7 ms·

‘Silicon Saxony’ aims to be EU chipmaking hub

54 points by 1cvmask 5y ago

1cvmask 5y ago
https://archive.md/fjEgo https://archive.md/fjEgo
1cvmask 5y ago
Key excerpt regarding chip making in Germany: Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/75841b94-196e-466f-ad1b-72d3809c33fc https://www.ft.com/content/75841b94-196e-466f-ad1b-72d3809c3... The region has been burnt by politicians’ fading interest before. While Taiwan was shoring up the semiconductor sector with nine-figure subsidies at the turn of the century, European support for the capital intensive industry remained modest. As recently as 2009, Dresden-based memory chipmaker Qimonda — one of the world’s largest — filed for bankruptcy after struggling to compete with Asian rivals despite appeals to the European Commission for support. “Qimonda wasn’t saved, [carmaker] Opel was saved,” said Frank Bösenberg, managing director of Silicon Saxony’s representative body, which lobbies on behalf of 370 institutions. “Whose belts are standing still right now due to the lack of semiconductors?” he said, referring to Opel’s production lines.
- simiones 5y ago
  Wow, did FT actually insert additional text into your clipboard when you copy/pasted?
  - kmlx 5y ago
    yes, the ft does that. i guess it’s against their t&c to just copy their articles and they want to make that clear. they do have share button that allows a number of clicks without needing a subscription.
  - disabled 5y ago
    Yeah, it always does this if you are an FT subscriber when copying/pasting their articles. This can be extremely annoying as a screenreader user. While FT is an extremely accessible newspaper, it can sometimes be more convenient to just copy/paste the article into a screenreader software.
Schiendelman 5y ago
Right now covid in Saxony is so bad that they’ve closed hotels to non business travelers. It doesn’t bode well for Saxony as a tech hub when their residents won’t get vaccinated.
- shasts 5y ago
  Yes. AFD and right wing politics is not helping. Recently a friend moved from India to Dresden to work for a company in the "silicon" ecosystem. For some reason his name on the postal box where he and family lives temporarily, was tore off multiple times. Missed a few urgent letters. You know how it is in Germany, if you miss a letter from the Government office.
  - emsy 5y ago
    Hopefully the exposure to foreign professionals will lead to a decrease in xenophobia. So I think it's the other way around. It's not that there are fewer foreigners there because of right wing politics, but the right wing politics are flourishing because there are fewer foreigners (add to that the economic after-effects of the GDR that are still lingering more than 30 years later).
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > It's not that there are fewer foreigners there because of right wing politics Actually, you're wrong. Nazism in Eastern Germany has been pointed out to drastically reduce the attractivity for foreigners. Been that way ever since the 2015 anti-refugee riots and the rise of Pegida: https://www.br.de/nachricht/pegida-schadet-dresden-100.html https://www.br.de/nachricht/pegida-schadet-dresden-100.html The fact that people of color regularly get beaten up in public transport over there only strengthens the problem. The Nazi terrorism is winning.
      - emsy 5y ago
        I'm sure you have some sources for your bold claims. Also, I think you may have gotten the point of my comment wrong. The comment I replied to made it sound like it's a bad idea to build in the saxony area because of racism, which is a wrong way to think about this, because this will only let the problem persist. Of course, this will only work if law enforcement will punish right wing violence.
textcortex 5y ago
With the amount of neo nazis in Saxony, they can totally become the racism hub in EU
mensetmanusman 5y ago
I worked previously at the Lebiniz institute in Dresden. If you haven’t been, it’s one of the most beautiful cities in Europe (esp. at night). East Germany is still suffering from the economic damage of the cold war. The political challenge of funneling money from the west to the east is the same dynamic in the US that didn’t support the losers of globalization. This had led to the rise of the far right et al. Fun trivia: Early in Putin’s career, he was a spy in Dresden trying to learn about technology development.
- foepys 5y ago
  One thing I want to clarify about the rise of the far-right in East Germany is that a lot of people with far-right views moved from the West to the East, too. It's not just people from the East suffering economic hardship turning right, it's also an influx of "foreigners" (read: Western Germans) making it worse. Here are two short documentaries about two separate instances of this (German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_1S2mmUn00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_1S2mmUn00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YilcjXGXDbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YilcjXGXDbY
