Despite SEMI’s reassuring statement, concerns of a potential neon gas shortage due to the Ukrainian war keep surfacing. According to sources contacted by Reuters, effects on chip manufacturing could be felt if the conflicts drags on, and could mostly hit smaller chipmakers. On a wider IT scale, recent updates include concerns about data security expressed by some European governments in countries – Germany and Italy – that rely on Russia-headquartered Kaspersky’s cyber protection technologies. Moving to EDA companies, Aldec has suspended all sales and distribution transactions in Russia and is offering temporary housing to its Ukrainian personnel at a company’s facility in Poland; and Ansys, that had already suspended all sales transactions and consulting activities in Russia and Belarus, has now announced it will also make a financial contribution to ‘Doctors Without Borders’ in support of Ukrainian refugees. Let’s now move to tech news, this week including some academic research updates.
Intel investments in Europe
The European Union’s initiative to bolster local chip manufacturing (“EU Chip Act”) is starting to bear fruits: Intel has just announced the first phase of its plans to invest 80 billion euros in the European Union over the next decade along the entire semiconductor value chain. The plan includes a 17 billion euros investment for two semiconductor fabs in Magdeburg, Germany, a site that Intel has dubbed ‘Silicon Junction’. More Intel investments are planned in Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain and France. In this latter country Intel is planning to establish its new European R&D hub, its European headquarters for high performance computing and artificial intelligence design capabilities, and its main European foundry design center.
