Micron Pledges $30 Billion More to US Chipmaking as Trump Pushes for Better Deals

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said he is renegotiating several Biden-era deals with chipmakers to secure more favorable terms.

A view of a building where the facilities of U.S. semiconductor giant Micron is located in Shanghai on May 22, 2023. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

Micron Technology said on Thursday it will invest an additional $30 billion in the domestic semiconductor industry, becoming the latest chipmaker to answer President Donald Trump’s call for bringing more investment to the United States.

The move brings Micron’s total planned U.S. investment to approximately $200 billion, which the company said will help create some 90,000 jobs.

The $200-billion plan includes building two high-volume semiconductor fabrication plants in Idaho and up to four more in New York. Micron said the Idaho plants allow the company to bring advanced high-bandwidth memory (HBM) manufacturing, which is critical to artificial intelligence (AI) developers in need of advanced computer memory, to the United States.

The plan also includes expanding and modernizing its existing facilities in Virginia, and funding research and development “to drive American innovation and technology leadership.”

“These investments are designed to allow Micron to meet growing market demand fueled by AI, maintain share and support Micron’s goal of producing 40 percent of its DRAM in the US,” Micron said, referring to dynamic random access memory, a key component of modern computers and servers.

The expansion builds on agreements made under the Biden administration, in which Micron was awarded $6.1 billion in CHIPS Act funding in exchange for committing $100 billion in New York and $25 billion in Idaho. The Biden Commerce Department also signed a non-binding agreement to provide up to $275 million to support the upgrade of Micron’s Virginia plant.

Passed in 2022 with bipartisan support, the CHIPS Act allocated $53 billion in federal incentives to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research, with the goal of producing 20 percent of the world’s most advanced chips in the United States by 2030. As of 2023, American production accounted for about 12 percent of the global semiconductor supply, and none of the most advanced chips.

Major recipients of CHIPS Act funding include global chipmakers like Taiwan’s TSMC, South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix, and U.S.-based Intel and Micron. While the funding was approved under President Joe Biden, much of it had not been disbursed before he left office in January.

President Donald Trump has called on Congress to repeal the CHIPS Act, but the proposal met with a mix of opposition and silence from Republicans at both the state and national levels. In March, he issued an executive order establishing the United States Investment Accelerator, a new office within the Commerce Department tasked with negotiating “much better CHIPS Act deals than the previous administration.”

Earlier this month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed that his department is renegotiating several Biden-era deals with chipmakers to secure more favorable terms for taxpayers.

“We’re getting more value for the same dollars,” Lutnick said at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.

He highlighted a revised deal with TSMC, which was awarded $6.6 billion in direct federal funding under the CHIPS Act for a commitment to spend $65 billion to build three state-of-the-art factories in Arizona. In March, the Taiwanese company announced it would add $100 billion to its previous pledge, without any extra subsidies from the government.

During the hearing, Lutnick told lawmakers that he is pushing for funding levels that amount to 4 percent or less of a project’s total value, saying that the Biden administration was being “overly generous” with a 10 percent funding level.

“You will see that all the deals are getting better,” Lutnick told the lawmakers. “The only deals that are not getting done are deals that should have never been done in the first place.”

Headquartered in Boise, Idaho, Micron also maintains operations at four locations in Taiwan and is considered a major competitor to China’s leading memory chipmaker, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC).

In 2023, Chinese regulators launched a cybersecurity review of Micron and subsequently banned its products from use in critical infrastructure. The decision was widely seen as retaliation for U.S. actions that included banning the social video app TikTok on government phones and placing YMTC on the Commerce Department’s Entity List the previous year.