The Biden administration has reached an agreement to provide up to $6.4 billion in direct funding for Samsung Electronics to develop a computer chip manufacturing and research cluster in Texas.
The funding announced Monday by the Commerce Department is part of a total investment in the cluster that, with private money, is expected to exceed $40 billion. The government support comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022 with the goal of reviving the production of advanced computer chips domestically.
“The proposed project will propel Texas into a state of the art semiconductor ecosystem,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on a call with reporters. “It puts us on track to hit our goal of producing 20% of the world’s leading edge chips in the United States by the end of the decade.”
Raimondo said she expects the project will create at least 17,000 construction jobs and more than 4,500 manufacturing jobs.
I mean, I’m as anti-corporation as the next sane person, but it’s not like this is just a gift to Samsung.
This is just a small part of the total costs for building This facility, which is going to be absolutely massive, and the vast majority of the money is coming from the private sector. In return the US gets and incredibly important resource that makes it less dependant of countries in East Asia that are either hostile to them or are at risk of having their facilities disobeyed by those that are.
That alone is worth fare more than 6bn, and doesn’t even begin to mention the economic benefits of such an endeavour.
I mean, TSM already went “this isn’t gonna work” and “it’s not you, it’s me” on them…
The project is estimated to create 17,000 construction jobs (temporary, feels wildly overestimated as well) and 4500 manufacturing jobs.
If you just have that $6.4B to the 4500 who would get a permanent job out of it that would be $1.4million each, probably enough for them to retire.
But no we need workers so give that money to corporations that already have billions of dollars.
Then you’ve lost 6.4 billion and there’s no valuable commodity being produced
Most of these are points in favor of US Goverment support for first-time homebuyers. Instead of helping Samsung, what if there was a fund to pay 10% of every first time homebuyer’s purchase?
Except the most important point, which is to have domestic chip production facilities for the DoD.
House prices would go up even more.
Not 10%. Most buyers are not first time homebuyers. Most buyers already have property. That’s the problem.
The problem is lack of supply in such a bad way that any increase in demand is additional upward price pressure.
You make good points