Syracuse, N.Y. — Micron Technology’s construction of its largest U.S. chipmaking factory is well underway in Idaho, and it gives Central New Yorkers a good view of what to expect when Micron starts building here.
The scale of construction is jaw-dropping. Each fabrication plant, or fab, rises as tall as the JMA Wireless Dome and sprawls across an area about half the size of the Syracuse zoo.
And that’s just the fab: Add in the ancillary buildings, utility yards and other supporting structures, and the one-fab complex is nearly as big as the New York State Fairgrounds.
Just one fab will require as much steel as the Golden Gate Bridge and more concrete than the Pentagon. And four of those could be built at Route 31 and Caughdenoy Road in Clay.
Micron started construction in 2023 on a $15 billion fab at its corporate headquarters in Boise. Micron announced plans in June to add a second fab in Boise.
The vast scale of the Boise construction was captured in a drone video shot by the online news outlet BoiseDev, which covers business and development in the rapidly growing Boise area. The video above shows what the site in Clay could soon look like.
The Clay fabs “will be built on very similar architectural and engineering design to what we have here in Idaho,” Scott Gatzemeier, Micron’s corporate vice president for front-end U.S. expansion, told syracuse.com in 2023. “We’ll be applying it to Boise and then optimizing it as we move it to Clay.”
Micron declined to comment on the status of the Boise construction.
Micron announced its plans to build a fab in Boise in late September 2022 and announced the Clay fab project just a few weeks later.
The Clay project has slowed by the lengthy environmental review required under state and federal law. The Boise project was exempted from that review.
Micron is slated to get more than $25 billion in taxpayer subsidies for the first two fabs in Clay and an estimated $7 billion in breaks for the Boise fab. Most of that money comes from the bipartisan 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which set aside $52 billion to bring chipmaking back to the U.S.
Micron, like most major chipmakers, produces the vast majority of its chips in Asia, primarily Taiwan, Singapore and Japan. Micron makes chips in Manassas, Virginia, for consumer items, cars and military applications.
The first fab in Clay is slated to start producing memory chips in early 2029, according to Micron’s environmental impact report.