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  And west germans are still paying for it... :(
  - _glass 5y ago
    And East Germans, you might not know this, but a lot of Western Germans are teasing Eastern Germans that they pay for this, when in general there is a tax for all citizens. In general this kind of support is needed, and with positive results, see Bavaria, which had no industry until recently. Or big factories that were relocated after WWII like Audi from Zwickau (Saxony) to Ingolstadt (Bavaria).
    - nautilius 5y ago
      I assume you would support a 'nautilius-tax' then. Everyone pays $10 a month to me, but because I also throw $10 in the bucket it's totally fair!
citizenpaul 5y ago
I read that as "aims to be chipmunk hub" not gonna lie I was much more interested.
mellosouls 5y ago
Was Silicon Valley a deliberate government led initiative (beyond partnership and funding)? I'm sceptical of these "Silicon X" top-down projects which don't seem to have a great history (cf eg Silicon Roundabout); I would have thought that while government input and infrastructure help is useful, attempts at driving something at a high level in imitation of something else misses the point of low-level evolutionary growth, invention and originality.
- johanneskanybal 5y ago
  It's just a buzz word, calling something silicon valley doesn't make it so, there we agree :) At the same time the world sure is bigger than a city/university and there's tech hubs everywhere. Not having a hub for semi-conductors in Europe and Us seems foolish.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > Was Silicon Valley a deliberate government led initiative (beyond partnership and funding)? SV was the West Coast electronic warfare base for the US military after WW2, hence many early electronics pioneers started there. Stanford U. was the center. Some time after that, private investors became active, which was the start of civilian developments. I think startup parks could succeed, but not when headed by career bureaucrats. Something along the lines of how YC functions.
- rowanajmarshall 5y ago
  > I'm sceptical of these "Silicon X" top-down projects which don't seem to have a great history (cf eg Silicon Roundabout); I don't know how much the government helped with this, but the UK has one of the largest software industries in the world, right after the US and China. It's hard to argue it hasn't worked, even if were unclear as to what "it" is
  - anamax 5y ago
    One definition of "worked" is "When you say Silicon {whatever}, people outside of {location of whatever} know where you're talking about." Another definition is "Famous for producing notable companies."
mlinksva 5y ago
I don't know whether there are any real complementarities between chipmaking and operating systems r&d being geographically close (doubtful) but in case there are, I vaguely understand Dresden is a bit of a hub for the latter due to TU Dresden and Genode Labs.
908B64B197 5y ago
Everytime I heard about a "Silicon Something" it was someone trying to sell me something. And the best move was to keep everything in the Bay. What's the plan to bring-in world class caliber talent and investors this time?
- qnsi 5y ago
  re talent, there is plenty in EU and getting a visa to USA is not the easiest / not everyone wants to emigrate to USA
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    But most talented people end up working for US companies. If we all got together and founded a serious company in Europe, we could work for a company grounded in our community.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      Hence my question: what in this current "Silicon Generic Location" plan is the strategy to get the investors required for such a company to be founded?
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        None. They have no plan. That's honestly the answer. They don't want to make the challenging cultural and social mindset change required to produce a genuine competitor to Silicon Valley. In fact I would guess that they most likely don't even have the most basic idea of what is different about the Silicon Valley.
    - hulitu 5y ago
      Not really. The US companies have some bad reputation regarding work culture ( no holidays, expectation to be available after hours). There are a lot of European companies.
    - rurban 5y ago
bobthechef 5y ago
The way you compete with cheap Asian labor is protectionism. You will never build up that sort of industry with Chinese industry and cheap labor (and CCP shenanigans) as competition. America became an industrial power precisely because of protectionism. The US would never have stood a chance against England, France, and others (China is an interesting counterexample perhaps because they leveraged American greed to build up their industrial base, but that is not something everyone can replicate). You need a system of tariffs to prevent competition from abroad from killing the baby in the crib. This was certainly the argument made by Friedrich List. The only reason the US loves to promote open markets elsewhere is to remove friction for American exports and cheap labor.

