2023-06-22 11:43:52
Poland is not geographically far from Romania, but the distance is huge when it comes to important investments. One of the largest European processor factories will be built near the city of Wroclaw and the total investment will be more than 4 billion dollars. How did Poland attract Intel?
Wroclaw, PoloniaFoto: Shutterstock
Microprocessor factories are expensive, multibillion-dollar investments, far more than it would take, for example, to build a mega-car factory from scratch.
Europe has few chip factories compared to Asia, and authorities in some countries are desperate to attract large companies and reduce dependence on processors from Taiwan, China and South Korea. For this, governments are willing to give subsidies that investors in other industries would not even dream of.
How did Poland do it? The investment agencies coordinated, were persistent, made clear plans and prepared to answer any possible more complicated question asked by the investor. The Poles always communicated, requested many meetings, came up with long-term strategies and came out victorious.
The talks started in the summer of 2021 and then Poland had no chance, with Germany tipping the balance completely. There were remote meetings, because there was a pandemic, but face-to-face discussions followed in 2022, and those from Intel saw, following being in Poland, that the country wanted to get the investment at any cost: a mega-factory.
“Poland was a little hungrier than rivals to get the investment,” Pat Gelsinger, the company’s CEO, said recently. Basically, jokingly, we would say that Poland “wanted the victory more” and we wouldn’t be wrong.
An essential chapter concerns subsidies, and here no one has given figures. How much did the Polish government offer? We can guess that it was as much as Intel asked for, or somewhere close to it, and it is certainly more than a billion dollars.
Regional authorities have promised to build roads to the factory, buy electric buses, upgrade the power grid and build a new sewage treatment plant.
Those from Intel were also pleasantly impressed by the presentations in which the Wroclaw officials insisted on the pleasant living conditions in the area, giving examples including the existence of many bicycle paths and some swimming pools.
Design and engineering of the factory will begin in the coming months, and production should begin in 2027. The number of employees will be 2,000.
Intel has been present in Poland for 30 years, has 4,000 employees there and a large research and development center in Gdansk.
In 2021, Intel announced a $72 million investment in the R&D center in Gdansk to expand it, and in March 2022, when the company announced the large German plant in Magdeburg, few would have guessed that a mega-plant would follow and in Poland.
Surse: Archyde.com, DigiTimes, MarketWatch
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