The Biden administration's fast approach to industrial policy and re-shoring of semiconductor production has been through the Chips and Science Act.
The United States is progressing down the path of rebuilding its semiconductor manufacturing base after the Biden administration awarded $8.5 billion in grants and $11 billion in loans to tech giant Intel last month to build the next generation of manufacturing facilities across several states.
A new report from The Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter," revealed South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics is planning to double its total semiconductor factory investment in Texas to a whopping $44 billion.
Samsung is already building a semiconductor hub in Taylor, Texas. The new investments will include a new chip-making factory plus a facility for advanced packaging and research and development.
The people said Samsung plans to announce the mega-investment in Texas on April 15. They expect the Biden administration to hand the company billions of dollars in subsidies from the Chips Act to support the efforts.
"Samsung's additional investments add to the $17 billion that the company had previously committed more than two years ago to Taylor, located just outside of Austin, for a cutting-edge chip-making plant," WSJ pointed out.
The second Taylor-based chip factory is estimated to cost around $20 billion, the people said, adding the company's research and development efforts are expected to be warehoused inside the new plants.
Samsung is only one of three firms, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Intel, capable of producing advanced logic semiconductors for national defense and artificial intelligence. The re-shoring effort under the Chips Act is an effort to mitigate China's influence on US supply chains.
At the current rate, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo recently said the Chips Act is allowing the US to capture about 20% of the world's most advanced logic chips production by 2030. As a reminder, the US once had 37% of the world's chip production in 1990 and has since plummeted to about 12% in recent years due to the West's globalist leaders who offshored America's manufacturing capacity. It's time to bring the production back as the world fractures into a dangerous multi-polar state.
