European Semiconductor Atlas: October 2026 Update

I've updated the European Semiconductor Atlas for October 2026. My target was to update and fact check the contents as well as improve search and data export. Also, a lot of smaller rendering glitches have been solved. The atlas is now split into four main sections:

• The geographic map of the sites.
• An exportable and searchable list of sites.
• The list of the top 50 companies.
• An updated description of the processes used in Europe.

You can now use the searchable fab list to compare individual sites, look up their operators in the revised company profiles, or follow the process guide to the fabs using each technology. The funding records also distinguish site grants from loans and awards covering several sites.

Infineon's Dresden Smart Power Fab and STMicroelectronics' new Catania silicon-carbide line have entered production. ESMC remains under construction in Dresden, with first production targeted for 2028. Intel's Magdeburg and Wolfspeed's Ensdorf projects are still cancelled and will most certainly never come back to life. About a fifth of the €13.53bn in recorded site grants and approved aid ceilings is associated with fabs producing today.

Changes in Detail

• Infineon, Dresden. The €5bn Smart Power Fab opened on 2 July 2026, "several months ahead of schedule" in Infineon's words. Production is ramping up. The status is now operational. (Infineon, Federal Government)
• STMicroelectronics, Catania. The new 200mm silicon-carbide line started production in the second quarter of 2026. The target had been the fourth quarter of 2025. The status is now operational. (ST filing)
• ams OSRAM, Premstaetten. The 2025 annual report names the construction of the new fab as an investment focus. The status moves from “announced” to “under construction”. ams OSRAM plans full production for 2030. (ams OSRAM)
• Coherent, Kista. Coherent began to wind down its silicon-carbide business in Stockholm, as etn.se reported on 3 April 2025. The operating company reported no employees for 2025. The status moves from expanding to cancelled. (etn.se)
• Fraunhofer IISB, Erlangen. The 200mm silicon-carbide research line is ramping up. The status moves from under construction to research pilot line. (Fraunhofer IISB)
• onsemi, Rožnov pod Radhoštěm. The Commission approved €450m of Czech aid for a silicon-carbide fab on 21 November 2025 (SA.117291). On 3 August 2026 the Czech industry minister said that onsemi's change of strategy means the aid conditions are no longer met. The Czech government has not approved the payment, and onsemi is negotiating changes to the plan. No source shows that construction started. The status moves from “under construction” to “announced”. (Seznam Zprávy, ČT24)
• Octric Semiconductors, Newton Aycliffe. The June data listed this fab as cancelled after Coherent left it. The UK Ministry of Defence bought it on 27 September 2024 and runs it as Octric Semiconductors. The status moves from cancelled to operational. (UK government)

Other projects kept their status, but their dates or their funding moved:

• VIGO Photonics, Ożarów Mazowiecki. VIGO plans serial production only after its first-deployment phase ends in 2029. The atlas no longer gives a production year. (VIGO)
• ESMC, Dresden. ESMC topped out its fab shell on 14 September 2026. The Saxon government confirms first tool installation in 2027. NXP's 2025 10-K gives production in 2028, which is the target used throughout the atlas; earlier reports gave 2027. (Saxon government, NXP 10-K)
• STMicroelectronics and GlobalFoundries, Crolles. The Commission approved €2.9bn of French aid for the joint fab in April 2023 (SA.102430). The French Cour des comptes reported in 2026 that the state had paid €574m to ST by the end of June 2025. GlobalFoundries had received nothing because it had not started its part of the project. The court wrote that this delay raises questions about the successful completion of the project. (Cour des comptes)
• Vishay, Itzehoe. The Commission approved €214m of German aid for the new 300mm power-chip fab on 14 July 2026 (SA.120818). Vishay expects engineering wafers by the end of 2026 and production in mid-2027. (Commission, Vishay earnings call)
• GlobalFoundries, Dresden. The €1.1bn expansion broke ground on 17 March 2026. GlobalFoundries plans to integrate the added capacity by the end of 2028. (Business Saxony)
• Wolfspeed, Ensdorf. Wolfspeed said on 24 October 2025 that it will not build a fab in Saarland. The atlas already listed the project as cancelled. (SR)
• imec, Málaga. Spain's digital minister and imec's CEO put the start of construction in the first quarter of 2027. (Xataka)
• GlobalWafers, Novara. The 300mm wafer plant opened in October 2025. A fire in summer 2026 damaged part of the older 200mm line. (Taipei Times)

