Poland is geographically not far from Romania, but the distance is huge when it comes to important investments. One of the largest European processing plants will be built near the city of Wroclaw, and the total investment will amount to more than 4 billion dollars. Why did Poland attract Intel?

Manufacturing microprocessors is an expensive multibillion-dollar investment, much more than, for example, building a megacar factory from scratch.

Europe has few chip factories compared to Asia, and governments in some countries are desperate to attract big companies and reduce reliance on processors from Taiwan, China and South Korea. For this, governments are ready to provide subsidies that investors in other industries would not even dream of.

• The largest investment in Israel: an American company will build a plant worth 25 billion dollars

Poland has pulled off an extraordinary feat by convincing Intel to build one of Europe’s largest microprocessor factories near Wrocław, the country’s third-largest city. Although the “bulk” of Intel’s European investment will go to Germany, Poland’s success deserves praise, especially since it is the largest investment from scratch in the country’s history. In addition, Poland is a neighbor of Ukraine, and some companies may initially say that they will not invest in the war-torn country.

How did Poland do it? Investment agencies acted coherently, were persistent, clearly planned and ready to answer any possible more complex question of the investor. The Poles always communicated, demanded many meetings, invented long-term strategies and came out victorious.

Negotiations began in the summer of 2021, and then Poland had no chance, and Germany completely tipped the scales. There were remote meetings because there was a pandemic, but in 2022 there were personal discussions, and Intel representatives, after being in Poland, saw that the country wants to get investment at any cost: a megafactory.

“Poland was looking for investment a little more than the competition,” the company’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, said recently. In general, we would jokingly say that Poland “wanted victory more”, and we would not be wrong.

A significant section concerns subsidies, and no one mentioned the numbers here. How much did the Polish government offer? We can guess that it was as much as Intel was asking for, or somewhere close to it, and it’s definitely more than a billion dollars.

The regional government promised to build roads to the plant, buy electric buses, update the power grid and build a new sewage treatment plant.

Intel representatives were also pleasantly surprised by presentations in which Wrocław officials emphasized the pleasant living conditions in the area, citing examples such as the existence of many bicycle paths and some swimming pools.

Design and engineering of the factory will begin in the coming months, with production slated to begin in 2027. The number of employees will be 2,000.

Intel has been present in Poland for 30 years, has 4,000 employees there and a large research and development center in Gdańsk.

In 2021, Intel announced a $72 million investment in a research and development center in Gdańsk to expand it, and in March 2022, when the company announced a large German plant in Magdeburg, few could have guessed what would follow a mega-factory in Poland as well.

Sources: Reuters, DigiTimes, MarketWatch