Chipmaker Breaks Ground on $22 Billion Midwest Fabrication Campus

Construction crews broke ground Tuesday on a $22 billion semiconductor campus outside Columbus, the largest single private investment in Ohio’s history and one of the biggest bets yet that advanced chipmaking can be rebuilt on American soil. The two fabrication plants are slated to produce 2-nanometer-class logic chips by 2030.

The project’s arithmetic reflects both subsidy and strategy. Federal incentives cover roughly 15 percent of capital costs, with state tax abatements adding more. Company executives say the decisive factors were water rights, grid capacity, and proximity to a university system producing two thousand engineering graduates a year.

Staffing remains the open question. The campus will need 3,000 permanent employees and an estimated 7,000 construction workers at peak — in a metro area where unemployment sits below 4 percent. The company has funded semiconductor-technician programs at six community colleges, and building-trades unions have agreed to project-labor terms designed to import specialized crews without displacing local hiring.

Suppliers are following. Three chemical and equipment vendors have announced satellite facilities within an hour’s drive, and logistics firms are expanding air-freight capacity at the regional airport. Economists caution that the multiplier effects of fabs, while real, take a decade to mature.

For a region that spent forty years watching manufacturing leave, the groundbreaking carried symbolic weight beyond the balance sheet. The first production wafers are scheduled for the end of the decade — an eternity in politics, a heartbeat in semiconductors.