"We're making meaningful commitments in workforce development, bringing in all communities to this, as well as environmental sustainability," Hochul said. "When this is all up and running here, companies from around the world are going to flock to this area. They're already starting."
The specific center being built is called a High NA Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Public-Private Center, the first and only of its kind in North America. $1 billion comes from New York state with the other $9 billion from leveraging private spending and investment.
Hochul, as well as U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and leaders from companies like IBM and Micron all spoke Monday about the investment and development of the semiconductor center. Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, called Albany "absolutely unique" and said he could see companies and nations alike looking to the Capital Region for semiconductor advancement.
Semiconductors are electric components in everything from smartphones to airplanes. Commonly referred to as chips, in recent decades, it has been a race to downsize and IBM in collaboration with UAlbany's NanoTech Complex currently holds the record at two nanometers.
That is the equivalent, Schumer said, of a strand of DNA. The investment was made possible by the CHIPS and Science Act, a bill that the senator wrote and President Biden signed into law in 2022.
Part of the bill establishes a National Semiconductor Technology Center that will include an $11 billion investment. The funding announced Monday, Schumer said, makes the Capital Region and upstate New York "a forerunner to win that designation."
Hochul said these investments will benefit the nation as much as New York. In the 90s, the United States made 40 percent of the semiconductors in the world and now produces 12 percent with many produced in China, Korea, and Taiwan, she said.
There are two problems with that dependency, she said, the first being that geopolitical relations with those countries change. The second is one the U.S. still is recovering from, supply chain issues like those that affected the world's ports during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"You don't have to imagine what that would look like, it happened in our country," Hochul said. "Think about what happened to the auto industry. By not having chips, it literally put the brakes on the manufacturing, endangering thousands of jobs here and elsewhere."
But jobs are one of the subjects every speaker mentioned on Monday. The Center will create 700 jobs directly and Micron's separate $100 billion investment in a new lab in Syracuse could lead to up to 50,000 jobs, the governor said. They are also instituting training programs to help funnel the workforce to where it's needed.
HVCC and RPI both have programs that were lauded during the conference and Malta's GlobalFoundries announced a $1 million investment in a new center at HVCC in November. Gillibrand also mentioned her Cyber Service Academy, a program through the Department of Defense that provides free college tuition for students in cybersecurity-related programs in return for five years of public service.
"As a girl from Albany, I've been watching this. All the people from Albany, we've been doing this now for about 30 years," Gillibrand said. "We had people who knew this could be the center of Silicon Valley. This could be the new Silicon Valley of the United States."
The Capital Region and upstate New York could set a precedent, said Krishna, and the center is a testament to New York's foresight. The U.S. needs a hub for semiconductors, he continued, and this area is the preeminent choice.
The investment is also unique because it's a combination of local, state, and federal governments partnering with industry leaders, Schumer said. Rather than one individual company having the sole say in a center like this, the collaboration ensures that the research and development will benefit all.
This is just one more step that New York State has taken to become the semiconductor capital of the world, Hochul said, and the places leading the charge in semiconductors are the vanguards of the world's technical future.
"This is a race for dominance, tech dominance," Hochul said. "And if you want to know one thing about New Yorkers, we are competitive.
"We are that generation that is driving the change as required at this moment," she continued. "Because the world will look to New York and say, 'This is the day they moved ahead. This is the day that we literally won the race.'"
©2023 The Record, Troy, N.Y. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
