Domestic chip industry gets defense bill support
Schumer’s $25 billion bipartisan legislation seen boosting upstate
U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer announced Monday his $25 billion domestic computer chip manufacturing bill is included in the final version of the fiscal year 2021 defense budget.
It remains unclear, however, if President Donald Trump will sign it.
The bipartisan bill, which Schumer originally called the American Foundries Act and first attached to the defense bill in July, would support U.s.-based computer chip manufacturing in order to ensure that the U.S. military will continue to have access to a domestic chip supply.
The bill would greatly aid a variety of computer chip makers in upstate New York, including Globalfoundries, IBM and Cree, which is building a new chip fab outside Utica with financial assistance from New York state.
Trump has threatened to not sign the defense bill if it doesn’t include language to repeal Section 230, a federal law that gives social media companies protections for what their users post.
Globalfoundries is one of a few U.S. companies that have so-called Trusted Foundry status with the Department of Defense to supply computer chips to the military.
Schumer and others in Congress have been pushing the U.S. to shore up its chip manufacturing leadership in order to protect its supply from global competition, especially in Asia and China where more and more chips are being produced.
With rumors that China has its eyes on retaking Taiwan, the concept is even more important. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is the world’s largest chip foundry that makes chips for other companies, including Apple. Globalfoundries is No. 2.
The American Foundries Act would create several chip manufacturing and research funds that could provide tens of billions of dollars in incentives for U.s.-based companies like Globalfoundries to expand their chip-making operations to ensure the U.S. military has an adequate supply of chips for weapons systems. “The eco
nomic and national security risks posed by relying too heavily on foreign semiconductor suppliers cannot be ignored, and upstate New York, which has a robust semiconductor industry, is the perfect place to grow domestic semiconductor R&D and manufacturing by leaps and bounds,” Schumer said in a statement. Schumer’s bill was not only supported by Globalfoundries, Cree and IBM but also Cornell University, Binghamton University and SUNY Polytechnic Institute, all of which do semiconductor research.