CCU in the News
A great article on the new chip boom in Arizona, featuring CCU staff, our friends in Vistancia, and other participants at the Dark Side of the Chip conference we held in October in Phoenix.
Ken and Carol Apacki, CCU allies who live near Columbus, Ohio, were featured in a Planet Money episode exploring how data centers drive up electricity bills. (Chip fabs can have a similar effect, although data centers are much bigger energy users.)
And here’s a wonderful article by Chip Hughes, another friend of CCU, about how his state of North Carolina learned lessons about chip-making and its hazards from Ted Smith, Mandy Hawes, and other Silicon Valley pioneers, and then forgot them.
National News
The New York Times concludes that Big Tech is getting what it wants from our current president, from AI to chips.
Do you recall how the Trump administration clawed back $13 billion from Natcast, the research arm of the CHIPS Act, and fired all its staff? It was ugly. Harvard’s Reimagining the Economy project went deep into the demise of Natcast and the federal defunding of science.
Now the administration has axed the Smart USA institute, which was going to provide “digital twin” technology that industry could use to try out new manufacturing systems. The institute was expected to reduce manufacturing costs by more than 35 percent, cut development time by 30 percent, improve manufacturing yields by 40 percent, and train 110,000 workers over five years.
In December, the president issued an executive order designed to stop states and local communities from passing laws to regulate artificial intelligence. The order frames AI as a national security race and argues that companies must be free to innovate without “cumbersome” regulation. It treats state consumer protection and civil rights laws as barriers to be eliminated and uses federal power to do so. The aim of the EO, say our friends at Public Citizen, is to insulate tech companies from accountability and create a regulatory vacuum at a moment when AI harms are accelerating.
The CHIPS Program Office will provide North Carolina firm Vulcan Elements, which makes rare earth magnets, with a $50 million incentive grant in exchange for $50 million of equity in the company, to encourage domestic mineral production. This follows the pattern applied to Intel, and the Commerce Department has also used CHIPS Act money to buy shares of several other mining and mineral companies. At the same time, the US Office of Strategic Capital, a branch of the new War Department, is making a $700 million loan to Vulcan and ReElement Technologies to increase production of Neodymium Iron Boron magnets, which apparently are important for motors, hard drives, and other applications.
News from Around the Country
Arizona: Despite extensive community opposition, the city of Phoenix approved the rezoning of part of North Phoenix to make way for more TSMC factories. Here’s another article on the rezoning that acknowledges the local opposition.
On the other hand, the New York Times says that environmental rules and concerned citizens make it hard for poor TSMC to build its fabs in Arizona. The article shares the story of Citizens for Smart Growth, the group that succeeded in pushing the city of Peoria to relocate the Amkor packaging plant further away from the community of Vistancia. (You can also listen to an episode of The Daily discussing the same issue.)
For the first time, there are now non-stop flights between Phoenix and Taipei.
A fascinating if sometimes somewhat opaque article analyzes the growth of the semiconductor industry in Arizona and draws some interesting conclusions about what the author calls “techno-statecraft.” “[S]tate agencies, utilities, economic development boards, and public universities have increasingly coordinated industrial strategy – albeit one defined less by coherence than by convergence around a shared anticipatory posture. Permitting regimes were streamlined; industrial parks prepared before commitments; workforce programs aligned with projected labour needs. Institutions like the Arizona Commerce Authority, Greater Phoenix Economic Council, and Arizona State University are not just policy implementers but have functioned as brokers – linking real estate, utility infrastructure, and talent pipelines with the speculative logics of global tech production.”
Idaho: Micron says it will spend $75 million to improve local infrastructure but provides few details.
Oregon: The state’s data center boom is producing a water pollution crisis. “Healthy adults … were coming down with unexplained medical conditions, including diseases and cancers that usually afflicted the elderly.” 68 out of 70 wells tested violated the safe level for nitrates, with an average concentration of nitrates close to four times the federal limit, and it turned out that Amazon data centers were concentrating the hazardous chemical.
Corporate News
The global semiconductor market is approaching a trillion dollars in 2026. The phrase you might hear describing this boom is “supercycle.”
A company called Space Forge says they will start making chips in space, no humans needed.
Intel: Nvidia purchased $5 billion in Intel stock (at a steep discount) and now owns a 4% equity stake in the company.
Here’s the first-person account of a laid-off Intel employee in Portland who can’t find another job.
Micron: AI-driven demand for memory is leading to a shortage of RAM. Micron benefits from the scarcity, as the price of memory chips increases.
Samsung: Had to share this because it’s so funny: here’s a PR-driven fluff piece entitled “Samsung is Back,” which literally includes the phrase, “All hail Samsung’s chips.”