Added to the atlas

• Element 3-5, Baesweiler. The Commission approved €353m of German aid on 14 July 2026 for a fab that will make silicon-carbide epitaxial wafers (SA.119614). No source shows that construction started. Status: announced.
• X-FAB Fab4Micro, Erfurt. The Commission approved €128m of German aid on 11 December 2025 (SA.119086). Construction started on 5 October 2026, and X-FAB plans first production at the end of 2028. Status: under construction. (Commission)
• KETEK, Munich. KETEK makes silicon radiation detectors on 150mm wafers in its own cleanroom. The Commission approved €17.9m of German aid for new lines on 14 July 2026 (SA.120179). Status: expanding. (KETEK)
• Silex Microsystems, Järfälla. This contract maker of MEMS chips on 200mm wafers sat in the back-end layer. It now sits in the fab layer as a foundry. Silex listed its shares in Stockholm in May 2026. (Nasdaq)
• Back-end and equipment layers. New sites: Diodes' assembly and test plant in Neuhaus am Rennweg, KLA's metrology equipment plant in Weilburg (€74.4m of German aid, SA.121240), and Aixtron's sites in Cambridge and Turin. (Commission)

Minor Corrections

• BelGaN, Oudenaarde. The June data said that the BelGaN fab in Oudenaarde went bankrupt after Chinese investors withdrew funding. The record from 2024 does not support that. BelGaN filed for bankruptcy on 30 July 2024 after it failed to find further financing, and the union said that an unnamed investor had pulled out. The atlas text is now corrected. (VRT)
• Duplicate records. ST's silicon-carbide wafer plants in Catania and Norrköping each appeared twice. Each now appears once.
• Q.ANT, Stuttgart. The photonic-chip pilot line at IMS CHIPS belongs to Q.ANT. The June data filed it under TRUMPF Photonic Components.
• Wolfspeed, Ensdorf. The June data gave an investment of €3bn without a source. The Saarland development agency reported "roughly 2.5 billion euros" at the announcement in February 2023. (SHS)
• IMS Nanofabrication. The equipment layer flagged IMS as a sole supplier of mask writers. NuFlare also makes mask writers, so the atlas no longer flags IMS.
• Coherent, Jena. The atlas listed a Coherent diode-laser fab in Jena. Coherent's lists of subsidiaries for 2024 and 2026 show no Jena company, so the record is gone. The diode-laser production in Jena belongs to Jenoptik.
• Opening years. For twelve fab records the opening year was wrong. Often it was the year of a purchase, an expansion or a new line. Nexperia Hamburg, for example, has made chips since 1953, not 2024. Where a source gives the real year, the record now has it. Where no source does, the field now says "not found".
• Headcounts. Some records gave a whole company's or country's headcount as a site figure, for example 5,500 for each of Infineon's three Villach fabs. These fields now say "not found" unless a source gives a site figure.
• Pragmatic, Sedgefield. Pragmatic decommissioned its first 200mm line in 2025, so the record is now closed.
• X-FAB, Itzehoe. The MEMS line makes chips for other companies, so it now counts as a foundry, like the other X-FAB fabs.
• Capacities and aid. Soitec's four Bernin fabs and its Hasselt site now carry the capacities from Soitec's 2025–26 annual report. LFoundry's capacity is the company's figure of 40,000 wafers a month. Freiberger's public funding is now the Commission's approval of up to €32.8m (SA.101129), not a smaller project grant. Pragmatic's £60m from the UK Infrastructure Bank was equity, so it is excluded from the grant subtotal.

