1y ago

Biden administration agrees to provide $6.4 billion to Samsung for making computer chips in Texas

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.

69 comments

High-speed rail funding, semiconductor factory funding... Why the fuck is Texas getting these federal perks when they've been fighting Biden the entire time?
- Neoliberal bargaining strategy...
  Anyone that's already "blue" you ignore, because they have no other options to vote for.
  So you continually give preference to conservatives in the hopes you can pull some into the Democratic party. This pulls the Dem party more conservative and perpetuates the problem.
  It's pretty much why 1/3 of the country doesn't vote, and the only time in modern history Dems ran a progressive campaign, we flipped a bunch of red states.
  We can easily do that again, it's not difficult. It's just not the direction party leaders want to take the party. They'd rather lose elections than move left.
  
  Everything I see in the news about how the dems are bending over backwards to please republicans leads me to believe that the senior democratic party members are genuinely just fucking stupid.
  I guess that's to be expected since half of them are like 300 years old, but it's still really annoying to watch them just let democracy be destroyed for the sake of decorum.
  
  This is exactly how we got the Affordable Care Act over single payer. Dems wanted to appease Republicans and yet still none of them voted for it.
- I suspect it was Samsung that chose Texas, and not the Feds.
  
  The feds could have said something like, "consider Michigan and we'll give you $6.4 billion."
- Does Biden have a shot to swing it blue? Haven't kept up with voting demographics there.
  
  I don't think he does in the current climate.
  
  Texas will secede the union and sink into the Gulf of Mexico before it becomes a democratic state.
  
  Lol na, not a chance. Liberals who typically vote are middle class and if they could afford to leave Texas then they have. What's left is poor democrats who can't leave but don't typically vote and if they do vote it's for people like Bernie. They see Biden as Capitalist who couldn't give a fuck about them so fat chance they are taking off work to vote for him.
  To turn texas blue you would need an extremely progressive candidate and even Bernie wasn't progressive enough.
- A bullet to Dallas, call it the Kennedy Express
- Ideally where funds are invested would be decided without fear or favor.
  
  And Texas needs these funds more than any other state? I find that spurious.
  
  Nah, I think partisan special treatment is exactly what we need more of. What could go wrong making eligibility for federal projects and funds contingent on the state being represented by the correct party.
  Obvious /s.
- Not by choice I'm sure. Kinda like our public school books. It's a numbers and -hopefully-long game.
- You can’t argue the differences if you behave the same way.
- Because Texas is currently the most valuable, most important, and fastest-growing state in the nation
  
  Well if you can't trust "RealLifeLore" on YouTube, who can you trust?
  Texas has a 5 cent return on every federal dollar it receives.
  New Mexico, 40 cents.
  https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal-government/
  Maybe it doesn't need more federal dollars if it's such a paltry return.
  
  3rd world countries have more reliable power grids than Texas. Texas the only state where you can just freeze to death if you have a few cold days because the power grid is so shit.
I'm pretty sure Samsung doesn't need that money
- 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.
  
  You make good points
  
  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?
  
  The project is estimated to create 17,000 construction jobs (temporary, feels wildly overestimated as well) and 4500 manufacturing jobs.
  If you just have that $6.4B to the 4500 who would get a permanent job out of it that would be $1.4million each, probably enough for them to retire.
  But no we need workers so give that money to corporations that already have billions of dollars.
- 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.
- Yeah it should be going straight to Israel.
Private businesses making their own way in the world with no help from anyone else. Perfect example of capitalism working as it should...
Oh wait...
- Foxconn should have been a warning not an example.
  
  Are you referring to the plant in Wisconsin where they used eminent domain to kick out a whole neighborhood full of families after secret backroom deals, gave them a guaranteed tax break regardless of them keeping their promises or not, and then act shocked when Foxconn did a 180 on the entire project and only hired a fraction of the promised amount doing low skill, low paying work?
Anyone remember the Foxconn building deal during the Trump presidency? It was supposed to prop Republicans up in the mid-terms of 2018.
The GOP offered a $2.85 billion subsidy so Foxconn would build an LCD panel manufacturing plant in Wisconsin. Apparently the subsidy was in the form of tax credits. Trump calls Foxconn "8th wonder of the world" despite its cost.
According to The Verge:
The renovations never arrived. Neither did the factory, the tech campus, nor the thousands of jobs. Interviews with 19 employees and dozens of others involved with the project, as well as thousands of pages of public documents, reveal a project that has defaulted on almost every promise. The building Foxconn calls an LCD factory — about 1/20th the size of the original plan — is little more than an empty shell. In September, Foxconn received a permit to change its intended use from manufacturing to storage.
As far as I can tell (from skimming over a few recent news articles), they ultimately employed about 1000 people (7%-10% of what was promised). When negative reporting on the project ramped up, Republicans claimed that incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers tried to renegotiate the deal and blamed him. When that turned out to be a lie, Republicans pivoted to the more nebulous claim that Foxconn bailed because Wisconsin was unfriendly to business under its fresh Democratic governor.
This could be a great side-by-side comparison on how Dems vs. Reps handle such a project, but I doubt the average person caught in the news cycle still remembers Foxconn after nearly 6 years). 😅
Aren’t there even cheaper, lower wage states we can build these chips in? What about building the plant in Alabamistan, and having the cheap texas engineers flown in as needed?
FUCK TEXAS.
Wow they get a Samsung factory and a bullet train back to back.
Way to help Ted Cruze and that little nazi governor. Wtf.
- Hoping Texas becomes a purple state maybe
Love corporate handouts.
Socialism for the rich!

69 comments