According to Reuters reported on Friday, Volkswagen’s Audi purchasing director Renate Vachenauer said in an interview, although chipmakers plan to build factories in Germany, but the semiconductor shortage caused by the bottleneck of the German automotive industry will continue for several years before it can be resolved.
It will still take years for chipmakers to build plants in Germany, and automakers need to alleviate this bottleneck by reducing the variety of chips used in vehicles, of which there are currently more than 8,000, it said. “We must use a variety of means to stabilize the supply of semiconductors, but also to add to the inventory to some extent.”
▲ Photo credit Audi
And with German automakers and electronics makers hit hard by production delays due to the global chip shortage, corporate executives and policymakers are now reconsidering supply lines.
As previously reported, TSMC issued a press release on August 8 announcing that the company’s board of directors approved a plan to invest in a semiconductor plant in Germany. The press release noted that the approved investment in the amount not exceeding 3.5 billion euros within the amount of TSMC’s main shareholding in the German subsidiary European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, in order to provide professional integrated circuit manufacturing services.
TSMC has actually been in talks with the German state of Saxony since 2021 about building a plant in Dresden. Upon board approval, TSMC plans to use the Dresden facility to sign a letter of intent with Berlin for financing, which will ultimately be decided by the European Commission.