Changes to the data format

• Tags replaced by four fields. The atlas used to tag each fab with a flat list of 17 labels. That list mixed a chip's job, its material, its construction and its buyers. Some labels overlapped. Each fab now has four fields: materials (Si, SiC, GaN, GaAs, InP, other), functions (digital, memory, analog/mixed-signal, power, RF, sensing, optoelectronics, other), form (integrated circuit, discrete, MEMS, passive, wafer) and process (the ten process families of the processes post). The CSV and GeoJSON downloads include the new fields and no longer carry the old tags field.
• Four Fraunhofer lines are now research pilot lines. The atlas had filed the lines in Berlin, Erlangen (two) and Freiburg as compound-semiconductor fabs. It files every research institute's line as a pilot line, so they moved.
• Empty fields now say why. A field can be empty because it does not apply, because a search found no published figure, or because nobody has researched it yet. The CSV has a missing column with the reason for each tracked field.
• Capacity is per month, and investments are in euros. Companies publish capacity per week, month or year, and investments in their own currency. The atlas now gives capacity in wafers per month. It converts other currencies to euros at the ECB average rate for the year of the figure. In the GeoJSON, each converted record keeps the figure as published, with the rate and its source.
• EU research grants per operator. A new file, eu-grants.json, adds up the Horizon research grants of 54 operators from CORDIS. The searchable list shows them as a table.

Recorded public funding

The atlas records approximately €13.53bn across 18 site-attributable grant amounts and approved aid ceilings (the stored figures sum to €13,529.65m). These include Commission State-aid clearances, which can precede national grant awards. Note that these are not a total of payments: For instance, Crolles had €2.9bn approved and €574m paid by June 2025. By current status:

• Fabs that produce now: €3,022.00m across 4 records.
• Fabs under construction: €5,568.40m across 4 records.
• Announced fabs: €3,805.85m across 4 records.
• Expansions of existing fabs: €1,133.40m across 6 records.

The following recorded funding is excluded from the site-attributed subtotal. Each item remains visible in the underlying record.

The four shared programme amounts total €641.1m. No research-pilot record remains in the site-attributed subtotal. SMART's loan formed part of its July 2023 financing round; it was previously mislabelled as a grant.

About a fifth of the recorded site-attributed amounts sits with fabs that produce today. More than half sits with ESMC and Crolles, which do not produce yet.

EU research grants are a different kind of funding. They pay for research projects, which include the Chips Act pilot lines. The research totals overlap with some of the separately listed pilot-line awards. They should not be added to those public-funding amounts. For projects since 2014, CORDIS records the largest EU chip-programme contributions to research institutes: €594.5m to imec and €338.6m to CEA. Among companies, the recorded contributions are €134.0m for Infineon and €119.9m for STMicroelectronics. The searchable list adds up the grants for each operator, from the CORDIS database of the European Commission.

Read the detailed project tables on the website for investment figures, funding sources and target dates. At one point, I will maybe do a visual explainer.

Selected projects, by status

Target years use dated company or government evidence, with conflicting forecasts explained above. Tool installation and production are separate milestones. A past year means that I found no newer date. In the tables, "–" means not yet researched, "not found" means that a search found no published figure, and "none recorded" means that the atlas holds no public funding for the fab.

Opened since 2020 (9)

Under construction (5)

Announced (6)

Expanding (24)

Cancelled (4)

Closing

Every record in the atlas is fully sourced. Records re-checked in this pass are dated 2026-10. The full data is free to download as CSV and GeoJSON under CC BY 4.0. The map shows every site.

If you know of a change, or if you run one of these sites and have better numbers, write to kontakt@richard-stahl.at.

Part of the European Semiconductor Atlas, open and source-verified data on Europe's chip supply chain. For the companies behind these fabs, see Who Makes Europe's Chips. To search every fab, use the searchable list.