Germany (and the EU as a whole) is no Wild West and there are actually rules, environmental responsibility and labor laws to follow.

I am pretty sure the other reailers in Germany like Aldi and Lidl teamed up to prevent Walmart from getting a foothold. They are extremely strong and this for a reason. I went to Walmart in Jena when they opened their shop there and was really underwhelmed by what they had to offer.

Aldi and Lidl are even expanding their foothold in the US I think, so they are probably quite competitive

The uk is horrible political mess at the moment. God knows if we'll be able to import or export anything or keep the lights on next week. Not a great place to put a billion dollar global supply investment.

Chicken licken?

do you even live in the UK?

the political deadlock was completely resolved after the 2019 election... now the government has a huge majority and is rock solid politically (as is normally the case)

other than some toilet roll shortages in March last year, there have been no visible issues whatsoever

https://www.thenational.scot/news/19450687.brexit-scottish-c...

Plus lorry drivers. And hospitality jobs. And god knows what else.

And we're in the middle of pulling out of the deal we signed, because no one read the Northern Ireland section. Or they did and lied and now they're pretending otherwise.

We can have all the elections we want, and you're right that Bojo has a solid majority. But that majority does nothing for our relationship with the EU. And it falls apart when the "have your cake" part notices the "eat your cake" part are eating all the cake. And that's without getting into the reliability of anyone in the current government (except maybe Sunak, he's doing rather well...).

I don't think The National can be considered a credible source on, well, anything really (the Daily Mail is less biased)

in their picture there's... apparently been a run on weetabix, but then the picture below shows fully stocked shelves of fruit and vegetables?

honestly, I don't know why I've even bothered responding

By strong political will to remove barriers you mean that certain politicians with the right motives (whatever that might be) are willing to wave any legal barriers ? Not sure I see this as a good thing.

And with regards to political whims, From the outside it seems that is the specialty of the UK right now. Right now, in my view the UK does not look like a stable international partner, it could go in any direction, who knows ?

Remove barriers - as in, get the planning permits issued, provide necessary tax or subsidy incentives etc, all the standard stuff that goes on when attracting a mega-manufacturer such as TSMC.

You are based in London so your view of the UK's international perception is probably about as useless as mine (also based in London). Taiwan and the UK have good relations - arguably better than Taiwan / EU - there is a longer term geopolitical instability with the EU more recently tilting towards Russia (Nordstream) and China (controversial investment deal signed in January) - whilst the UK is shying away from both. Political whims, indeed.

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