Bosch puts its chip business in a standalone division with a €5bn 2030 target

A chip unit inside Bosch

The unit will be called Semiconductors and it stays inside Bosch rather than becoming a separate company. It starts in January 2028.

Today the chip business sits within Mobility Electronics, which will keep making electronic control units for vehicles. The manufacturing base is already large. Bosch runs around 40 chip sites worldwide and has invested roughly €3bn in its Dresden and Reutlingen wafer plants. It is spending about $2bn to convert its Roseville, California facility to silicon carbide production. Bosch also holds a 10% stake in ESMC, the TSMC-led joint venture building a fab in Dresden. The company puts the target at around €5bn in annual semiconductor revenue by 2030.

Selling capacity to outsiders

Bosch wants outside customers. It plans to open its manufacturing facilities to external clients and expand its foundry business.

Robotics, factory automation, AI data centres, phones and wearables are the named target markets. Bosch says it is a leading supplier of MEMS sensors, the motion and pressure sensors used in smartphones and robots, and it also makes silicon carbide chips and custom circuits for power systems.

"With the founding of a dedicated unit, we are opening a new chapter in our more than 60-year semiconductor history," said Erik Rein, who heads Bosch's chip business.

Markus Heyn, the deputy chairman, made a similar point. He said the company's sensors are "the key" to its products and "the technological basis" for its customers' innovations.

The foundry offer matters more than the chip catalogue. Opening plants to outside customers would give European buyers another source of supply. Bosch's own framing is that it could help diversify Europe's chip supply while the company looks for new markets.

The subsidy arithmetic

The scale question is awkward. A paper published by IMD on 28 October puts the US CHIPS Act at $52.7bn, the sum Congress set aside in 2022. That is more than 109 countries collect in a year from all taxes and other revenue.

Bosch's €5bn target runs straight into that comparison. The same paper says governments now launch twice as many industrial policy measures as they did in 2020. It adds that economies outside the G20 have never won more than a third of announced new greenfield foreign investment since 2021. That pot reached nearly $1.4tn in 2025. It also notes that Kenya imported 4,618 products in 2025, only nine of them worth more than $250m. That is the market-size wall in one line.

National programmes keep growing anyway. A Semiconductor Engineering roundup published on 3 November lists India's $13.4B Semicon 2.0 among recent industry items.

The IMD prescriptions are modest. The authors want governments to see problems as a business would, avoid relying on bans or subsidies alone, let pioneers take the risk and be ready to pivot. None of that needs a programme the size of the CHIPS Act.

Why Europe is doing this now

Carmakers spent part of the autumn managing shortages during the Nexperia dispute. That exposed how few suppliers the industry depends on.

Policy is moving too. A Transport & Environment piece published by CleanTechnica on 29 October pointed to a France-Germany deal to remake the EU auto industry. A slightly weaker European Parliament version followed a week later. The same piece says two-thirds of new cars sold in China are electric and 40% of truck sales there are electric. Ningde alone produces 300gWh of battery capacity, more than the whole of Europe. Those figures sit behind the argument that Europe needs capacity of its own, not just rules.

What to watch

The division starts in January 2028. The 2030 target depends on customers Bosch has not identified.

Bosch has not said how much it will invest in the external foundry business or what it will charge outside clients. The company has also not named a single external customer. Those two numbers decide whether €5bn is a plan or a hope, and whether a supplier can build European chip capacity without a state programme behind it.