The Biden administration has reached an agreement to provide up to $6.4 billion in direct funding for Samsung Electronics to develop a computer chip manufacturing and research cluster in Texas.

The Biden administration has reached an agreement to provide up to $6.4 billion in direct funding for Samsung Electronics to develop a computer chip manufacturing and research cluster in Texas.

The funding announced Monday by the Commerce Department is part of a total investment in the cluster that, with private money, is expected to exceed $40 billion. The government support comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022 with the goal of reviving the production of advanced computer chips domestically.

“The proposed project will propel Texas into a state of the art semiconductor ecosystem,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on a call with reporters. “It puts us on track to hit our goal of producing 20% of the world’s leading edge chips in the United States by the end of the decade.”

Raimondo said she expects the project will create at least 17,000 construction jobs and more than 4,500 manufacturing jobs.

  • @[email protected]
    10•3 months ago

    Anyone remember the Foxconn building deal during the Trump presidency? It was supposed to prop Republicans up in the mid-terms of 2018.

    The GOP offered a $2.85 billion subsidy so Foxconn would build an LCD panel manufacturing plant in Wisconsin. Apparently the subsidy was in the form of tax credits. Trump calls Foxconn “8th wonder of the world” despite its cost.

    According to The Verge:

    The renovations never arrived. Neither did the factory, the tech campus, nor the thousands of jobs. Interviews with 19 employees and dozens of others involved with the project, as well as thousands of pages of public documents, reveal a project that has defaulted on almost every promise. The building Foxconn calls an LCD factory — about 1/20th the size of the original plan — is little more than an empty shell. In September, Foxconn received a permit to change its intended use from manufacturing to storage.

    As far as I can tell (from skimming over a few recent news articles), they ultimately employed about 1000 people (7%-10% of what was promised). When negative reporting on the project ramped up, Republicans claimed that incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers tried to renegotiate the deal and blamed him. When that turned out to be a lie, Republicans pivoted to the more nebulous claim that Foxconn bailed because Wisconsin was unfriendly to business under its fresh Democratic governor.

    This could be a great side-by-side comparison on how Dems vs. Reps handle such a project, but I doubt the average person caught in the news cycle still remembers Foxconn after nearly 6 years). 😅