Everyone’s crazy about microchips. There will be losers and winners in the all-Italian contest to grab the new maxi-plant of the American Intel. After months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, official confirmation has arrived: the Draghi government is working to persuade Intel, the California tech giant and the first American microchip manufacturer, to build a production plant in Italy.
As anticipated by Reuters, it is a “packaging plant” that will work in contact with the other large production site ready to be born in Germany, probably in Dresden. An investment with an estimated value of 4 billion euros that could create 1000 jobs.
The occasion is tempting to two great realities of the Italian tech industry: Mirafiori in Piedmont, Etna Valley in Sicily. For months, both have been at the top of the list of areas where the chip mega-factory should be built. And if the ongoing negotiations between the Italian government and the company led by Pat Gelsinger are a reality, the final destination of the investment has not yet been revealed.
A clue came recently from the minister who most of all is following the dossier: the holder of the Mise and deputy secretary of the Lega Giancarlo Giorgetti. Already in August he had defined the Mirafiori plant as “ideal”, also in light of the necessary involvement of Stellantis. Endorsement welcomed by opposite reactions, with a transversal front accusing the minister of a biased judgment in favor of Turin.
Giorgetti for his part has clarified on several occasions that the game of the Intel plant primarily concerns “the Italian system”. But the Piedmontese advantage over the Sicilian area, which already hosts a factory of the Italian-French chip manufacturer Stmicroelectronics and will double with another plant in Catania for silicon carbide chips financed by the Recovery plan, continues to be discussed.
Even within the League: in September the Sicilian MEP Annalisa Tardinohe put his hands on, “there is no North against South when it comes to the country system”. A part of the center-right joined the choir. First of all, the governor of Sicily at Fdi altitude, Nello Musumeci , convinced that “the usual logic that favors the North at the expense of the South” must be avoided. In mid-October the Northern League deputy Alessandro Pagano tried to throw water on the fire: “No investment by the multinational Intel for the construction of microchips in Etna Valley has been diverted to Northern Italy”. Last Friday, during an Angi conference in the Senate, another assist to the Etna cause started with Adolfo Urso, president of Copasir: in order not to become “users of other people’s technology”, the imperative is “to invest in Italy, for example in the Etna Valley as regards the production of semiconductors”, said the senator of Fdi.
In short, in the Intel affair diplomacy and politics are intertwined without solution of continuity. Semiconductors, Prime Minister Mario Draghi said in Parliament , are “a decisive challenge to achieve European technological autonomy”. However, they are also a golden opportunity to relaunch industry and manufacturing in entire regions.
This explains the Turin teamwork between the region, the municipality and the production categories. A thirty-page document has already landed on the desks of Draghi, Giorgetti and the undersecretaryGilberto Picchetto Fratin . Numbers, estimates and tables to demonstrate the goodness of the Piedmontese candidacy, together with a list of areas ready to host the Intel plant. On pole, as predicted, there is also Mirafiori with its 350,000 square meters.
At Mise for the moment the mouths remain sewn. Giorgetti has just returned from a five-day mission to the United States, between institutional and face-to-face meetings with possible investors. There was also room for a discussion with Intel, pending a new visit from Gelsinger to Palazzo Chigi in the coming weeks.
