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Comment by 988747 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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

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/

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

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)

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