Magdeburg

Magdeburg is the capital of Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany and the site of Intel's abandoned €30bn advanced-node semiconductor megafab, the largest single foreign direct investment ever planned for Germany. Intel cancelled the project outright in early 2026 following a $2.9bn net loss and a 15% workforce cut. The Commission's June 2026 Digital Decade scorecard confirmed European chip share at 9% against the Chips Act's 20% target, with the Magdeburg cancellation cited as a load-bearing cause of the gap .

Announced in 2022, the fab attracted €10bn in committed German state aid and was positioned as the cornerstone of the Chips Act's supply-side ambitions. It would have been Europe's first sub-2nm manufacturing site. Its collapse, paired with GlobalFoundries' suspension of its €7.5bn Crolles expansion, removed the two largest planned contributions to the 20% target in a single year .

Eastern Germany had positioned the Intel investment as a centrepiece of post-industrial economic transformation; Magdeburg's civic identity became entwined with the project across three years of development. Its failure removed an anchor that would have drawn suppliers and engineers to a region still recovering from deindustrialisation after reunification, and demonstrated that the Chips Act relied on private capital conditional on demand assumptions that did not materialise.