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’m pretty sure Samsung doesn’t need that money
Need has nothing to do with it. The Biden admin is prepping for Taiwan to be taken by China. Throwing cash at Texas just helps with political messaging.
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.
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.