Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ambitions to turn Germany into a semiconductor powerhouse have suffered a fresh blow after US tech company Wolfspeed shelved plans to build a factory in the country, prompting the opposition to claim his industrial policy was in tatters.
Wolfspeed was to have built a €3bn factory in the town of Ensdorf, in western Germany, to produce silicon carbide chips widely used in electric vehicles. But the plans have been hit by falling European demand for EVs.
In a statement, Wolfspeed said it was “suspending [its] plans to build our next [fabrication plant] in Ensdorf at this time”, citing a “more modest” increase in EV adoption than previous forecasts.
The move comes just weeks after Intel put off a plan to build a €30bn factory in the east German city of Magdeburg. The project, which was to receive €9.9bn in government grants, would have been the largest foreign investment in Germany’s postwar history.