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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.
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Silicon Valley's First Hard Drive Was Built by a Company Born in Upstate New York
IBM was founded June 16, 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York, and was renamed IBM in 1924. When IBM ...
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