New York Joins IBM, Micron
in $10 Billion Chip Research Complex
Planned facility to include advanced
chip-making equipment made by ASML
New
York state is joining chip companies to invest $10 billion in a semiconductor research
facility at the University at Albany that is set to include some of the most advanced
chip-making equipment in the world.
NY
Creates, a nonprofit that oversees the Albany NanoTech Complex where the facility is to be built, will coordinate
its construction. It will also use state funds to acquire chip-making equipment
from
ASML
Holding, a Dutch company whose machines can cost hundreds of millions of dollars
and are key to making the most advanced chips possible.
Once
the machinery is installed, the project and its partners will begin work on next-generation
chip manufacturing there, according to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s
office. The partners include tech giant
IBM,
memory manufacturer Micron Technology and chip manufacturing equipment makers Applied
Materials and Tokyo Electron.
The
expansion could help New York’s bid to be designated a research hub under last year’s
$53 billion Chips Act. That legislation included $11 billion for a National Semiconductor
Technology Center to foster domestic chip research and
development.
Expanding
domestic chip manufacturing and research has become a federal and state-level priority
in recent years as concern grows in the U.S. over China’s expanding grasp over the
industry. Chips are increasingly seen as a crux of geopolitical power, underlying
advanced weapons for militaries and sophisticated artificial-intelligence systems.
ASML’s
advanced machines use lasers and droplets of tin in a complex process to imprint
the outlines of transistors on silicon. Today, the company’s extreme ultraviolet
light, or EUV, machines are the most capable available, allowing chip makers to
make transistors only a couple nanometers long.
The
machine to be installed in Albany is the next generation of these systems, called
high-NA EUV, which aren’t expected to be used in commercial chip production until
2025.
The
project at the Albany complex, which began in the 1990s and has been expanded in
several stages since, would create 700 jobs and bring in at least $9 billion of
private money, Hochul’s office said. New York is investing
$1 billion to buy the ASML equipment and construct a building with 50,000 square
feet of chip-manufacturing space. Construction is expected to take about two years.
The
Albany complex has produced numerous successful chip research efforts over the years
but has also had its stumbles. A contracting scandal in 2016 led to the resignation
of its founding leader and prompted an Austrian company to abandon plans to partner
with the state on a chip factory in Utica. A consortium that was researching whether
chips could be made on larger wafers of silicon collapsed in 2017.
As
the U.S. offers manufacturing incentives through legislation such as the Chips Act,
the federal government has also sought to limit Beijing’s access to the most sophisticated
AI chips and chip-making equipment through several rounds of tightened export controls.
New
York is home to a number of large chip factories, including ones operated by GlobalFoundries,
ON Semiconductor and Wolfspeed. Micron is planning to
invest up to $100 billion in a large factory near Syracuse that it is hoping to
get funding for through the Chips Act. State officials also have offered incentives
for the manufacturing facilities.