Semiconductor support laws (2022 and 2023)
US and European laws that subsidize building chip plants on their own soil, to reduce dependence on a few Asian sites.
The shortages of 2021 and the tension around Taiwan made the location of chip plants a matter of national security. Both laws respond with massive subsidies and public guarantees, in exchange for conditions: investing locally, and sometimes not expanding capacity in certain countries. They shift the risk rather than remove it: new plants of very high value are built within a few years, which creates considerable construction and commissioning risk for construction and property insurers. They also make subsidies revocable, which adds a second-order political risk to investors' calculations.
The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law on August 9, 2022, provides about 52.7 billion dollars for semiconductor manufacturing and research in the United States; European Regulation (EU) 2023/1781, which entered into force on September 21, 2023, targets 20% of global chip production in the Union by 2030.
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