54 points by 1cvmask 5y ago

https://archive.md/fjEgo https://archive.md/fjEgo

Key excerpt regarding chip making in Germany: Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/75841b94-196e-466f-ad1b-72d3809c33fc https://www.ft.com/content/75841b94-196e-466f-ad1b-72d3809c3... The region has been burnt by politicians’ fading interest before. While Taiwan was shoring up the semiconductor sector with nine-figure subsidies at the turn of the century, European support for the capital intensive industry remained modest. As recently as 2009, Dresden-based memory chipmaker Qimonda — one of the world’s largest — filed for bankruptcy after struggling to compete with Asian rivals despite appeals to the European Commission for support. “Qimonda wasn’t saved, [carmaker] Opel was saved,” said Frank Bösenberg, managing director of Silicon Saxony’s representative body, which lobbies on behalf of 370 institutions. “Whose belts are standing still right now due to the lack of semiconductors?” he said, referring to Opel’s production lines.

simiones 5y ago
Wow, did FT actually insert additional text into your clipboard when you copy/pasted?
- kmlx 5y ago
  yes, the ft does that. i guess it’s against their t&c to just copy their articles and they want to make that clear. they do have share button that allows a number of clicks without needing a subscription.
- disabled 5y ago
  Yeah, it always does this if you are an FT subscriber when copying/pasting their articles. This can be extremely annoying as a screenreader user. While FT is an extremely accessible newspaper, it can sometimes be more convenient to just copy/paste the article into a screenreader software.

Schiendelman 5y ago

Right now covid in Saxony is so bad that they’ve closed hotels to non business travelers. It doesn’t bode well for Saxony as a tech hub when their residents won’t get vaccinated.

shasts 5y ago
Yes. AFD and right wing politics is not helping. Recently a friend moved from India to Dresden to work for a company in the "silicon" ecosystem. For some reason his name on the postal box where he and family lives temporarily, was tore off multiple times. Missed a few urgent letters. You know how it is in Germany, if you miss a letter from the Government office.
- emsy 5y ago
  Hopefully the exposure to foreign professionals will lead to a decrease in xenophobia. So I think it's the other way around. It's not that there are fewer foreigners there because of right wing politics, but the right wing politics are flourishing because there are fewer foreigners (add to that the economic after-effects of the GDR that are still lingering more than 30 years later).
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > It's not that there are fewer foreigners there because of right wing politics Actually, you're wrong. Nazism in Eastern Germany has been pointed out to drastically reduce the attractivity for foreigners. Been that way ever since the 2015 anti-refugee riots and the rise of Pegida: https://www.br.de/nachricht/pegida-schadet-dresden-100.html https://www.br.de/nachricht/pegida-schadet-dresden-100.html The fact that people of color regularly get beaten up in public transport over there only strengthens the problem. The Nazi terrorism is winning.
    - emsy 5y ago
      I'm sure you have some sources for your bold claims. Also, I think you may have gotten the point of my comment wrong. The comment I replied to made it sound like it's a bad idea to build in the saxony area because of racism, which is a wrong way to think about this, because this will only let the problem persist. Of course, this will only work if law enforcement will punish right wing violence.

textcortex 5y ago

With the amount of neo nazis in Saxony, they can totally become the racism hub in EU

mensetmanusman 5y ago

I worked previously at the Lebiniz institute in Dresden. If you haven’t been, it’s one of the most beautiful cities in Europe (esp. at night). East Germany is still suffering from the economic damage of the cold war. The political challenge of funneling money from the west to the east is the same dynamic in the US that didn’t support the losers of globalization. This had led to the rise of the far right et al. Fun trivia: Early in Putin’s career, he was a spy in Dresden trying to learn about technology development.

