Ayni — Analysis — The US Makes 12% of the World's Semiconductors, Down From 37% in 1990. Micron — Born in a Boise Basement — Just Broke Ground on the Fab Meant to Help Fix That.

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The US Makes 12% of the World's Semiconductors, Down From 37% in 1990. Micron — Born in a Boise Basement — Just Broke Ground on the Fab Meant to Help Fix That.

US semiconductor manufacturing has fallen from 37% of the world's supply in 1990 to about 12% today, and the country currently has zero domestic capacity for the most advanced logic chips (5 nanometers and smaller) -- 67% of that capacity sits in Taiwan, 31% in South Korea. The CHIPS Act's stated goal is to get the US back to 20% by 2030. Micron Technology, the company at the center of one attempt to close that gap, was founded October 5, 1978, in the basement of a Boise, Idaho dental office by four engineers left jobless when their employer's contract was abruptly cancelled. It is now the only major American computer memory manufacturer, still headquartered in Boise, and in 2022 it broke ground on a new $15 billion leading-edge memory fab there -- part of the same $6.165 billion CHIPS Act award this site already covered in Upstate New York, split between Micron's Idaho and New York projects. Construction began in 2023, with DRAM production targeted for 2025, and the Idaho and New York fabs together are projected to create roughly 75,000 direct and indirect jobs. Nationally, more than $640 billion in domestic fab investment has been announced since the CHIPS Act passed, and US semiconductor manufacturing capacity is projected to roughly triple by the end of 2028. And two miles from Micron's new fab, a completely different kind of reshoring is happening at a much smaller scale: Slant3D, a high-volume 3D printing company, took over a former locomotive-manufacturing building in 2022 and filled it with 2,000 printers, explicitly built around shipping parts from US print farms instead of overseas injection molding.

Start with how far US chip manufacturing actually fell, because the scale of the gap is what makes the rest of this piece matter. The United States made 37% of the world's semiconductors in 1990. Today it makes about 12% -- and for the most advanced logic chips, 5 nanometers and smaller, the US has zero domestic manufacturing capacity at all: 67% of that capacity sits in Taiwan, 31% in South Korea.^[3] The CHIPS Act's stated target is to get the US back to 20% by 2030.^[3]

The company at the center of one real attempt to close that gap was founded in the basement of a Boise dental office. On October 5, 1978, four engineers -- Ward Parkinson, Dennis Wilson, Doug Pitman, and Ward's brother Joe, a corporate lawyer -- started Micron Technology after their employer, Mostek Corp, abruptly cancelled the contract they were working under.^[2] The company went public in 1984, listed on the NYSE in 1990, and is today the only major American computer memory manufacturer -- still headquartered in Boise, the same city it started in.^[2]

37% → 12%US share of world semiconductor manufacturing, 1990 to today

$15BMicron's new leading-edge memory fab, broken ground in Boise in 2022

2025the year DRAM production is targeted to begin at the new fab

Micron broke ground on that new fab in Boise in 2022, and it is not a separate story from the one this site already told about Upstate New York -- it is the other half of it. The Department of Commerce awarded Micron up to $6.165 billion in direct CHIPS Act funding, split between its Idaho and New York projects -- the same federal award this site's Upstate NY piece already covered from the New York side.^[1] Construction on the Boise fab began in 2023, with DRAM production targeted for 2025, and the two projects together -- Idaho and New York -- are projected to create roughly 75,000 direct and indirect jobs.^[1]

The other half of a story this site already told from New York Micron's $100 billion Clay, NY megafab and its $15 billion Boise fab are the same company, the same CHIPS Act award, split across the two states that bookend its history -- the place it was founded and the place it's betting biggest on next. The Upstate NY piece is here.

Zoom out, and Micron's fab is one project inside a much larger national reshoring push. More than $640 billion in domestic semiconductor fab investment has been announced since the CHIPS Act passed, spread across more than 50 new ecosystem projects, with more than 68,000 direct manufacturing jobs projected across new and expanded facilities. By the end of 2028, US-based semiconductor manufacturing capacity is projected to roughly triple from where it stood in 2025.^[3]

And two miles from Micron's new fab, a completely different kind of reshoring is happening at a completely different scale. Slant3D, a high-volume 3D printing company founded by Gabe Bentz in 2017, took over a former locomotive-manufacturing building in southeast Boise in 2022 and filled it with 2,000 printers -- a space the company calls the MegaFarm.^[4] Its actual pivot point is volume, not geography: an injection mold typically costs $10,000 to $100,000-plus before a single part comes off it, while 3D printing has no tooling cost and no lead time at all -- the file itself is the tool. Slant3D's own published break-even sits around 100,000 units; below that, printing wins on cost, above it, a mold pays for itself and wins instead.^[5] That volume math is what makes domestic production viable in the first place -- without tooling costs or the lead time of shipping a mold overseas, there's no economic reason left to print anywhere but close to the customer, which in Slant3D's case means a former locomotive factory a few miles from the company that's spent almost fifty years making Boise synonymous with manufacturing at a completely different scale.

The same math runs all the way down to a single person. Macy Makes 3D, a former seventh-grade math teacher, has run a one-woman 3D-print shop on Etsy for more than two years and is now an official production site for a national miniatures line.^[6] The Mountain Maker, a veteran-owned one-man print farm in Vermont, sells organizational products to teachers and woodshops built and shipped from a single home workshop.^[7] Neither needed $15 billion or a repurposed locomotive factory. The identical no-tooling, no-lead-time economics that got Micron and Slant3D to break ground in Boise works exactly the same way at a scale of one person and a handful of orders a month.

Reshoring is usually described as one story -- a policy, a subsidy, a factory groundbreaking. Boise is running two versions of it at once, at two completely different scales and in two completely different technologies, in the same small city: a $15 billion memory fab from the company the city has been synonymous with for almost fifty years, and a repurposed train factory now full of 3D printers, built by someone who wasn't alive when Micron started in that dental-office basement.

The takeaway US semiconductor manufacturing fell from 37% of world supply in 1990 to about 12% today, with zero domestic capacity for leading-edge logic chips (5nm and below) -- 67% of that sits in Taiwan, 31% in South Korea. The CHIPS Act's goal is 20% US share by 2030. Micron Technology, founded October 5, 1978 in the basement of a Boise, Idaho dental office by four suddenly-jobless engineers, is now the only major American computer memory manufacturer and is still headquartered in Boise. In 2022 it broke ground on a new $15 billion leading-edge memory fab there -- part of the same $6.165 billion CHIPS Act award split between its Idaho and New York projects (the same award this site covered in the Upstate NY piece). Construction began 2023, DRAM production targeted 2025, with Idaho and New York together projected to create roughly 75,000 jobs. Nationally, $640 billion-plus in domestic fab investment has been announced since the CHIPS Act, and US semiconductor capacity is projected to roughly triple by the end of 2028. Two miles from Micron's new fab, a different, much smaller reshoring story is happening in parallel: Slant3D, a high-volume 3D printing company, took over a former locomotive-manufacturing building in 2022 and filled it with 2,000 printers built specifically to ship US-made parts instead of overseas-molded ones.

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