1,200 days and counting for Micron's fab

If policymakers in the US can agree on anything, it’s that they want more semiconductor plants (“fabs”) built in the US. The bipartisan CHIPS & Science Act promised hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies toward this purpose, and President Biden even signed legislation exempting the factories from federal environmental reviews. Problem solved, right? Lol, of course not. Micron, a US-based chip company, is building a fab near Syracuse, NY, costing $100 billion and employing some 9,000 workers in an area that’s lost a lot of manufacturing jobs. Naturally, for this they are getting sued by a foundation/union-funded group, Jobs to Move America, for not doing sufficient review under New York’s environmental review statute. The best summary comes from the trade pub SemiAnalysis, which notes, “The project has already taken an absurd 1200 days between announcement and groundbreaking. Competitors overseas who began at the same time now have built and working fabs.”