foepys 5y ago
One thing I want to clarify about the rise of the far-right in East Germany is that a lot of people with far-right views moved from the West to the East, too. It's not just people from the East suffering economic hardship turning right, it's also an influx of "foreigners" (read: Western Germans) making it worse. Here are two short documentaries about two separate instances of this (German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_1S2mmUn00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_1S2mmUn00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YilcjXGXDbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YilcjXGXDbY
cyberpunk 5y ago
And west germans are still paying for it... :(
- _glass 5y ago
  And East Germans, you might not know this, but a lot of Western Germans are teasing Eastern Germans that they pay for this, when in general there is a tax for all citizens. In general this kind of support is needed, and with positive results, see Bavaria, which had no industry until recently. Or big factories that were relocated after WWII like Audi from Zwickau (Saxony) to Ingolstadt (Bavaria).
  - nautilius 5y ago
    I assume you would support a 'nautilius-tax' then. Everyone pays $10 a month to me, but because I also throw $10 in the bucket it's totally fair!

citizenpaul 5y ago

I read that as "aims to be chipmunk hub" not gonna lie I was much more interested.

mellosouls 5y ago

Was Silicon Valley a deliberate government led initiative (beyond partnership and funding)? I'm sceptical of these "Silicon X" top-down projects which don't seem to have a great history (cf eg Silicon Roundabout); I would have thought that while government input and infrastructure help is useful, attempts at driving something at a high level in imitation of something else misses the point of low-level evolutionary growth, invention and originality.

johanneskanybal 5y ago
It's just a buzz word, calling something silicon valley doesn't make it so, there we agree :) At the same time the world sure is bigger than a city/university and there's tech hubs everywhere. Not having a hub for semi-conductors in Europe and Us seems foolish.
redis_mlc 5y ago
> Was Silicon Valley a deliberate government led initiative (beyond partnership and funding)? SV was the West Coast electronic warfare base for the US military after WW2, hence many early electronics pioneers started there. Stanford U. was the center. Some time after that, private investors became active, which was the start of civilian developments. I think startup parks could succeed, but not when headed by career bureaucrats. Something along the lines of how YC functions.
rowanajmarshall 5y ago
> I'm sceptical of these "Silicon X" top-down projects which don't seem to have a great history (cf eg Silicon Roundabout); I don't know how much the government helped with this, but the UK has one of the largest software industries in the world, right after the US and China. It's hard to argue it hasn't worked, even if were unclear as to what "it" is
- anamax 5y ago
  One definition of "worked" is "When you say Silicon {whatever}, people outside of {location of whatever} know where you're talking about." Another definition is "Famous for producing notable companies."

mlinksva 5y ago

I don't know whether there are any real complementarities between chipmaking and operating systems r&d being geographically close (doubtful) but in case there are, I vaguely understand Dresden is a bit of a hub for the latter due to TU Dresden and Genode Labs.

908B64B197 5y ago

Everytime I heard about a "Silicon Something" it was someone trying to sell me something. And the best move was to keep everything in the Bay. What's the plan to bring-in world class caliber talent and investors this time?

qnsi 5y ago
re talent, there is plenty in EU and getting a visa to USA is not the easiest / not everyone wants to emigrate to USA
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  But most talented people end up working for US companies. If we all got together and founded a serious company in Europe, we could work for a company grounded in our community.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Hence my question: what in this current "Silicon Generic Location" plan is the strategy to get the investors required for such a company to be founded?
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      None. They have no plan. That's honestly the answer. They don't want to make the challenging cultural and social mindset change required to produce a genuine competitor to Silicon Valley. In fact I would guess that they most likely don't even have the most basic idea of what is different about the Silicon Valley.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    Not really. The US companies have some bad reputation regarding work culture ( no holidays, expectation to be available after hours). There are a lot of European companies.
  - rurban 5y ago

bobthechef 5y ago

The way you compete with cheap Asian labor is protectionism. You will never build up that sort of industry with Chinese industry and cheap labor (and CCP shenanigans) as competition. America became an industrial power precisely because of protectionism. The US would never have stood a chance against England, France, and others (China is an interesting counterexample perhaps because they leveraged American greed to build up their industrial base, but that is not something everyone can replicate). You need a system of tariffs to prevent competition from abroad from killing the baby in the crib. This was certainly the argument made by Friedrich List. The only reason the US loves to promote open markets elsewhere is to remove friction for American exports and cheap labor.