Biden administration, winding down, awards billions to Boise’s Micron for its new fabs
Micron was awarded more than $6.1 billion in federal subsidies to help pay for new chip-making plants in Boise and upstate New York, the Commerce Department announced Tuesday.
The award fulfills a deal the government made with Micron in April for the money. It comes as the Biden administration tries to “get as much high-tech spending out the door” as possible before Donald Trump takes office, Politico reported.
That’s in part because Trump has criticized the CHIPS and Science Act, a massive federal subsidy of the semiconductor industry, as the wrong way to boost American manufacturing. “That chip deal is so bad,” Trump said on Joe Rogan’s podcast in October, during his successful campaign to regain the presidency. He said tariffs would work better, The New York Times reported.
About $1.5 billion could go toward the Boise plant and $4.6 billion to the New York plant, according to Syracuse.com.
The Boise company is also slated to receive an additional $275 million in previously undisclosed funding to expand and modernize its facility in Manassas, Virginia, according to Tuesday’s announcement.
The subsidy law, passed with bipartisan support and signed by President Joe Biden in August 2022, authorized government funding for semiconductor companies to expand domestically. Micron filed applications for the Boise plant, and the other planned in Clay, New York, with the Commerce Department a year later, and a preliminary memorandum of terms was signed last April.
The department said it will disburse the funds based on Micron’s completion of project milestones, according to the news release, which did not say what those milestones are.
“With this investment in Micron, we are delivering on one of the core objectives of the CHIPS program — onshoring the development and production of the most advanced memory semiconductor technology, which is crucial for safeguarding our leadership on artificial intelligence and protecting our economic and national security,” Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in the release.
Micron plans to spend about $100 billion on the upstate New York plant and $25 billion in its Boise plant over the next two decades. The two massive projects, which the company has said represent the biggest investment in memory manufacturing in U.S. history, are estimated to create about 20,000 jobs and help the U.S. grow its share of advanced memory manufacturing from less than 2% today to about 10% by 2035, the news release said.
The cranes being used now to build the fab on Micron’s Southeast Boise campus are easily seen from nearby Interstate 84.
Construction on the New York fab was scheduled to start in June 2024 but has been plagued by delays. Groundbreaking is now expected to start in November 2025.
Micron is Idaho’s largest for-profit employer and the nation’s largest maker of memory, which is one class of semiconductor chips, the Idaho Statesman previously reported. The U.S. has fallen to fourth in semiconductor production, trailing No. 1 Taiwan, No. 2 South Korea and No. 3 Japan and leading No. 5 China, according to World Population Review.
Micron’s stock closed Tuesday at $98.10 in Nasdaq trading, down $4.72 or 4.6% from Monday’s close. The stock topped $153 in its 52-week peak in June.
Business and Local News Editor David Staats contributed.
This story was originally published December 10, 2024 at 4:22 PM.
