Now that the U.S. government has finally settled the matter of whether it would be providing subsidies to entice chip fabs to setup shop within the U.S., those fabs and chip makers are starting to hammer out their domestic investment plans. Of all of the proposals revealed so far, Micron's new proposal stands to be the most ambitious. Last week the company announced plans to build the largest chip production complex in the history of the U.S. in central New York state. The plan will span 20 years of construction and upgrades, with a total price tag expected to hit around $100 billion by the time Micron is finished in the 2040s. 

Micron's new site near Clay, New York, will not only be the company's largest campus ever built, but will also be the largest chip fab in the USA. The new Micron campus will produce DRAM using leading-edge process technologies and is expected to eventually include four 600,000 feet2 (55,700 meters2) clean rooms. Which, to provide some context, is roughly eight-times the clean room space of GlobalFoundries' Fab 8. The new fab complex will complement Micron's already announced campus near Boise, Idaho, that is expected to start coming online starting in 2025. Both sites will be instrumental to meet Micron's goal to produce 40% of its DRAM in the U.S. over the next decade.

According to Micron, the company's investments in its New York production facility will total $100 billion when fully built, and it will create some 9,000 Micron jobs along with some 41,000 indirect jobs. The first phase of the Clay, New York, project is expected to cost Micron around $20 billion in total over the rest of this decade. The DRAM maker expects to get $5.5 billion in incentives from the state of New York over the life of the project, as well as federal grants and tax credits from the CHIPS and Science Act. In addition, Micron and the state of New York will also invest $500 million over the next 20+ years in community and workforce development.

Micron plans to start site preparation work in 2023 and start construction in 2024. The facility ramp up is set to begin in the second half of the decade based on industry demand for DRAM devices.

Broadly speaking, fab complexes with eye-popping price tags are quickly becoming the norm in the fab industry as the cost of building and equipping successive generations of fabs continues to balloon. And while Micron is not the first company to plan for a twelve digit price tag for a new fab complex (Intel's new fab complex in Ohio is officially expected to cost around $100 billion when completed), Micron's announcement is notable in that unlike Intel and TSMC, Micron isn't a logic producer. So the company's $100 billion plans are entirely for memory, a relatively bold commitment for a conservative company that's competing in the tech industry's classic commodity market.

Bearing in mind that the new fab in in Onondaga County, New York, is not set to come online until the later half of the decade, it is too early for Micro to reveal which process technologies and types of products it will produce. The only thing that the company says is that this will be a leading-edge facility that will produce advanced DRAM products (think 64Gb DDR5 chips, DDR6 DRAMs, next-generation HBM, etc.) using EUV-enabled production nodes.

"Micron will leverage the diverse, highly educated and skilled talent in New York as we look to build our workforce in the Empire State," said Sanjay Mehrotra, chief executive of Micron. "This historic leading-edge memory megafab in Central New York will deliver benefits beyond the semiconductor industry by strengthening U.S. technology leadership as well as economic and national security, driving American innovation and competitiveness for decades to come."

Source: Micron

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  • Samus - Tuesday, October 11, 2022 - link

    Environmental regulations should fall under federal authority (EPA) as states should not be giving a pass on this sort of thing.

    But as history has shown, we know how that goes. It could be worse than we know now that the EPA has been stripped of vast regulatory power by the supreme court.
  • RedGreenBlue - Tuesday, October 11, 2022 - link

    I think we should be cautious where we get information about water usage because while it may have used to be true they could easily use tap water, I suspect in the last decade or two that has become impractical without serious filtration because it would contaminate the wafers and to some degree the cleanroom environment. I expect they take the used water and put it through stages of reverse osmosis because even the used water is probably cleaner than the tap water, and if they use a lot of it then it would be cheaper to reuse as much as possible. They’re pretty picky about having as much control over contamination as possible. Nobody’s exactly making clean rooms with opening windows for fresh air.
  • RedGreenBlue - Tuesday, October 11, 2022 - link

    Besides that water is probably supplied by the Great Lakes system being so close to Lake Ontario. Same reason German brew-meisters went to Milwaukee.
  • RedGreenBlue - Tuesday, October 11, 2022 - link

    It’s federal regardless, as a minimum. But keep in mind the plant isn’t that far from where Love Canal was, which was a trigger to create the EPA in the first place. New York wouldn’t forget that quickly. In state regulations, usually they don’t differ much more than scientifically questionable issues. For instance that, California warning we always see, I’ve only ever seen it for substances that are shown in studies to be possible or probable carcinogens. The federal standard usually ends up aligning in some way but with detectable threshold limits in parts per billion or million. It comes with more conclusive studies but is defined in a different way so it needs to be implemented differently. Also, the Great Lakes System flows to the Atlantic from the rivers that feed it. Pollution won’t go upstream. If there was any it would fall under the EPA and US-Canada regulations.
  • meacupla - Monday, October 10, 2022 - link

    My guess is that you need a chemical factory producing high purity hydrogen fluoride for EUV lithography, and that it's expensive to build such a chemical plant, along with the logistics to deliver it to the fab. Most of those chemical plants are in Texas/Arizona area, where they were already supplying for Intel/Micron/Samsung
  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, October 11, 2022 - link

    Demand for chemicals must exist before production will move into an area so the Fab must pull on the supply chain before a chemical company will invest in a plant nearby.
  • RedGreenBlue - Tuesday, October 11, 2022 - link

    Yeah, likely the future in this case. But it could also be moved in on freight trains. A train can move that much weight more efficiently than we perceive with trucks.
  • Arsenica - Tuesday, October 11, 2022 - link

    HF is used for some etching processes. Nothing to do with lithography per se.
  • nandnandnand - Monday, October 10, 2022 - link

    "think 64Gb DDR5 chips"

    I can think of much larger numbers. Let's octuple our RAM already.
  • RedGreenBlue - Tuesday, October 11, 2022 - link

    Yeah, seriously. Leading edge better be more than this in a few years.

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