SYRACUSE, N.Y. — U.S. President Joseph Biden on Thursday afternoon formally announced a $6.1 billion funding award for Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: MU) during a visit to the Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science & Technology (the MOST) in downtown Syracuse. The billions in funding will come through the federal CHIPS and Science Act for […]
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The billions in funding will come through the federal CHIPS and Science Act for Micron projects in both the Town of Clay and in Boise, Idaho, where the chip manufacturer is headquartered.
The U.S. Department of Commerce has reached a preliminary agreement with Micron to provide the funding.
This money will support the construction of two fabs in Clay and one fab in Boise, Idaho. The funding is part of $50 billion in private investment by 2030 as the first step towards Micron’s investment of up to $125 billion across both states over the next two decades to build a “leading-edge memory manufacturing ecosystem,” per a White House fact sheet about Biden’s visit.
“In all, it’s going to create over 70,000 jobs across both states, at least 9,000 of which are construction jobs; [and] 11,000 manufacturing jobs,” Biden said in his remarks before a packed crowd at the MOST.
Biden also recalled the shortage of semiconductors during the coronavirus pandemicand noted that semiconductors are smaller than the tip of a human finger.
“[They] help power everything in our lives from smartphones to cars to dishwashers, satellites,” Biden said. “We invented those chips here in America … We made them move. We modernized them.”
The U.S. at one time produced 40 percent of the global semiconductor market’s chips, Biden added. “But over time, we stopped making them.”
When the pandemic shut down chip makers overseas, prices on a lot of products shot up, the president explained. In the U.S., a semiconductor shortage helped drive the surge in inflation in 2021 and contributed to long waits for several products.
“Folks, I determined that I’m never going to let us be vulnerable to wait lines again,”Biden contended. “We’re going to make [them] here.”
The funding will support the construction of the first two fabs of a planned four-fab “megafab” focused on leading-edge DRAM chip production at the White Pine Commerce Park in the town of Clay. Each fab will have 600,000 square feet of cleanrooms, totaling 2.4 million square feet of cleanroom space across the four facilities — “the largest amount of cleanroom space ever announced in the United States and the size of nearly 40 football fields,” per the White House fact sheet.
Sanjay Mehrotra, president and CEO of Micron Technology, called it an “historic moment for semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S.”
“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,” Mehrotra said in a statement forwarded to the media ahead of the event. “We appreciate the foresight of U.S. President Joe Biden, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the bipartisan delegation in Congress that supported the CHIPS and Science Act. Their steadfast focus championing these strategic investments will ensure U.S. semiconductor competitiveness for generations to come.”
Micron established two project-labor agreements (PLAs) at both the New York and Idaho sites for construction of new fabrication facilities. Both PLAs are the “largest in each state’s history,” per the White House fact sheet.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul; Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon; U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D–N.Y.); and Micron’s Mehrotra spoke to the gathering ahead of Biden.
Biden, Hochul, McMahon, and Schumer also remembered the deaths of Syracuse Police Officer Michael Jensen and Onondaga County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Michael Hoosock who were killed in the line of duty on April 14 while investigating the report of a stolen vehicle in the town of Salina.
Shannon Thomas, a second-year electrician apprentice and a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 43 union, introduced President Biden to the assembled crowd.
In contrast to the crowd of supporters inside the MOST, protesters gathered on the sidewalk along West Jefferson and South Franklin Streets behind fences as law-enforcement stood guard. One protester carried a sign that read, “Stop Funding Israeli War Crimes in Palestine.”