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.
$1.4 mil is probably not enough for someone to retire unless they were only a decade away from retirement anyway. And let’s say one of these workers has a 30 year career at this factory that’s only $46k/year, which isn’t a lot, especially for a skilled worker. So if we assume and average wage for these jobs is $80k (probably an underestimate) then that’s only 17.5 years before Samsung pays put more to employees than it got from the government, and realistically these factories will be operating for many decades if all goes well.
And that’s ignoring both the construction jobs and the downstream jobs that would be needed to support 4.5k workers. As well as the money the government will make back on various taxes from both income and manufacturing and savings from procuring chips locally instead of shipping them.
And also massively ignoring the importance of domestic chip manufacturing which given the current state of things and potential future conflict could legitimately be the difference between that stops NATO losing a war with China. Which is the main thing this project is about and is worth so so so much more than 6bn