Infineon bets €1.1B on a chip material silicon cannot match
By Daniel Rao | 27 October 2026 Europe has spent years designing chips it cannot build at scale, then wondering why the factories — and the leverage — sit elsewhere. On Tuesday, a German chipmaker in a small Austrian city offered its own answer, and it was not a speech about sovereignty. It was a billion euros, a timetable, and a material most readers have never heard of. If Infineon pulls this off, the unglamorous work of moving electricity around inside machines gets cheaper, cooler and smaller — and Europe stops being merely a customer for the power electronics inside its own AI boom. Infineon Technologies said on Tuesday 27 October 2026 that it will invest around €1.1 billion, about $1.23 billion, at its site in Villach, Austria, to build what it says will be the world's first high-volume production plant for gallium nitride (GaN) power semiconductors on 300-millimetre wafers. Production is scheduled to start by the end of 2027, with the investment programme running through ...