US government is granting GlobalWafers up to $400 million in CHIPS Act cash to help fund its 300mm wafer manufacturing facilities in Texas and Missouri.

The Commerce Department said GlobalWafers' Texas plant is a significant milestone for the US as it's the country's first facility for manufacturing 300mm wafers, the kind that are used for modern processes. The Missouri site will produce a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) variant of 300mm wafers, which are more geared towards defense and aerospace applications where chips need to be less prone to failure.

Plans to build the Texas wafer plant were first revealed just over two years ago by the Taiwanese chip biz. It was an alternative use of a few billion dollars that were originally earmarked for acquiring German wafer maker Siltronic, an acquisition which didn't go as hoped due to resistance from German regulators.

The Missouri plant meanwhile was announced in 2021 as a partnership between GlobalWafers and GlobalFoundries, the chip fab spun off from AMD that now focuses on older nodes rather than the cutting edge. This fab seems to be the smaller of the two, considering that its budget when first announced was just $800 million, and that seems to also cover an expansion of a 200mm SOI wafer plant.

In total, GlobalWafers' Texas and Missouri factories will cost around four billion dollars, which means the maximum award funded by the CHIPS Act would cover up to ten percent of the budget. The Commerce Department claims that facilities will create 1,700 jobs in construction and 880 in manufacturing.

Although 300mm manufacturing plants aren't quite as exciting as the cutting-edge fabs that Intel, TSMC, and Samsung are building across the country, they're still an important component in the US's quest to restore local chip production. No 300mm wafers means no chips, no matter how many fabs there are, and if the US is going to build its own fabs, why not wafer plants too?

Plus, building out parts of the semiconductor supply chain domestically isn't a bad idea to mitigate the impacts of a hypothetical (albeit very unlikely) Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which is the global hub for the silicon industry.

The US could stand to make more than a quarter of the world's advanced chips within a decade, if the CHIPS Act and longer term efforts are successful. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/17/globalwafers_scores_400m_for_building/