The U.S. isn’t slowing down its efforts to bring chipmaking stateside to compete with China, and the country’s largest maker of computer memory chips is next in line for federal funding.
Semiconductor manufacturing company Micron is set to receive $6.1 billion in CHIPS and Science Act funds to build chip fabrication plants (fabs) in central New York and Idaho, the Biden administration said Thursday. President Joe Biden will tout the funding Thursday in Syracuse. The administration said the investments across New York and Idaho would create 70,000 jobs.
“This is a historic moment for semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S.,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement Thursday. “Micron’s leading-edge memory is foundational to meeting the growing demands of artificial intelligence, and we are proud to be making significant memory manufacturing investments in the U.S., which will create many high-tech jobs.”
Micron’s federal funding is part of a $100 billion public-private investment over the next 20 years to build a “mega-fab project” to produce memory chips in central New York that is expected to create 50,000 jobs, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said. New York’s share of Micron’s CHIPS Act funding will go toward construction of the first two of four fabs by the end of the decade, Schumer added.
“From smartphones to AI to our nation’s most sensitive defense technologies, the memory chips Micron makes are in nearly every product of our modern economy, but as the pandemic showed when we don’t shore up our supply chains and make these chips in America it can sky rocket prices and threaten our national security,” Schumer said in a statement earlier this month. “This investment will build a more secure economy for the entire country, with Micron in Central NY as its beating heart.”
In March, American semiconductor pioneer Intel was awarded $8.5 billion in direct federal funding from the act, as well as up to $11 billion in federal loans. And earlier this month, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) received $6.6 billion in grants, as well as up to $5 billion in loans to support its first major chipmaking hub in the U.S.
The CHIPS Act, which was signed into law in 2022, includes $39 billion in manufacturing incentives to advance U.S. leadership in the semiconductor industry. Other awardees so far include GlobalFoundries, Microchip Technology, and BAE Systems.
