The European Chips Act will strengthen manufacturing activities in the Union, stimulate the European design ecosystem, and support scale-up and innovation across the whole value chain.

The European Chips Act consists of three main pillars:

1. the Chips for Europe Initiative - reinforces Europe's technological leadership, by facilitating the transfer of knowledge from the lab to the fab, bridging the gap between research and innovation and industrial activities and by promoting the industrialisation of innovative technologies by European businesses. The Chips for Europe Initiative will be primarily implemented by the Chips Joint Undertaking.
2. The second pillar of the European Chips Act incentivises public and private investments in manufacturing facilities for chipmakers and their suppliers. It creates a framework to ensure security of supply by attracting investments and enhancing production capacities in semiconductor manufacturing. To this end, it sets out a framework for Integrated Production Facilities and Open EU Foundries that are “first-of-a-kind” in the Union and contribute to the security of supply and to a resilient ecosystem in the Union interest. 
3. In its third pillar, the European Chips Act has established a coordination mechanism between the Member States and the Commission for strengthening collaboration with and across Member States, monitoring the supply of semiconductors, estimating demand, anticipating shortages, and, if necessary, triggering the activation of a crisis stage. As a first step, a semiconductor alert system has been set up on 18 April 2023. It allows any stakeholder to report semiconductor supply chain disruptions.