Just weeks after Congress passed $52 billion in additional funding to increase domestic chip manufacturing, Micron announced on Thursday that it will invest $15 billion to develop a new semiconductor plant in Idaho.
The CHIPS and Science Act, which the Biden administration just authorised, has been the target of a number of multibillion-dollar proposals, the latest of which was announced by Micron. Micron announced last month that it would use the extra subsidies provided by the act to invest $40 billion in US memory fabs by 2030, adding an estimated 40,000 new jobs. Over the next eight years, the new Boise plant is anticipated to generate 17,000 new jobs, including 2,000 Micron jobs.
In a Thursday statement, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra thanked the Biden administration for finishing the bipartisan chips legislation. “Our new leading-edge memory manufacturing fab will fuel US technology leadership, ensuring a reliable domestic supply of semiconductors that is critical to economic and national security,” Mehrotra said.
President Joe Biden celebrated Micron’s latest investment in a statement on Thursday, calling it “another big win for America.”
But it wasn’t apparent until last month whether the CHIPS and Science Act would pass this year until it finally did. Intel postponed the groundbreaking for a new $20 billion chip factory in Ohio as the financing for it stagnated in Congress, and even went so far as to propose to the Biden administration taking over an abandoned Chinese plant rather than waiting for the funding’s approval. The New York Times claims that these advertisements terrified lawmakers and caused them to move more quickly to pass the bill.
The Columbus Dispatch stated that the president would attend a new groundbreaking for Intel’s plant this month shortly after Biden signed the legislation into law. It would require 7,000 workers to construct and, according to the business, would be the “largestsilicon manufacturing location on the planet.”
Biden issued an executive order last week to begin distributing the billions in subsidies to businesses like Micron and Intel.
Although a new interagency council was established by Biden’s order to monitor the implementation, it is currently unknown when the Commerce Department will formally release the additional cash.
The federal government has invested billions in generating domestic IT and manufacturing jobs through Biden administration priorities including the CHIPs programme and the bipartisan infrastructure law.
“Just this week, we’ve seen First Solar, Toyota, Honda, and Corning make major announcements of new investments and new jobs as a direct result of my economic plan,” Biden said on Thursday. “In our future, we will make EVs, chips, fiber optics, and other critical components here in America, and we will have an economy built from the bottom up and middle out.”
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm made $3.1 billion in funds available to US businesses in April to help increase the use of electric vehicles. An energy start-up by the name of Sparkz revealed plans to erect a new battery facility in northern West Virginia earlier this week.
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