The financing and a 10-year supply deal meet the conditions GlobalWafers' CEO publicly set for expanding in Sherman, Texas.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works .
Sherman is the sole operating facility in the U.S. capable of producing advanced 300 mm raw silicon wafers, the substrate on which every leading-edge DRAM, NAND, and logic die is built. GlobalWafers opened the plant in May last year and holds a $406 million CHIPS Act award covering the site and a silicon-on-insulator facility in St. Peters, Missouri. The 142-acre campus is designed for up to six phases, one of which is running. Micron's other American sites draw their wafers from Japan, Taiwan, Germany, and South Korea; Shin-Etsu, SUMCO, GlobalWafers, Siltronic, and SK Siltron together control the overwhelming majority of global 300 mm supply, making raw silicon the most concentrated layer in the chip space.
Doris Hsu, chairperson and CEO of GlobalWafers, set out her terms for building phase two at Sherman during the plant's opening last year, telling Reuters the company needed profitability at the first two phases, customers willing to sign long-term contracts, reasonable pricing, prepayments, and government support. Thursday's announcement supplies most of that list in a single transaction.
Wafer suppliers spent the 2023-2024 downcycle protecting margins rather than adding capacity, and SUMCO is winding down 200mm production at Miyazaki this year while holding the line on new 300mm expansion. Customers, not suppliers, are therefore now underwriting the capacity. The last time the industry did this, during the 2017-2018 megacycle, chipmakers signed prepaid long-term agreements that turned into liabilities when pricing rolled over.
Silicon wafer shipments reached 3,275 million square inches in Q1 2026, up 13.1% year over year, with SEMI.org attributing the growth to AI data center demand across advanced logic, memory, and power devices. Micron's first new Idaho fab, ID1, is expected to begin wafer output in mid-2027 , and production at Clay isn't expected until around 2030. The company began making 1-alpha DRAM at its Manassas, Virginia fab in May.
Micron's Virginia fab begins producing America's most advanced DRAM memory
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/micron-takes-a-500-million-position-in-americas-only-300mm-wafer-plant#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/subscription
- Anthropic says it can read Claude's 'thoughts,' as detailed in new research paper — models observed to have a global workspace, revealing more of what makes LLM
- Colibrì proof-of-concept gains frontier-level 1.5-TB AI model — novel approach runs on only 25GB of RAM and shows promise for local AI setups
- AI servers will consume more power than all conventional data center hardware combined by 2027 — global data center electricity consumption set to grow by 26% t
- How Jaiveer Singh Is Helping Robots — and Developers — Move Faster
- Rapidus fab roadmap examined — first new leading-edge chipmaker in decades has one Hokkaido fab, a 2027 deadline, and 60 potential customers
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.