The news arrived in the last few days and marks - together with the launch of the Chips Act – “a decisive step forward” for Europe to “determine its own destiny”, explained Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton. Thanks to major investments - which are already underway - together with substantial public funding and a strong regulatory framework, Breton explained, “we are becoming an industrial powerhouse in the markets of the future, able to provide ourselves and the world with mature, advanced semiconductors. Semiconductors that are essential elements of the technologies that will shape our future, our industry and our defence base”.
What is the Chips Joint Undertaking?
In this context, the Chips Joint Undertaking (JU) plays a crucial role in shaping the future outlined by the EU Commissioner.
In fact, the “new” JU has the task of implementing a large part of the “Chips for Europe Initiative”, the first pillar of the European Chips Act, which aims to support the development of technological capabilities and innovation in the Union by bridging the gap between the EU's advanced research and innovation capacities and their industrial exploitation.
As mentioned above, the Chip JU replaces the Key Digital Technologies Joint Undertaking (KDT JU), one of the 49 partnerships of the Horizon Europe programme promoted by Brussels to pool public and private resources in order to have sufficient firepower to tackle key challenges such as the future of batteries, water systems or European manufacturing, avoiding overlaps between different initiatives and to provide research, development and innovation actors with a single point of reference on the topic in question.
