A gold rush is on to win a portion of the $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act largesse, especially in Virginia, the home state of one of the principal authors of the Act, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner.
Warner convened a 90-minute roundtable discussion in the state capital of Richmond on Thursday to meet with four local governments pitching potential sites for a large chip fab. Representatives for chipmaker Micron and the Virginia Economic Development Partnership were also at the event, held behind closed doors.
“We are still aggressively going after Micron,” Warner told reporters afterwards, noting Micron’s recent announcement to spend $40 billion on memory production over the next decade in addition to its previous plan to expand production at a Manassas, Virginia, fab.
Virginia will be “very competitive, but we have to realize that certain states at this point are a bit ahead,” Warner said. Virginia will need to “put up incentive packages that are frankly much larger than we have in the past.”
The major competition is coming from Ohio, Texas, Arizona and New York. Ohio has already grabbed the golden ring with a big commitment from Intel to build two fabs valued at more than $20 billion near Columbus. Intel won commitments from Ohio state of $1 billion and is seeking financial support through the CHIPS Act. New York has recently committed $10 billion to attract fab production.
The Ohio site for the Intel build is 1,000 acres, which has become the minimum size some chipmakers and government officials are seeking for a chipmaking mega site.
Micron has run a fab for nearly 20 years in Manassas, a suburb to the far west of Washington near the fabled I-66 corridor. The company makes 300 mm wafers and other products with 1,300 workers. Micron announced a $ 3 billion expansion there in 2018 with $70 million in state incentives to create an added 1,100 jobs by 2030.
More recently, Micron announced plans to invest $40 billion in memory production by 2030 but did not detail where it would build facilities starting in the second half of the decade. The Micron announcement came on Aug. 9, the same day President Biden signed the CHIPS Act, with Micron saying the grants and credits in the act “will enable the world’s most advanced memory manufacturing in America.”
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If Micron were to use its $40 billion in Virginia, it would bring in 40,000 new American jobs, including 5,000 high paid technical and operation roles at Micron, the company said at the time. Micron is based in Boise, Idaho.
Micron Senior Vice President and General Counsel Rob Beard attended the Thursday roundtable with local Virginia officials and Warner. The company did not comment afterwards but said in early August it plans to share future fab details in coming weeks as it assesses many factors to invest billions of dollars in construction.
The CHIPS Act provides $12 billion for research, with could boost work underway at the Virginia Microelectronics Center at Virginia Commonwealth University, although Warner told reporters that it might take a collective of universities to meet the education and training needs of mega chip production in coming years.
Representatives from local governments at the roundtable included the counties of Chesterfield and Henrico in the Richmond area and in a commerce park in Chesapeake and Berry Hill in Southern Virginia, according to a Richmond Times-Dispatch report.