A look at Samsung's and Texas Instruments' chip fabs in Texas, as the state becomes a US chipmaking hub with six projects totaling $61B and creating 8K+ jobs
WATCH NOW — How Texas became the center of U.S. chipmaking — On a 1,200-acre plot of land in a small town 30 miles north of Austin …
Context & Ripple Effects
Texas' rise as a chipmaking hub is the sum of two companies' long-running bets finally compounding. Samsung's path ran from an early $10B plant under consideration to the ~$17B Taylor factory announced in late 2021, then to filings sketching 11 possible facilities around Austin over two decades — before sources reported plans to more than double the Taylor commitment to ~$44B.
Texas Instruments moved on a parallel track: a plan for up to four Texas wafer fabs with production targeted from 2025, now materializing as the 300mm Sherman fab inside its $60B US investment program. Together the two anchors account for six projects totaling $61B and more than 8,000 projected jobs, turning the Austin–North Texas corridor into the country's newest fab cluster.
First-order effects
- Samsung becomes the cluster's largest single investor at ~$44B in Taylor, up from the original $17B announcement, with the first fab slated to come online in H2 2024.
- Texas Instruments' Sherman fab moves from plan to production site, giving TI domestic 300mm capacity within a $60B US program that includes chips destined for iPhones.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's stated motive since the earliest reports — closing ground on industry leader TSMC — gets a US-based lever, forcing the foundry race to be contested partly on American soil rather than only in Asia.
- The concentration of six projects in one state puts Texas in direct competition with other US states for the next wave of fab siting decisions, raising the stakes of local incentives, water and power infrastructure, and technician pipelines around Austin and Sherman.
Third-order effects
- Samsung's non-committal filings for 11 additional Austin-area facilities signal a campus model where each anchor fab creates cheap optionality for decades of follow-on builds — if the pattern holds, US capacity growth concentrates into a few multi-decade megasites rather than scattered single fabs.
- A $61B, 8,000-job cluster gives US policymakers a working template for onshoring advanced manufacturing outside traditional hubs, likely shaping how future federal and state subsidy rounds are allocated.
The trend: US semiconductor capacity is being rebuilt through state-anchored megacampuses led by a handful of firms, with Texas emerging as the counterweight to single-company clusters elsewhere.