Semiconductors are a strategic industry in today's world, which is related to national security and economic development. In recent years, with the growth of global chip demand and the tight supply chain, countries have introduced policies to increase investment and support for local chip manufacturing. From the United States, Germany to Israel, the construction of global chip factories is showing a trend of "blooming everywhere".
The U.S. Department of Commerce recently announced that it will provide about $162 million in federal incentive funds to semiconductor company Microchip Technology to facilitate the transfer of the company's semiconductor supply chain to the United States. This is the second U.S. grant under the CHIPS and Science Act, which aims to provide $39 billion to stimulate local chip manufacturing. U.S. Commerce Secretary Raimondo said he hopes to increase the share of global semiconductors produced in the United States from the current level of about 12% to nearly 20%.
In the past 2023, in addition to the United States, countries such as Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and Israel have also introduced incentives such as subsidies to promote chip production in their countries. Among them, Intel has new chip factory projects in Germany, Poland, Italy and Ireland, with a total investment of more than 40 billion euros. The European Commission also announced the European Chips Act, which will use 43 billion euros of investment to increase the proportion of global chip production in the EU from less than 10% to 20% by 2030.
In Asia, the Japanese government has designated semiconductors as an industry critical to economic activity and national security, and has allocated 2 trillion yen to subsidize up to 50% of companies' investments in manufacturing facilities, chip-making equipment and semiconductor materials. TSMC is also building a new chip production base in Kumamoto, Japan, for which the Japanese government has provided subsidies of about $3.2 billion. The South Korean government plans to attract 550 trillion won of investment by 2026 and boost the domestic chip industry by expanding tax incentives and support. Intel and Samsung Electronics have also built new chip factories in Israel and South Korea, respectively.
International chip factories are also actively investing in the Chinese market. According to Xinhuanet, Micron Technology plans to invest 4.3 billion yuan in its packaging and testing plant in Xi'an in the next few years, and introduce new and high-performance packaging and testing equipment. STMicroelectronics has established a joint venture manufacturing plant with A-share listed company Sanan Optoelectronics to carry out large-scale mass production of 8-inch silicon carbide devices, and the total construction of the joint venture plant is expected to be about 3.2 billion US dollars.
Xing Yuqing, a professor at Japan's National Graduate School for Policy Studies, told this reporter that semiconductors are the cornerstone of modern industries, involving artificial intelligence, communications, and autonomous driving technology. Originally, the operation of global value chains depended on trust and cooperation between companies in different countries. However, as trust between countries has declined, many countries have begun to build their own semiconductor factories, and this is the phenomenon of "semiconductor factories all over the world".
According to the 2023 Global Value Chain Development Report jointly released by the Asian Development Bank, the Asian Economic Research Institute of the Japan External Trade Organization, the Global Value Chain Research Institute of the Beijing University of International Business and Economics and the WTO, fabless has gradually become the mainstream business model of the global semiconductor industry over the past four decades. From a global perspective, fabless companies in the United States specialize in integrated circuit design and marketing, while semiconductor companies in East Asia are responsible for wafer manufacturing and downstream production activities. Under this model, between 2018 and 2023, East Asian economies such as China, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore together account for about 80% of the world's total semiconductor manufacturing capacity. At the same time, as of 2021, the U.S. accounted for only 11% of the world's wafer manufacturing capacity, compared to 9% in Europe.
The report argues that the semiconductor global value chain is currently in a period of large-scale transformation. Previously, it was often designed and manufactured in-house by the same semiconductor company, but in recent years, the design and manufacture of semiconductors have become increasingly organizationally and geographically separate. At the same time, with the development of emerging technologies such as PCs, smartphones, and servers, semiconductor manufacturing has become more technologically complex and capital-intensive in terms of capital investment. The characteristics of these specific industries pose fundamental challenges to the current policy initiatives of countries to build semiconductors in their countries. These policy efforts must therefore be viewed with caution.
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