Infineon opened its €5bn Smart Power Fab in Dresden on 2 July, several months ahead of schedule1. The new Module 4 doubles the German chipmaker's Dresden capacity, runs 300mm wafers for power and analog chips, and creates around 1,000 jobs. Ground was broken in May 2023.
The opening ends a two-year run of failure on the EU Chips Act, the bloc's flagship law for funding home-grown semiconductor capacity. Intel's cancelled €30bn Magdeburg fab and GlobalFoundries' suspended €7.5bn Crolles project had stripped €37.5bn from the programme and left Europe's chip share at 9% against a 20% target. Every prior flagship slipped or died; this one opened before its deadline.
Power and analog silicon runs AI data-centre power delivery, electric vehicles and renewables, and Infineon already leads that node. It does not touch leading-edge logic, the sub-7nm fabrication the Chips Act was written to reclaim, where Europe still depends wholly on TSMC, Samsung and Intel fabs abroad. Dresden brings real capacity online now, at the one layer where Europe never lost ground.
The site draws roughly €1bn in public money, co-financed by the EU Chips Act and Germany's IPCEI ME/CT (Important Project of Common European Interest on Microelectronics). It joins a Dresden cluster that keeps filling out: TSMC's ESMC (European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) fab took its first equipment weeks earlier for 2027 production, and GlobalFoundries ran the first all-European chip flow with Qualinx at the same site.
