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Comment by hans1729 | Hacker News Reader

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

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...?

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.

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