Tech war: Singapore eyes chip investments amid US-China tension
- Singapore will do its best to secure its ‘fair share’ of investments in the semiconductor value chain, said a top official
- The city state expects to continue to attract mature nodes and wafer fabs, in addition to design-related chips jobs
The move by President Joe Biden’s administration is a “muscular industrial policy to bring back manufacturing and technology development to the US”, Beh said. “It has definitely made competition for investments more intensive and certainly for the type of investments that today Singapore is also aiming for.”
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“We will have to take it as it is and we will do our best to secure our fair share,” he said, noting separately that Singapore currently accounts for about 5 per cent of the global wafer fab output.
Singapore last year attracted a record S$22.5 billion (about US$17 billion) in fixed-asset investment commitments, thanks to what Beh described as an “unprecedented semiconductor supercycle”.
The EDB sees the city state continuing to attract mature nodes and wafer fabs, in addition to design-related chips jobs that are growing steadily, although it might not repeat the 2022 performance in terms of investments.
“We are a small country, so in a way the share of the pie that we need to ensure to continue to develop our economy is relatively small,” Beh said.