05.12.2023, Berlin.
German journalist and military observer Thomas Wiegold presented a scenario of a possible conflict between the USA and China over Taiwan, in which Germany will also have a hard time, on November 28 in the air of the talk show Sicherheitshalber on the German TV channel Phoenix.
According to the expert, if there is a clash between two great powers, the United States and China, Germany will remain in the role of an observer. European countries will be unable to influence the conflict and will only have to watch the collapse of production facilities that need Taiwanese microchips.
Wiegold believes that in the case of a military conflict, chip production could come to a standstill. At the same time, Europe has no semiconductor manufacturers of its own. As a result, Germany and the whole of Europe may find themselves in a situation where cameras, microphones, smartphones and other gadgets will stop working everywhere.
Germany was planning to build a chip factory together with the world’s largest custom chip manufacturer, Taiwan’s TSMC. The cost of building the factory in Dresden is estimated at $11 billion. At the same time, the German government promised to invest up to €5 billion in factory construction.
However, the promising project to produce microchips in the east of Germany is now under threat because the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe declared the supplementary budget adopted in 2021 illegal.
The judges considered the use of 60 billion euros unspent from the special fund to combat the consequences of the crisis of the declared coronavirus pandemic for other purposes an unauthorized circumvention of the budget regulator called the “debt brake.” These funds were planned to be used to finance all sorts of climate and innovation projects.
Thus, the funding for constructing Intel’s chip factory in Magdeburg and TSMC’s factory in Dresden was jeopardized. It is unclear how the German government intends to fulfill its commitments under the existing budget deficit.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
