Micron makes plans for a big new Boise building. Is it the giant manufacturing plant?
Micron is making plans to expand in Boise and build a big new building.
No, it’s not the massive new manufacturing center, dubbed a mega-fab, that’s been discussed in recent months. It’s a seven-story office building.
The proposed building “is to be a world class, state-of-the-art building for the Micron Boise campus, both externally and internally,” Micron wrote in an application filed with the city.
Micron is Idaho’s largest for-profit employer, with more than 6,000 workers in the Treasure Valley, mostly on its Southeast Boise headquarters campus where the new building is planned.
Micron numbers its buildings. This building would be B42, and it would be adjacent to Micron’s B26, B36 and B37 buildings on the southern side of the campus at 8000 S. Federal Way. The campus is south of the Gowen Road exit from Interstate 84.
The proposal “is in line with plans to preserve our options to accommodate Micron’s future growth,” Micron spokesperson Erica Rodriguez Pompen said in an emailed statement. “Micron Boise is the home of our global headquarters, and the epicenter of our innovation efforts. We will continue to invest in this site in line with our plans to meet long-term demand for memory and storage.”
The application for a design review hearing says the building “needs to blend in well with the existing campus buildings and landscape, while incorporating modern design trends and building elements.”
The building would include a west entry plaza with a visitors’ drop-off point, a pedestrian promenade on the east, and outdoor dining and lounge areas and an amphitheater, the application says.
It would be 124 feet, 6 inches tall and have 524,000 square feet, according to the application, whose filing was first reported by BoiseDev. That’s twice as big as the 265,000-square-foot main building at J.R. Simplot Co.’s downtown Boise headquarters and roughly the equivalent of three Walmart Supercenters.
A Micron spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Micron plans its ‘mega-fab’ in US
After Congress passed of the CHIPS and Science Act, Micron said it was looking to build a massive manufacturing plant in the U.S., but declined to say whether that would be near its headquarters.
The legislation authorized about $52 billion in incentives to computer chip manufacturers to build fabs domestically.
Fab is short for semiconductor fabrication, the manufacturing plants where DRAM, dynamic random-access memory, and NAND flash memory are produced. Micron is the only manufacturer of DRAM in the U.S.
The new plant Micron is planning to construct, called a mega-fab, would employ 3,000 to 5,000 people, including engineers, operators and permanent construction workers, the company has said. Non-Micron jobs created as part of the fab would bring the total to about 10,000 people, according to previous reporting by the Statesman.
Micron has not yet said where it plans to build such a plant, in Idaho or elsewhere. Earlier this month, an executive at the company told the Idaho Statesman that it was considering locations in several states across the country.
Micron used to manufacture chips for sale on its Boise campus but stopped in 2009 and increased production at other fabs, mainly abroad. It still has a fab in Boise that the company calls a “pilot line” for research and development.
Business and Local Government Editor David Staats contributed.
This story was originally published August 24, 2022 at 12:32 PM.
CORRECTION: This story has been revised to reflect that a Micron spokesperson told the Idaho Statesman on Sept. 6, 2022, that the company employs more than 6,000 people in the Treasure Valley, not the nearly 7,000 that a Micron executive had told the Statesman in early August.
