Inside a GlobalFoundries chipmaking plant in upstate NY, filled with $10B worth of machinery, detailing the three-month, 700-step chip manufacturing process
and expensive — pieces of equipment in the factory are the lithography machines that print the intricate designs on the wafers. The Malta plant has 20 of those; each costs roughly $100 million.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Jay Cuthrell / @jaycuthrell : Intel has invested ~$20B in New Mexico since 1980 which includes ~$3.5B in upgrades... this year. TSMC will invest ~$12B in Arizona... this year. GlobalFoundries will invest ~$2.5B in New York and Vermont... this year. @USGov? $52B? That's pretty... wait for it... FABulous.🤓 https://twitter.com/... Steven Vogel / @stevenkvogel : It's not so easy to make a computer chip . . . @JeanneWhalen cites me in this piece on the state of semiconductor manufacturing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Post's tour landed mid-spend: weeks earlier GlobalFoundries had committed $4B+ to a Singapore fab plus $1B each for its German and US sites, and within two weeks of publication it detailed ~$1B more to expand its largest fab in Malta via a private-public partnership. The article's core fact — $10B of machinery on one campus, with 20 lithography tools at roughly $100M apiece — is the cost structure behind all those announcements.
First-order effects
- GlobalFoundries' own numbers make the tour concrete: ~$2.5B going into New York and Vermont this year alone, against Intel's ~$20B lifetime investment in New Mexico (~$3.5B in upgrades now) and TSMC's ~$12B Arizona build-out — a three-way race for the same skilled workforce and equipment supply chain.
Second-order effects
- The capital-intensity case the tour documents became the argument for public money: the US later awarded GlobalFoundries $1.5B from the $52B CHIPS Act plus $1.6B in loans specifically for a new Malta fab and Fab 8 expansion, effectively co-funding the economics the article describes.
Third-order effects
- By 2025 GlobalFoundries had scaled the plan to $16B total, including $3B for advanced packaging research — suggesting fabs of Malta's profile become standing recipients of subsidy cycles rather than one-off projects, with each round raising the machinery bar new entrants must clear.
The trend: US chipmaking is converging on a model where billion-dollar fab economics are underwritten by successive government funding rounds, making capital intensity itself the industry's moat.