The Biden administration announced billions of dollars in new funds for chipmaker Intel on Wednesday, touting the investment as a way to boost U.S. competitiveness in a burgeoning high-tech market.
Intel will get as much as $8.5 billion in direct federal funding and will have access to another $11 billion in loans. The money, delivered in part from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, is expected to go to building and modernizing chip plants in Arizona, Ohio, Oregon and New Mexico.
This is the fourth such disbursement directed by the CHIPS act. The money has been critical in helping chip companies commit to domestic investment, officials say.
Intel said in a press release the new funds would feed into its ongoing plans to invest $100 billion over five years in the U.S. The company said its efforts would create more than 10,000 new jobs within the company, and temporarily support at least twice that number of construction jobs in the process.
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Right now, more than 90% of advanced chips come from Taiwan, which officials have framed as an economic and national security risk for the U.S. The chips are used in everything from consumer goods and vehicles to military applications.
"The semiconductor industry is absolutely critical for our long term economic strength," said Don Graves, Deputy Secretary of Commerce, in an interview with Scripps News. "We rely on semiconductors and microchips to power all of our devices, all of our equipment, so our phones, our computers, certainly our cars. And so this investment in Intel is a huge down payment for our future, to make sure that we have that resilient supply chain of semiconductors that we need to out-compete the rest of the world."
According to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Intel's cash infusion could help drive the U.S. share of worldwide production of advanced chips from 0% to 20%.
"Leading-edge chips are the core of our innovation system, especially when it comes to advances in artificial intelligence and our military systems," Raimondo told reporters. "We can’t just design chips. We have to make them in America."
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