Rishi Sunak’s plans to turn Britain into a world leader in microchip design have been dealt a devastating blow.
The prime minister is set to announce plans for a cutting-edge research institute as part of a £1 billion semiconductor strategy which they hope will include hundreds of millions of pounds for domestic manufacturing.
But the new fund won’t match the tens of billions in subsidies that the US and EU are offering.
The announcement also comes as British microchip giant Arm revealed it has decided to take its bumper listing to New York in part due to the damage done to the London market from leaving the EU.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Hermann Hauser, the co-founder of the company, explained that the UK’s split with the European Union could have fundamentally damaged Britain’s reputation as a safe place to invest.
He said: “New York is a much deeper market than London and… because of Brexit idiocy, of course, the image of the London Stock Exchange has suffered a lot in the international community.”
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