Chips as a Manufacturing Business

In January 2022 Intel announced that it would build a new chipmaking site on farmland at New Albany, in Licking County outside Columbus, Ohio: an initial investment of about $20 billion in two leading-edge logic fabs, on a site with room for more. It broke ground that September, weeks after the CHIPS and Science Act was signed. The project became a symbol of American reshoring, "Silicon Heartland", and the state offered grants of about $300 million per fab, tied to completing construction by the end of 2028 (reported). In November 2024 Intel's final CHIPS award of $7.865 billion earmarked at least $1.5 billion for Ohio (reported). There was no anchor customer.

The schedule moved first to "late 2026" in reports in early 2024, and then, in February 2025, Intel moved completion of the first fab, Mod 1, to 2030, with operations in 2030–31, and the second to completion in 2031 and operations in 2032 (company). Intel kept building at what it called a slower pace, with the option to accelerate if customers appeared. By early 2026 it had spent about $5 billion on construction, about $1.4 billion of it in 2025 (Axios, reported), and in October 2026 the first major roof truss for the first fab went up. Its chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, said projects such as Ohio would proceed only when enough customer demand was secured (reported). Meanwhile Intel's planned leading-edge fab at Magdeburg in Germany, a project of about €30 billion, and an assembly and test plant in Wrocław, Poland, of about $4.6 billion, were cancelled in July 2025; Germany had pledged €9.9 billion of support and Poland €1.7 billion, and no German money had been paid out (reported). Ohio survived, partly because Intel's CHIPS grants had by then been converted into a roughly 9.9% government stake in the company, 433.3 million shares at $20.47, about $8.9 billion, on 22 August 2025.

The contrast was in Phoenix. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) announced its first Arizona fab on 15 May 2020: one 5-nanometre-class fab of about 20,000 wafer starts a month on 300 mm wafers, about $12 billion of spending over 2021–29 (company). It ran into construction-labour shortages and union disputes, brought in experienced technicians from Taiwan and delayed production by a year, and its US costs were far above Taiwan's; Morris Chang put the gap at about 50% (reported). But it had customers. Volume production on its N4 process began in the fourth quarter of 2024, with yields reported comparable to Taiwan's; the subsidiary went from a loss of about NT$14.3 billion in 2024 to a reported profit of about NT$16.1 billion in 2025; and on 17 October 2025 the fab produced its first wafer of Nvidia's Blackwell AI chips (company). TSMC's US plan had grown to $165 billion by March 2025. Ohio, with a groundbreaking in 2022, will not make chips for about eight years; Phoenix, announced in 2020, was in volume production in about four and a half.