Up until now, TSMC has been the only company in the world able to make 2nm chips, the smallest and fastest chips on the planet, and only in Taiwan. (The company expects to produce 2 nm chips in Arizona, but not for a few more years. To ensure that the country retains its status as the leading manufacturer of cutting-edge chips, TSMC has promised it will only produce its most sophisticated chips in Taiwan.) But now Samsung is partnering with AMD and Google to produce 2nm chips in Texas, a deal that would circumvent TSMC’s monopoly on the chips. (All hail!)
TSMC: Over in Taiwan, TSMC has begun its 2nm production process, which uses vast quantities of water and energy to make tiny chips. In case you want to track which fabs are making what kind of chips, this article was written by AI (ugh!) but provides (as far as I can tell) a good overview of TSMC’s production phases. In any case, TSMC’s Arizona fab will not be producing the most advanced 2 nm chips anytime soon.
TSMC is “the most important company in the world,” says a recent article, which includes other interesting details about the company. In addition to the six Arizona fabs that TSMC has committed to building, “industry rumors suggest the possibility of adding additional phases in Arizona. Rumors suggest 6 more phases, bringing the total to 12, starting construction in 2032. If completed, this would make TSMC Arizona the largest advanced fab in the world.” Perhaps this explains why Commerce Sect’y Lutnick recently said that TSMC will invest $200 billion in Arizona (not the previously disclosed $165 billion).
Apparently the process of packaging chips has emerged as a bottleneck in the chip supply chain, and TSMC is looking to build its own packaging plant in Arizona. It’s not clear what that means for Amkor, which was (we thought) going to be doing advanced packaging for TSMC. For an introduction to advanced packaging, which does not mean putting chips into little packages, watch this video.
Environmental News
More cities are finding PFAS pollution in their water. Louisville, Kentucky found 52 ppt (parts per trillion) of the toxic “forever chemicals” in the river flowing through their city. As CCU steering committee member Lenny Siegel commented, “imagine how much of the chemical must be discharged into the Ohio River to be detected above 50 ppt more than 400 miles downstream from the reported source, the Chemours Teflon-PFA factory in Parkersburg, West Virginia. This is relevant to the semiconductor industry. In 2023, Chemours’ CEO explained, ‘You cannot make chips without a whole PFA infrastructure. We estimate that in a modern-day fab, there’s a half-kilo of PFA in every square foot. So in a 400,000- to 600,000-square-foot fab, that’s 200 to 300 metric tons of this stuff’.” To learn more about CCU’s Zero PFAS campaign, reach out to CCU’s policy analyst Katherine Cohn at katherine@chipscommunitiesunited.org.
15 state attorneys general wrote to the EPA opposing a plan to weaken a PFAS reporting rule. The rule, enacted in 2023, called for companies to retroactively report any PFAS or products containing PFAS that they manufactured or imported between 2011–22. The new proposal would introduce exemptions, including ones for importers of many products that contain PFAS.“The Proposal would gut the Reporting Rule—by adding exemptions which effectively would reduce the number of responding entities by over 98 percent,” the attorneys general wrote. “EPA fails to provide a reasoned explanation for its sudden reversal and ignores the substantial body of reliable scientific research showing the importance of collecting this data.”
I missed this research when it came out earlier in 2025, but it studies greenhouse gas emissions from global chip production over the course of 2015-2023. “Energy consumption is clearly one of the biggest challenges in chip production. It has more than doubled over the past 8 years, from 58,326 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in 2015 to 131,278 GWh in 2023.”
After all the bad news, here’s a vision of a sustainable technological future. Permacomputing is “a small and thriving community of practice inspired by permaculture, whose principles include ‘Care for life, Care for the chips’.”
Labor and Workforce News
Has the CHIPS Act created jobs? A new study from Brookings estimates the law has had a significant impact on hiring, contributing to 15,000 new jobs in chip production and about 30,000 in construction and related sectors. Of course, this falls far short of the hundreds of thousands of jobs promised by the industry, but it’s significant nonetheless.
The roll-out of the US semiconductor industry has been accompanied with public and private investment in workforce development programs to educate the next generation of semiconductor engineers and technicians. But does workforce development spending help workers? Friend of CCU Madhumitta Dutta conducted research to explore this question and concluded, “Without guarantees of high-quality jobs and corporate accountability, historical precedent suggests contemporary workforce development initiatives risk serving corporate interests over broad-based growth and working class interest. “
Global Politics
Tariffs? What tariffs? After much saber-rattling by our president, it looks like the new tariffs to be imposed on Chinese chips will be (wait for it!)… zero percent! Meanwhile, China has quietly introduced a rule under which chipmakers must use at least 50% domestically produced equipment when adding new semiconductor manufacturing capacity.
We’re Also Reading
You know how obsessed I am with the Dutch firm ASML and the Extreme Ultra Violet photolithography machine the company uses to etch itty bitty circuits into tiny chips. Well here’s an article about how ASML developed that technology, using the same science involved in supernova explosions.The long strange trip from silica to your smart phone. This article retraces the 30,000 km ride from a quartz mine in Spain to the iPhone on which you may be reading this article.
That’s all for now. Stay in touch!
