The Biden administration has reached an agreement to provide up to $6.4 billion in direct funding for Samsung Electronics to develop a computer chip manufacturing and research cluster in Texas.
The Biden administration has reached an agreement to provide up to $6.4 billion in direct funding for Samsung Electronics to develop a computer chip manufacturing and research cluster in Texas.
The funding announced Monday by the Commerce Department is part of a total investment in the cluster that, with private money, is expected to exceed $40 billion. The government support comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022 with the goal of reviving the production of advanced computer chips domestically.
“The proposed project will propel Texas into a state of the art semiconductor ecosystem,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on a call with reporters. “It puts us on track to hit our goal of producing 20% of the world’s leading edge chips in the United States by the end of the decade.”
Raimondo said she expects the project will create at least 17,000 construction jobs and more than 4,500 manufacturing jobs.
High-speed rail funding, semiconductor factory funding... Why the fuck is Texas getting these federal perks when they've been fighting Biden the entire time?
Anyone that's already "blue" you ignore, because they have no other options to vote for.
So you continually give preference to conservatives in the hopes you can pull some into the Democratic party. This pulls the Dem party more conservative and perpetuates the problem.
It's pretty much why 1/3 of the country doesn't vote, and the only time in modern history Dems ran a progressive campaign, we flipped a bunch of red states.
We can easily do that again, it's not difficult. It's just not the direction party leaders want to take the party. They'd rather lose elections than move left.
Everything I see in the news about how the dems are bending over backwards to please republicans leads me to believe that the senior democratic party members are genuinely just fucking stupid.
I guess that's to be expected since half of them are like 300 years old, but it's still really annoying to watch them just let democracy be destroyed for the sake of decorum.
Lol na, not a chance. Liberals who typically vote are middle class and if they could afford to leave Texas then they have. What's left is poor democrats who can't leave but don't typically vote and if they do vote it's for people like Bernie. They see Biden as Capitalist who couldn't give a fuck about them so fat chance they are taking off work to vote for him.
To turn texas blue you would need an extremely progressive candidate and even Bernie wasn't progressive enough.
Nah, I think partisan special treatment is exactly what we need more of. What could go wrong making eligibility for federal projects and funds contingent on the state being represented by the correct party.
3rd world countries have more reliable power grids than Texas. Texas the only state where you can just freeze to death if you have a few cold days because the power grid is so shit.
I mean, I'm as anti-corporation as the next sane person, but it's not like this is just a gift to Samsung.
This is just a small part of the total costs for building This facility, which is going to be absolutely massive, and the vast majority of the money is coming from the private sector. In return the US gets and incredibly important resource that makes it less dependant of countries in East Asia that are either hostile to them or are at risk of having their facilities disobeyed by those that are.
That alone is worth fare more than 6bn, and doesn't even begin to mention the economic benefits of such an endeavour.
Most of these are points in favor of US Goverment support for first-time homebuyers. Instead of helping Samsung, what if there was a fund to pay 10% of every first time homebuyer's purchase?
Need has nothing to do with it. The Biden admin is prepping for Taiwan to be taken by China. Throwing cash at Texas just helps with political messaging.
Are you referring to the plant in Wisconsin where they used eminent domain to kick out a whole neighborhood full of families after secret backroom deals, gave them a guaranteed tax break regardless of them keeping their promises or not, and then act shocked when Foxconn did a 180 on the entire project and only hired a fraction of the promised amount doing low skill, low paying work?
The renovations never arrived. Neither did the factory, the tech campus, nor the thousands of jobs. Interviews with 19 employees and dozens of others involved with the project, as well as thousands of pages of public documents, reveal a project that has defaulted on almost every promise. The building Foxconn calls an LCD factory — about 1/20th the size of the original plan — is little more than an empty shell. In September, Foxconn received a permit to change its intended use from manufacturing to storage.
As far as I can tell (from skimming over a few recent news articles), they ultimately employed about 1000 people (7%-10% of what was promised). When negative reporting on the project ramped up, Republicans claimed that incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers tried to renegotiate the deal and blamed him. When that turned out to be a lie, Republicans pivoted to the more nebulous claim that Foxconn bailed because Wisconsin was unfriendly to business under its fresh Democratic governor.
This could be a great side-by-side comparison on how Dems vs. Reps handle such a project, but I doubt the average person caught in the news cycle still remembers Foxconn after nearly 6 years). 😅
Aren’t there even cheaper, lower wage states we can build these chips in? What about building the plant in Alabamistan, and having the cheap texas engineers flown in as needed?