IDA Ireland has continued to give tens of millions of euros to global semiconductors makers with operations in Ireland, new figures show.
In the latest round of grants to big chip makers, the IDA has given an €85 million grant to Analog Devices.
The US semiconductor company last year announced plans to build a €630 million facility in Limerick, which it says will add 600 jobs to its Irish workforce, and expand its footprint by 45,000 square feet. The facility is intended to support the development of next-generation signal processing products designed, and triple its European capacity for wafer production.
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The IDA funding was provided as part of a European initiative on processors and semiconductor technologies, working with several other countries — Austria, Czechia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Spain — who had “agreed to work together to boost the European Union’s microelectronics and communication technologies value chain”, according to a release by the European Commission, which ran the rule over the plan to check it for any competition issues.
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Earlier this year, accounts for Analog Devices International UC showed that the company had revenues of $8.18 billion (€7.5 billion), up from $7.72 billion the previous year, and pretax profits of $1.73 billion.
The State’s industrial agency has been swinging firmly behind chipmakers in recent years. As reported by The Irish Times, the IDA gave €30 million to Intel last year as part of a big European aid package for companies whose energy bills spiked after Russia invaded Ukraine.
That funding was provided to remedy “significant economic uncertainties, disrupted trade flows and supply chains and led to exceptionally large and unexpected price increases, especially in natural gas and electricity” caused by the invasion, according to the European Commission.
It was part of a €100 million scheme introduced by the Government last year and cleared by the European Commission in March 2023 to support companies involved in the manufacturing of microelectronics.
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