Intel Bets 17 Billion Euros on a Tech Revival in Eastern Germany
The company is building a new semiconductor factory in the city of Magdeburg, but skeptics abound.
This article is the fourth in an occasional series about the New Geography of Technology. You can read the first installment on Milan here, the second on the new U.S. tech economy here, and the third on Tel Aviv here.
Magdeburg knows a few things about comebacks. The East German city was destroyed three centuries ago during the Thirty Years’ War and then rebuilt into a flourishing industrial center. At the end of World War II, allied bombs pulverized its baroque facades, but Magdeburg reinvented itself as a center of heavy machinery, only to fade again after reunification.
Now the city, a two-hour drive west of Berlin, is plotting its latest revival, this time with the help of semico...