Texas Instruments To Invest $60 Billion To Make Semiconductors In US (cnbc.com) 51
Longtime Slashdot reader walterbyrd shares news that Texas Instruments has announced plans to invest more than $60 billion to expand its U.S. manufacturing operations in the United States. From a report: The funds will be used to build or expand seven chip-making facilities in Texas as well as Utah, and will create 60,000 jobs, TI said on Wednesday, calling it the "largest investment in foundational semiconductor manufacturing in U.S. history." The company did not give a timeline for the investment.
Unlike AI chip firms Nvidia and AMD, TI makes analog or foundational chips used in everyday devices such as smartphones, cars and medical devices, giving it a large client base that includes Apple, SpaceX and Ford Motor. The spending pledge follows similar announcements from others in the semiconductor industry, including Micron, which said last week that it would expand its U.S. investment by $30 billion, taking its planned spending to $200 billion. [...]
Like other companies unveiling such spending commitments, TI's announcement includes funds already allocated to facilities that are either under construction or ramping up. It will build two additional plants in Sherman, Texas, based on future demand. "TI is building dependable, low-cost 300 millimeter capacity at scale to deliver the analog and embedded processing chips that are vital for nearly every type of electronic system," said CEO Haviv Ilan.
Unlike AI chip firms Nvidia and AMD, TI makes analog or foundational chips used in everyday devices such as smartphones, cars and medical devices, giving it a large client base that includes Apple, SpaceX and Ford Motor. The spending pledge follows similar announcements from others in the semiconductor industry, including Micron, which said last week that it would expand its U.S. investment by $30 billion, taking its planned spending to $200 billion. [...]
Like other companies unveiling such spending commitments, TI's announcement includes funds already allocated to facilities that are either under construction or ramping up. It will build two additional plants in Sherman, Texas, based on future demand. "TI is building dependable, low-cost 300 millimeter capacity at scale to deliver the analog and embedded processing chips that are vital for nearly every type of electronic system," said CEO Haviv Ilan.
How many of those jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How many of those jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
I find that the assertion of 60K jobs in seven plants to be failing the smell test. That would be 8,571 people per plant. Mr. Google pants show me that on average a chip plant employed 2,200 for a 24/7/365 operation and that the job curve is skewed to warehousing, custodial, and security, with relatively few making more than 40K, slightly above poverty wages ($32,150 for a family of 4).
My suspicion, with no real evidence other than history, is that the announcement is a targeted effort to please the vanity of one particular person in Washington DC. Not the first time this has been done, nor the first time that particular person stopped a merger/acquisition from personal pique because a party involved was a perceived enemy.
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Someone else, apparently at CNBC, changed that to "create".
"Support" may just include the positive impact on the local economies. TI workers, construction workers, local restaurants, gas stations...
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Basically that. Usually companies use between a 1:10 to 1:30 ratio of direct jobs to indirect jobs - I think Apple uses around 10-15 whenever they quote how many jobs their
Re:How many of those jobs (Score:4, Informative)
It's TI, not Foxconn. They have been operating second tier fabs in the US for decades.
Re:How many of those jobs (Score:5, Informative)
TI already produces huge amounts of ICs in Texas and have new major units coming online every year for the next decade. They are not a vapor merchant.
Re:How many of those jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
So what you are saying is they poked their already-in-implementation plans into a spreadsheet and out popped the $60 Billion figure. $60 Billion sounded like a nice fat number and 60,000 divides neatly into it to yield $1 Million per job. A quick call to the White House revealed those were the correct numbers. They could be put on placards and displayed behind the Oval Office for those precious photo-ops.
Flunkie enters the Oval Office: I have the new placard with Texas Instruments showing how much they love you. Where should I put it?
la Presidenta: Over there in the corner.
Flunkie: Errrrm.....you do know where you are, right?
la Presidenta: ??!? Of course I know where I am, but where are you?
Flunkie: Hell.
BLAM.....the floorboards erupt and Beelzebub rises majestically, tail a'swishing, eyes a'flaming, horns scratching the celing: You rang?
la Presidenta: Mike Pence, what the Hell are you doing here? And watch those horns, damnit. Look at the gold leaf ceiling, now it has scratch marks on it.
Beelz: Rats, it's you. NO, for the last Goddamn time, I am not giving you my cell number....can't stand the constant whining. I'm going back to Texas.
"I want some hot stuff baby this evening, I want some hot stuff baby tonight"....Beelz's iPhone rings: God? Look it, I told you not to call me at work.
God: Well, you said me name and I thought you needed me for something.
Beelz: False alarm, you can guess where I am.
