Poland gets green light from EU for Intel chip plant

A planned new Intel plant in Poland has moved a step closer after the European Commission gave the green light for the Polish government to provide state aid for the project.

“The European Commission has informed Poland that it has given the green light to notify state aid for Intel,” announced digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski at a press conference on Friday. He said the amount of aid would be over 7.4 billion zloty (€1.7 billion) between 2024 and 2026.

Gawkowski added that the total cost of Intel’s project was over 25 billion zloty, describing it as “the largest investment in Poland in decades”, reports broadcaster TVN.

The plant, which will be located near the city of Wrocław and will assemble and test semiconductor chips, would help “guarantee both better economic development and greater security in Poland”, said the minister. It is anticipated to create 2,000 new jobs.

Plans for the project were first announced in June last year, under Poland’s former Law and Justice (PiS) government. Shortly before leaving office in December, the PiS government approved over 7 billion zloty of state support for semiconductor chip production.

Such state aid must be approved by the EU, and the new coalition government that replaced PiS has overseen that process this year.

“Such processes in the European Commission usually take two years,” said Gawkowski today. “We have managed to shorten and speed up this process significantly. It [took] only eight months.”

Deputy digital affairs minister Dariusz Standerski added that the government now hopes a final agreement can be signed with Intel by the end of this year, paving the way for construction of the plant to begin.

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The plant will become part of an EU-wide semiconductor supply chain being developed by Intel, including an existing wafer fabrication facility in Ireland and a planned one in Germany.

The site in Poland will receive chips created on silicon wafers at the Irish and German plants, assemble them into final products, and then test them for performance and quality.

The firm said that it chose Poland due to “its infrastructure, strong talent base and excellent business environment”. The country “is also very cost-competitive with other manufacturing locations globally”, said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who noted that the firm has already operated in Poland for 30 years.

“Poland offers a strong technical talent base and several excellent universities with strong engineering programs,” added Intel, which said that the “well-paid” jobs at the new facility would include engineers, business support functions, factory operators and equipment technicians.

A number of large international tech firms have recently launched major investments in Poland. Last year, Visa announced the creation of a global technology and product hub.

In 2020, Microsoft announced a $1 billion investment to locate its first data centre in Central and Eastern Europe in Warsaw and the following year Google pledged to make the city the “cloud capital of Europe” by establishing its biggest cloud technology development on the continent there.

In June this year, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith encouraged global tech firms to invest in Poland, saying the country has the opportunity to establish itself as an “AI Valley” pioneering the development of artificial intelligence.

Main image credit: Nick Knupffer/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.