Samsung gets $6.4 billion for chip plants

Hey, that’s right. Good morning, Leslie. We are here in Taylor, TX, just outside the Samsung manufacturing hub here, where the company is set to receive $6.4 billion in grants from the CHIPS Act. Samsung is then set to invest $45 billion over the next decade right here in this community and nearby in Austin. Behind me is where they’re where they’re constructing the advanced manufacturing ecosystem. That’s what they call it. It got underway in 2022 and now it will include two leading edge logic fabs and R&D fab and an advanced packaging facility. Officials say it should create 21,000 jobs within five years, mostly in construction but also in manufacturing. It’ll produce some of the world’s most advanced manufacturing chips to power AI. Now, this is the 6th award coming from the CHIPS Act, and the Commerce Department has roughly $16 billion left to dole out in awards after this. And to get a sense of the scale of this project, take a look at this drone footage that we have. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told us yesterday that each of the two leading edge logic fabs here will be the size of 11 football fields, and that’s only part of the project. We’ll get a chance to talk with her about this and this investment in an exclusive interview on Power Lunch Leslie. Megan, I’m just curious. Just for those of us who don’t know where Taylor, TX is, do they have the capacity and the the people in town to staff 21,000 jobs to build and to kind of run the function that’s there? So we are just about 45 minutes outside of Austin. Taylor itself is quite small. It’s a fairly rural area. There’s cornfields around us. They alone do not have the capacity to create all of those 21,000 jobs. But Samsung is really invested in the local community. They’re trying to hire here as much as they can, and officials told us yesterday that they really expect this investment is going to be transformative for this area. It’s going to really change this. Samsung is clearly the biggest thing in town. We can see all the cranes around us of how much is going up. So they really do expect this to have a big impact here. All right. Thank you, Megan, for the on the ground recording. Appreciate it.