Foxconn, Radiall and Thales Break Ground on the Tessalia Semiconductor Plant in France
Le Barp, 1 June 2026
Key points
- At Choose France 2026 on 1 June, Foxconn (Hon Hai Technology Group), Radiall and Thales laid the foundation stone of Tessalia Technology SAS, a semiconductor assembly-and-test joint venture at Le Barp in Nouvelle-Aquitaine
- The plant will perform OSAT — outsourced semiconductor assembly and test — producing more than 50 million System-in-Package components a year by 2033
- It will employ 800 at full production and draw investment that could exceed €250 million, with production starting at the end of 2029
- It addresses a sovereign gap: Europe designs and partly fabricates chips but performs almost none of the advanced packaging that turns wafers into usable components
Foxconn, Radiall and Thales broke ground on a semiconductor assembly-and-test plant, Tessalia Technology, at Le Barp in south-west France on 1 June — a joint venture to perform on European soil the chip-packaging step the continent has almost entirely outsourced to Asia.
Announced at the Choose France 2026 summit, Tessalia is dedicated to OSAT — outsourced semiconductor assembly and test, the back-end stage where bare dies are packaged, interconnected and verified into the System-in-Package components that go into systems. Sited in the “Route des Lasers” cluster near Bordeaux, it is to produce more than 50 million SiP components a year by 2033, employ 800 at full capacity, and draw investment that could exceed €250 million; production begins at the end of 2029.
The partners map the gap it fills: Thales as the defence and aerospace customer, Radiall as the interconnect specialist, and Foxconn as the volume-manufacturing operator. Advanced packaging is the quiet chokepoint of the chip supply chain — Europe has fabrication capacity and design houses but has ceded almost all back-end assembly to Asia, which means even a sovereignly designed and fabricated chip leaves the continent to be finished.
The proprietary read. Chip sovereignty is usually argued at the fab, but the back end is where Europe is most exposed, and Tessalia is a rare move to close it. For a defence buyer like Thales, the strategic point is supply assurance: a component packaged in France cannot be interdicted, embargoed or back-doored at an Asian OSAT house. The plant is small against global packaging volumes and starts late — 2029 — but it puts a sovereign back-end stake in the ground where there was none. Tracked in Signal No. 72.
Sources: Thales · Radiall · Foxconn · Choose France.
First reported in Signal No. 72, 1 June 2026.
