EU regulations mandate chip level recycling, ITAD technology threshold skyrockets
The EU has revised the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE), requiring a GPU/CPU recycling rate of over 95% from 2025. The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has developed low-temperature plasma decomposition technology, which can extract 0.2 grams of gold and 1.5 grams of copper from a single CPU. TSMC invests $200 million to upgrade its ITAD factory in Tainan, with the goal of achieving silicon wafer regeneration for processes above 28nm.