God: Damn, I told you to stay away from that yokel. Are you trying to destroy the ambiance of Hell?
Beelz: I got tricked into showing up.
God: Well, as long as you are there, why don't you pick up la Presidenta's soul while you are at it.
Beelz: Already have it....we use it for target practice down there.
God: Ya, good thing they have no gun laws.
la Presidenta: Hey, I'm not chopped liver. Stop ignoring me.
Beelz: I have you under constant surveillance.
la Presidenta: How? I never see anyone but my advisors.
Beelz: Stephen Miller. He's one of ours.
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A bunch of service industry level wages isn't going to spur the economy all that much. Construction will give a temporary minor bump.
It's great to see a company called Texas Instruments investing in US based production but the details matter.
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"TI already produces huge amounts of ICs in Texas"
The QC in Texas must be absolute ass. One customer of mine uses a 10-pin LED driver IC from TI on the BOM. The piece of shit blows itself out fresh off the reel one out of every roughly 20 times. You aren't even pulling a full fucking amp at 48V and this thing rockets off the board, taking traces and pads with it.
No, there isn't a short. On the boards where the pads and traces survive, replacing the IC (usually) fixes the issue.
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Hadn't heard much about TI for a while (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't that the company that was regarded as a law firm with a silicon foundry?
Guess it pays well. I have a friend retired from TI about a decade back. Money, they have.
Re:Hadn't heard much about TI for a while (Score:5, Informative)
If you do any EE work today you'll find that almost all the other chip companies have been bought by either TI or Analog Devices. Onsemi is still around and they now own Fairchild.
Re:Hadn't heard much about TI for a while (Score:4, Insightful)
If you do any EE work today you'll find that almost all the other chip companies have been bought by either TI or Analog Devices
Indeed. Between Analog and TI, the bulk of the entire high spec conversion chip market (ADC/DAC) is locked up. Maxim, Linear, Hittite and others were gobbled up by Analog. TI grabbed National, Burr-Brown and others.
Naturally, prices are high, innovation is slow and supply is limited. Garden variety oligopoly.
These devices are critical to every non-trivial sensor and communication system. Military applications are legion. And now basically two companies have it all locked up, yet I don't expect anyone that matters will begin caring about this for some time. Relative to any given Big Tech company, both TI and Analog put together amount to a rounding error. The size of the claimed build-out in this story seems dubious for a company that only had $15.6 billion in revenue last year.
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High spec ADC/DAC products are close to the theoretical maximum performance, not a lot of reason to expect "innovation" unless you have new physics.
And prices remain pretty low, there's strong competition between ADI and TI in this area, and lots of lower cost vendors. Monolithic Power Systems ($2B revenue, based in Seattle) will eat their lunch with almost-as-good chips if they try to raise prices very much.
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We might be hitting noise floors near physical limits, but there's plenty of room for innovation -- interfaces, processing, integration, etc. But little incentive for this to happen with so much concentration in the marketplace.
> And prices remain pretty low,
If you want a 12-ENOB 2.5GSPS DAC, you're paying hundreds of dollars; this isn't *extremely* high end, either. Prices haven't really been falling on the high end for several years.
> Monolithic Power Systems
They don't make any "high-spec" SKUs an
Re:Hadn't heard much about TI for a while (Score:4, Funny)
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ADI has $9B revenue and ON has $7B, so they're not only "still around" but they've been actively competing in the industry consolidation.
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You might be thinking of NVidia, which has used aggressive tactics to block competitors. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/d... [cbsnews.com]
Texas Instruments, by contrast, has been quietly making the basic, un-flashy chips used in all kinds of electronics from microwave ovens to cars. That's probably why you don't hear much about them, their products are not on store shelves, they are in the products on store shelves. For that reason, they don't have to advertise in places regular people see ads.
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I like their analog stuff: Control ICs for switchmode power supplies, load switches, gate drivers, linear regulators, opamps, comparators, digital logic on the rare occasion I need a gate or two. They have some nice isolator products. I'm not doing anything fancy though.
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But yes, a lot of what they do now is neither innovative nor high tech.
World's largest semiconductor company is not innovative nor producing tech. Yessirreee. Tell us you have no clue without telling us. Just because they aren't cranking out AI accelerated GPUs doesn't mean there isn't tech. Most of your computer wouldn't work without TI in there somewhere. Heck I mean that literally. If you run a laptop you can bet good money that it couldn't even get power without the help from TI's circuits.
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Intel Market Cap - $93.74 billion USD
TI Market Cap - $180.20 billion USD
They seem to be well regarded by the stock market
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Not remotely. They are one of the biggest semiconductor manufacturers in the world and always have been. The fact they have lawyers doesn't mean they are primary legal trolls.
