Singapore eyes chips investments amid US-China tension

Singapore will be looking to win its “fair share” of investments in semiconductor assembly and integrated circuit design, a top official said, amid a growing geopolitical divide between the US and China over trade and technology.

The city-state will be focusing on the semiconductor value chain of activities, Beh Swan Gin, chairman of Singapore’s Economic Development Board, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Haslinda Amin on Monday, as he discussed the fallout of the US’s so-called CHIPS Act aimed at wooing investments back to America and stemming China’s economic influence.

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.” 

“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% of the global wafer fabs output.

Singapore last year attracted a record S$22.5 billion (about $17 billion) in fixed-asset investment commitments, thanks to what Beh described as an “unprecedented semiconductor super-cycle.” 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.