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Costa Rica's semiconductor roadmap operationalises a US–CR bilateral partnership formalised under CHIPS Act §103 (International Technology Security and Innovation Fund), making Costa Rica one of only ~7 declared ITSI-fund partner economies. The instrument is a presidential executive decree + interministerial action plan, not a stand-alone statute: it directs COMEX (lead ministry) to coordinate across CINDE (national investment-promotion agency), PROCOMER (export-promotion), and more than 20 government entities to execute four pillars through short, medium, and long-term deliverables.
Pillar 1 — Talent: The Human Talent Training Incentive programme, co-developed by COMEX + PROCOMER, provides cost-sharing of 60-80% for high-demand technical and engineering training initiatives. Includes STEM curriculum-alignment surveys and engineering-talent pipeline assessments coordinated with Costa Rican universities. Budget: US$6M initial allocation.
Pillar 2 — Incentives: Strengthening Free Trade Zone (Zona Franca) regime benefits under Law 7210; designing new fiscal and financial R&D incentives structured to comply with OECD BEPS Pillar Two QDMTT requirements — Costa Rica acceded to the OECD in May 2021 and adopted the GloBE rules framework, creating a tension between existing FTZ tax holidays and the 15% minimum-rate floor that the new incentives architecture must navigate.
Pillar 3 — Investment Attraction: CINDE-led FDI promotion targeting advanced test-and-packaging (ATP), advanced PCB, and chip-design-house segments. Existing anchors: Intel (largest non-US ATP site, $1.2B 2024 ATP expansion announced), Applied Materials (new operation inaugurated July 2025), ON Semiconductor, Coherent, MaxLinear, Boston Scientific (medical-device manufacturing, cross-sector anchor for talent and infrastructure).
Pillar 4 — Regulatory Improvement: Customs facilitation for semiconductor components, intellectual-property reform aligned with TRIPS+ standards, export-control framework alignment with US BIS EAR partner-economy standards.
Costa Rica is the first country on the Latin American continent to publish an explicitly semiconductor-focused national roadmap — structurally preceding Mexico's Plan México semiconductor component, Brazil's CHIPS Brazil instrument, and all others in the region. The roadmap emerged from more than two years of preparatory consultations and is structurally peer to filed national-semiconductor-strategy instruments for Thailand (2026-01-07), Malaysia (2024-05-28), Vietnam (2024-09-21), Czechia (2024-10-10), and the UK (2023-05-19).
The executive decree of "interés público" (public interest) status conferred on the semiconductor industry is constitutionally significant in Costa Rica: it gives the implementing ministry (COMEX) enhanced coordination authority across other ministries, permits public-procurement fast-tracking for related R&D infrastructure, and creates the legal basis for the government to use public-private partnership frameworks. The canonical La Gaceta decreto-ejecutivo number was not retrieved in this filing session; consult https://www.pgrweb.go.cr/scij/ (SCIJ — Sistema Costarricense de Información Jurídica) using the date range April–May 2024 and ministry COMEX/MICITT to retrieve the published decree number.