American made! woohoo! (Score:5, Insightful)
Next we need to build up a market where the American consumer can afford American prices. Maybe if people didn't have to spend 60-70% of their income on housing they wouldn't buy cheap Chinese goods from Walmart.
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Indeed who do you think they learned it from, and who do you think is demanding cheap, low-quality goods. That's right. It's us.
Re: American made! woohoo! (Score:3)
I have a problem with this statement.
Americans don't really "demand" cheap goods, it's just that professional services are too ridiculously expensive. YouTube is full of videos showing you how to repair your fridge and your washing machine. parts are easily available online.
the problem is that a technician will charge you $400 in labor to replace a $5 part, so people will prefer to buy a new one and toss the old one.
I see folks on YouTube doing plumbing work. replacing a hose bib will cost at least $200 in
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One nation, under God (money) (Score:2, Troll)
Our labor costs are too high for that ever to happen, we'll make goods with high prices and low quality that nobody wants. And employers will try to weasel out of paying for health insurance for the staff by cutting hours to be below the threshold of full time employee. Anyone that doesn't like it, is a communist. If they make too much noise their family will get a visit from ICE, regardless of actual citizenship status.
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Yup, and that reveals a giant hole in la Presdienta's tariff policy. He's never been able to think beyond his nose and knows nothing about how the world works. He thinks that he can arm twist companies to set up shop in the U.S.. Maybe he will and probably won't.
However, to keep'm here, those tariffs will need to remain in place because the other countries are not going to lose their cost advantage. Keeping them in place means whatever new crap gets made in the U.S. from them will not be exportable because
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TI actually has competitive pricing on ICs. I do electrical engineering of commodity products at work, a lot of our customer base is in the US, and we use a fair amount of TI. They have nice control ICs for switchmode power supplies, for example. Also good for opamps, linear regulators, etc. These are all basic analog building block ICs. I guess they make fancier stuff too, but I never use it.
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Oh absolutely, it's mostly analog and mixed signal in the US. Very high yield and very few human hands that need to touch the product. Reels of components only getting touched when the receiver moves it off a palette. These kind of foundries don't create very many jobs though, almost no entry level jobs. And those components get priced according to what is competitive in the domestic market rather than the global market. With tariffs and shipping delays on imported components, the domestic stuff tends to cr
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Chinese manufactures can make both cheap and expensive goods.
In a sense American manufactures can really only do one. They struggle to keep the costs below what can be imported, and that's even when the American company doesn't have the same shipping overhead.
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I think you're completely clueless. TI has had a large manufacturing base in America forever. They are competitive in their market and consumers are already buying goods full of their chips.
Not everything is a race to the bottom. Some companies actually prefer to sell goods with a base level of quality. Even shit assembled in China can often be only done by importing some American made ICs in the process. When we're not talking about the latest 6nm AI accelerators made at fancy TSMC facilities, you'll find
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Wait, *creating* 60,000 jobs? (Score:4, Funny)
Who let this story through the usual doom-and-gloom filters?
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Would it help to know those are temporary construction jobs and your life won't be better as a result?
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To the extent that you are correct (because not all of them will be temporary construction jobs)...
Most construction jobs *are* temporary, and yet there are many people, about 11 million in the US, who make their entire livelihood working those temporary construction jobs. So while not as beneficial as permanent jobs, these are still...jobs.
TI currently employs about 35,000 people. Some nontrivial fraction of those jobs, will be permanent. Somebody's got to design all those chips, somebody's got to test the
Born in the USA (Score:1)
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Those are just the 300mm fabs, they cite "15 global," probably on the same page you found that list on.
Wikipedia has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
which also lists Maine, Japan (2), Germany, and China (formerly SMIC). And more in TX and Utah than that (in the 150-200mm wafer size range)
investment theater (Score:2)
"yes we were already doing most of that that, but .. uh .. now we're doing that for you, Mr Trump! Here's a nice press release for you, your favorite kind of release! Please be nice to us!"
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They've identified a goal of 95% internal manufacturing by 2030, so I agree. But timing can have a lot of value...
60 billion guess leaving was bad (Score:1)
Fucking Clinton and MBAs in general (Score:2)
Clinton approved selling chip capabilities to chip snd allowed money-hungry fuck-tomorrow god damned shit breathing MBAs sell-of the tech manufacturing industry.
So, here we are with a minimal chip capability. The MBA mind-set is gratification first, fuck the future, and completely wrong.
Don't believe it? Open some history books. After the MBA programs started, US industrial infrastructure stopped being an investiment. America's manufacturing and textiles and heavy industry started moving overseas.
We've beco