Has Micron’s Boise factory construction fallen behind schedule? What we know
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Micron expects its new Boise plant to start producing DRAM in fiscal year 2027.
- Federal subsidies total $6.1B for Boise and New York semiconductor projects.
- Micron plans to add second Boise fab and expand its Manassas, Virginia plant.
Update Wednesday, June 25, 2025: Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said during a quarterly earnings call Wednesday that the company expects to start producing DRAM wafers at its unfinished Southeast Boise plant in the second half of 2027.
The chipmaker announced plans June 12 to build a second Boise plant co-located at Micron’s headquarters campus. Mehrotra said that plant, dubbed ID2, will benefit from manufacturing economies of scale with the first, ID1, and will start production even before its giant New York plant, on which Micron expects to break ground later this year after state and federal environmental reviews.
The original June 23, 2025, story:
Micron is inching closer to completing its $15 billion memory-chip factory at its headquarters campus in Southeast Boise.
A year ago, the company was doing its final land blasting at the site. A building official told the Idaho Statesman during a tour in June 2024 that about 360 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of dirt had been removed to make way for the new fab. (Fab is industry shorthand for semiconductor-fabrication plant).
The 600,000-square-foot building, now several floors tall, is hard to miss for passersby on Interstate 84 heading into Boise near South Federal Way. Heavy machinery and over a dozen cranes dot the site.
But there’s still a way to go. Micron previously said it expects to finish construction on the government-subsidized fab later this year. A spokesperson for the company declined to comment on whether things were still on track to meet that deadline.
Micron originally said chip production would begin in 2026. Now, it says output will start in fiscal year 2027, according to a news release.
The fab will make dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM (pronounced dee-ram), which is used in smartphones, computers and other devices to temporarily store data as they function. Micron is the only manufacturer of DRAM in the country.
The fab would restore chipmaking to Micron’s home city for the first time since 2009, when the company closed its last production line. (In the years that followed, the Boise campus morphed into Micron’s research-and-development center, with highly paid scientists, engineers and technicians from around the world. An R&D fab continues to operate.)
President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said during a quarterly earnings call in March that a notable construction milestone triggered the company’s first federal funding disbursement for the project. The company did not respond to a question from the Statesman about how much that disbursement was.
Under a law enacted with bipartisan support during the Biden administration, Micron was awarded more than $6.1 billion in federal subsidies to help pay for its new chip-making plant in Boise and another planned in upstate New York, which lags far behind the Boise plant in construction.
The Clay, New York, plant, dubbed a “megafab” because it would be the largest semiconductor plant in U.S. history, is on track to break ground in November.
Even when the Boise fab is finished and functioning, construction won’t stop under Micron’s latest plans. Mehrotra announced June 12 that the company would build a second fab in Boise and expand an existing fab in Manassas, Virginia, at a combined cost of $30 billion.
A handful of other projects and improvements are going on at Micron’s Boise campus.
The company applied for a permit with the city in May to complete a tenant improvement and lease a 110,000-square-foot warehouse at 7075 S. Eisenman Road. The filing says Micron plans use the warehouse to train new employees to work at the Boise fab.
The space includes small and large classrooms and tool bays for hands-on construction, according to the application. The project is worth $16.5 million.
Here’s Micron’s February YouTube video showing some of the work that construction crews have done:
This story was originally published June 23, 2025 at 4:00 AM.
