Over the past 30 years, the US share of global semiconductor production has fallen from 37% to just 12%, according to White House figures.
Meanwhile, China’s share of chip manufacturing has grown nearly 50% over the past two years and now makes up about 18% of the world’s supply.
In 2021, the decline in domestic chip production was exposed by a worldwide supply-chain crisis that led to calls for reshoring manufacturing to the US. After more than a year of work from the Biden-Harris Administration to respond to acute semiconductor shortages, Congress in August 2022 passed the CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS Act). The legislation provided the US Department of Commerce (DoC) with $52.7 billion for a suite of programs under the CHIPS for America program to “revitalize” the US position in semiconductor research, development, and manufacturing.
With the CHIPS Act spurring them on, the likes of Intel, Samsung, Micron, TSMC, and Texas Instruments unveiled plans for a number of new US chip fabrication plants. (Qualcomm, in partnership with GlobalFoundries, also said it would invest $4.2 billion to double chip production in its Malta, NY facility.)
Micron Technologies
An artist’s rendition of Micron’s proposed fabrication plant, to be located in Onondaga County, New York. The plant will be the size of 40 US football fields and is expected to provide close to 50,000 jobs for the region.
The first round of CHIPS Act incentives totaling $39 billion for the construction of large-scale fabrication facilities became available in February. In September, a second funding opportunity for small-scale fabrication projects opened. But to date, none of the money has been distributed, and some fabrication plant projects have run into hurdles.
Editor’s note: The same day this story was published, the Department of Commerce announced that the first CHIPS incentive award for $35 million will go to BAE Systems, which makes chips for military aircraft, to increase its production capacity.
At the beginning of 2023, TSMC, the world’s largest chip maker, began construction on a second chip fabrication plant near Phoenix, Ariz. For Biden, TSMC’s two plants represented the flagship of his CHIPS Act incentive program. The TSMC project, however, stalled, and the company announced that it had pushed back its completion date from 2024 to 2025 due to problems finding skilled labor.
While the $52.7 billion provided in incentives to chip manufacturers and researchers is nothing to sneeze at, the Department of Commerce said the real win will come from manufacturers’ own investments in the US economy.
“We’ve seen over $230 billion in private-sector investment in semiconductor manufacturing since the beginning of this administration and over $166 billion since the CHIPS and Science Act was passed,” a DoC official said in response to a Computerworld inquiry.
Micron said it may spend up to $100 billion over the next 20 years on…
2023-12-16 04:41:02
Link from www.computerworld.com rnrn