The Biden administration is providing $162 million to Microchip Technology to support the domestic production of computer chips — the second funding announcement tied to a 2022 law designed to revive U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.
The incentives include $90 million to improve a plant in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and $72 million to expand a factory in Gresham, Oregon, the Commerce Department said. The investments would enable Microchip Technology to triple its domestic production and reduce its dependence on foreign factories.
Much of the money would fund the making of microcontrollers, which are used by the military as well as in autos, household appliances and medical devices. Government officials said they expected the investments to create 700 construction and manufacturing jobs over the next decade.
Super stoked at the possibility of actually being able to buy machines made in the USA instead of “figuratively thought about in California” like most electronics these days. Toyota cars have more percentage of a car being both designed and built in the US than an Apple iPhone, for example.
However, not really looking forward to the environmental impact in Colorado, Oregon and beyond. Most of Silicon Valley is all to this day toxic superfund sites from the damage caused by electronics manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s. The groundwater is contaminated and there have been incidents like toxic gases leaking into new modern Google office buildings. Selfishly, preferring the US be free of those production contaminants, but holistically, that just moves (and until now has moved) the problem to Taiwan anyway.
Definitely happy to be proven wrong here, and that chip fab is less toxic than it once was, but also skeptical as the US is generally pretty “pro-business-before-citizen-health” and always has been. They’ll gladly plug their ears and go “la la la” to say “the economy is strong” before giving two shits about We The People. (See: radiation contamination, PFAS, and other superfund sites already present in states such as Colorado.)