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Comment by tobessebot | Hacker News Reader

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.

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