Infineon will spend about €1.1B turning its Villach cleanrooms in Austria into the first plant anywhere making gallium nitride power chips on 300mm wafers at volume. Output is scheduled to begin by the end of 2027.
The wafer size is the story. Infineon ran its first 300mm gallium nitride wafers in 2024 and says the larger format yields roughly 2.3 times as many chips per wafer as today’s 200mm lines. Because the company is upgrading cleanrooms it already owns, most of the money goes to tools rather than buildings.
Why the AI rack pulled this forward
Gallium nitride switches waste less energy than silicon when current is converted at high frequency. That matters most where power density is climbing fastest – the supply shelves of AI data centre racks, which Nvidia has pushed toward an 800 volt distribution bus. Infineon already sells power silicon into that ecosystem, and the new line aims at it.
Chief executive Jochen Hanebeck framed the move as a first: by going to 300mm, he said, the company becomes the first to bring gallium nitride power electronics into volume production. The plant is also meant to serve solar inverters, storage and electric vehicle charging.
Brussels pays part of the bill
The European Commission approved €319M in state aid under the European Chips Act, with Austria’s economics ministry expected to formalise the grant. Chancellor Christian Stocker called it one of the largest single investments in Austrian high tech history.
The timing is not accidental. European politicians have argued for two years that the continent’s chip strategy leaned too far toward leading-edge logic and too little toward the power and analog parts its factories actually buy.
