GlobalWafers, one of the world's largest suppliers of silicon wafer substrates for chip production, disclosed plans to build a silicon wafer factory in Texas. The announcement precedes the launches of multiple new semiconductor manufacturing facilities by Intel, Samsung Foundry, and TSMC in the U.S. The new factory will cost $5 billion.
The new factory in Sherman, Texas, will be built in multiple phases, with production volumes reaching 1.2 million 300-mm wafers per month. The new wafer manufacturing facility will be the largest in the U.S. and also will be among the largest in the world, the company said.
The chip supply crisis and vulnerabilities of the global semiconductor supply chain centered on Taiwan and South Korea prompted multiple chipmakers with production in the U.S. — GlobalFoundries, Intel, Samsung Foundry, Texas Instruments, and TSMC — to expand local manufacturing capacities. But it is not enough to have new fabs to support local chip manufacturing: the whole supply chain has to be localized. For example, most wafer substrates are produced in Asia, whereas Japan leads the industry with high-purity gases and other materials. Meanwhile, importing these things overseas to the U.S. is expensive and further complicates the supply chain.
