12/31/2023 0 Comments Us rust belt![]() Preliminary talks began with Micron, but it all depended on whether the act got passed. TSMC and Intel both sniffed around Clay, says McMahon, before choosing other sites. Even before the CHIPS Act was passed last summer, semiconductor manufacturers had begun scouting sites in the US to expand. McMahon decided to go all in, pouring millions into expanding and upgrading the site. But for two decades there had been no takers. Previous county executives had promoted it as the perfect location for a semiconductor fab. ![]() ![]() When Ryan McMahon became county executive of Onondaga County, in 2018, the long-imagined industrial park in Clay was languishing. It’s much more difficult than that.” Risky business “You line up a bunch of factors and, voilà, you have a productive and growing economy. ![]() “We think like we have an economic development sausage machine,” she says. The challenge for Syracuse is that there are no “hard-and-fast recipes” for how to get it right, says Maryann Feldman, a professor of public policy at Arizona State University. What’s more, says Jensen, by offering generous tax breaks to companies, state and local communities can limit their sources of revenues in the coming decades, even as-if all goes well-they deal with booming demand for housing, roads, and schools. Corporate strategies can change, and 20 years is a long time to bet on growing market demand for a specific technology. While the Micron investment will likely bring good jobs and could be a great opportunity for a distressed city, he says, local and state leaders will need to manage multiple risks over the long term. Micron, for one, says it would not be building in the US without the funding it expects from the CHIPS and Science Act, which designated $39 billion for support of domestic semiconductor manufacturing and another $13.2 billion for semiconductor R&D and workforce development. Over the last two years, the US government has allocated hundreds of billions to supporting everything from new chip fabs to a slew of battery manufacturing plants throughout the country. In many ways, the Micron investment is an on-the-ground trial for the recent US embrace of industrial policy-government interventions that favor particular sectors and regions of the country. And the project’s success or failure will be an important indicator of whether the US can leverage investments in high tech to reverse years of soaring geographic inequality and all the social and political unrest that it has brewed. It is, in short, an attempt to turn around a region that has struggled economically for decades. It will also, if all goes according to plan, anchor a new semiconductor manufacturing hub in central New York at a time when the demand for chips, especially the type of memory chips that Micron plans to make in Clay, is expected to explode given the essential role they play in artificial intelligence and other data-driven applications. The Micron investment will flood billions into the local economy, making it possible to finally upgrade the infrastructure, housing, and schools. Without these high-tech jobs and with conventional manufacturing long gone as an economic driver, Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Syracuse, and nearby Rochester now top the list of the country’s poorest cities. The nation’s economy is increasingly driven by high-tech industries, and those jobs and the resulting wealth are largely concentrated in a few cities Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and San Diego accounted for more than 90% of US innovation-sector growth from 2005 to 2017, according to a report by the Brookings Institution. Syracuse, of course, is not alone in its postindustrial malaise. ![]() And each of these buildings will be the size of 10 football fields, so a total of 40 football fields worth of clean-room space.” The fabs will create 50,000 jobs in the region over time, including 9,000 at Micron, he has pledged-“so this is really going to be a major transformation for the community.” And on this April day, standing under the tent, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra conjures a vision for what the $100 billion investment will mean: “Imagine this site, which has nothing on it today, will have four major buildings 20 years from now. Micron, a maker of memory chips based in Boise, Idaho, announced last fall that it plans to build up to four of these fabs, each costing roughly $25 billion, at the Clay site over the next 20 years. It all begins with an astonishingly expensive and complex kind of factory called a chip fab. Now Syracuse is about to become an economic test of whether, over the next several decades, the aggressive government policies-and the massive corporate investments they spur-can both boost the country’s manufacturing prowess and revitalize regions like upstate New York. ![]()
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