The Executive negotiates with Broadcom the location of its chip substrate plant and “new operations” are planned
The Minister for Digital Transformation and the Public Service, José Luis Escrivá, has announced that Malaga will host the research and development (R&D) center that the IMEC – the Interuniversity Center for Microelectronics – will install in Spain.
Although last June the Government had already announced the intention of IMEC – which currently only has one R&D center in Leuven (Belgium) – to bring its new facilities to Spain, their location was still unknown.
“The second center (of the IMEC) that is going to be created in Spain is going to be located in Malaga. In recent weeks we have been working very intensely and with very good collaboration with the Junta de Andalucía and with the Malaga City Council so that the IMEC’s second plant in the world will be installed there,” he detailed.
“We have already closed the negotiation process with the Board and the City Council and now we will close the final conditions in the coming days,” he added.
The IMEC is the world’s leading institute for semiconductor research and development and has around 5,000 researchers from 95 countries and around 600 industrial partners, including large international companies in the sector.
In this sense, Escrivá has highlighted that the new IMEC facilities in Malaga will house an “absolute cutting-edge center for the design and prefabrication of the highest technology chips.”
NEGOTIATIONS WITH BROADCOM
In his appearance, the minister also indicated that the Government is still “discussing” with the American semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom the location of the chip “substrate” plant that the company will install in Spain.
The Government had already announced last July that Broadcom would bring these facilities to Spain, in which it is expected to invest around 900 million euros.
“We are discussing with them (Broadcom) the location and also certain elements of the industrial partners, but I think it will be a huge operation in an area such as this chip component,” he stressed.
Likewise, Escrivá has referred to the “cutting-edge” chip design center that Cisco has in Barcelona and has pointed out that the company already has its “first researchers” working. Along these lines, he has opined that in the coming years this center will become a “reference” in Europe.
The head of the Digital Transformation portfolio has also taken advantage of his appearance to highlight that, thanks to the Perte ‘Chip’, Spain is an “attractive” place for investments of this type.
In this context, ministry sources have indicated that Escrivá has recently met in the United States with “some of the world’s main operators” in the chip and microelectronics sector and that in those meetings “several operations” have been evaluated to Spain.
In this way, the sources consulted point out that throughout the current legislature “several significant operations” and of a nature similar to those of IMEC, Broadcom or Cisco can be expected.
