Negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council of the EU have reached an agreement on the Chips Act after their fourth negotiation meeting (‘trilogue’). They agreed to maintain the €3.3 billion budget to fund the ‘Chips for Europe’ initiative.
During the third trilogue, the co-legislators had already agreed on this ambition (see EUROPE 13153/2), but had not found a solution to find the missing budget to reach the €3.3 billion goal. “After a long discussion this morning, we found a way to find the money to compensate for the €400 million cut [initially advocated by the EU Council]”, the text’s rapporteur in the European Parliament, Dan Nica (S&D, Romanian), told EUROPE.
He added that the money had been found by cutting here and there in sub-sectors of the Horizon Europe programme, being careful not to touch funds that are not related to research on the semiconductor industry.
Without going into further detail, he stressed that the important thing was to have agreed on the €3.3 billion budget. According to one source, the Commission will still have to find a few million missing to do so.
On other aspects of the text, the Parliament has secured that another category of production sites can benefit from advantages under the ‘Chips Act’: “frontier installations” will also be able to enjoy accelerated permitting procedures insofar as they contribute to the security of supply on the internal market.
Design centres, on the other hand, are not included, but the European Commission will be able to grant them a European label of excellence which will enable them to benefit from support from the Member States. (Original version in French by Léa Marchal)