As one of the largest chip manufacturing companies in the world, TSMC is a leader in smaller lithographic processes, which has led them to seek collaboration with many of the major companies in the computer sector to offer the best technologies. This has led the Taiwanese company to seek new horizons, expanding throughout the world, and the factory that TSMC looking to open in the coming years will be Germany.
The third chip manufacturing plant that TSMC will have outside its home country, Taiwan, will be located in a European country, and it will be coming to Germany with a large investment, both by the company and the German government. This will place the Taiwanese company in a superior position than it currently has, although we cannot get our hopes up too high, since, as they have indicated, their most cutting-edge technologies will not be arriving at this factory.
TSMC is coming to Europe, its new factory in Germany will open in a few years
Over the last few years we have seen how TSMC has grown extremely quickly. Its speed in creating processes that no other company has achieved has made it a key company in the development of new technologies related to chips, such as the processors of the main companies in the market. This in turn has made a large number of countries and private companies look for ways to collaborate with them, since the ability to have the technological developments offered by this company would greatly improve the economy of the area.
In this case, as we well know, the next wafer manufacturing plant will arrive in Germany, specifically in Dresden, and according to multiple media outlets, the Taiwanese company is making all the preparations to begin construction on its new factory in the coming weeks. Although it has not yet been made official when the ceremony for laying the first stone will be, the President and CEO of TSMC, CC Wei, will travel to Germany at the end of August to sign documents with the German government, and it is expected that he will perform the ceremony during this trip.
As we can imagine, the construction process will not be easy, so it is expected that the production plant can begin developing its products in 2027.
This factory will not have the company’s most advanced technologies
Although everything points to this factory being one of TSMC’s biggest assets on European soil, it does not mean that they will bring all the technologies that have made them what they are, since these are reserved for the production plants they have in Asia. In this case, the production that the Dresden factory will have will be mainly dedicated to supplying components to the European automotive industry with two different process technologies: a 28 or 22 nm planar CMOS node and a 16 or 12 nm FinFET node.
The factory is expected to have a monthly production capacity of around 40,000 wafers, which is quite a lot considering that the Taiwanese brand will not be the only owner, as three other companies, Infineon, Robert Bosch and NXP, each have a 10% stake.