GlobalWafers breaks ground on new Sherman factory
SHERMAN, Texas (KXII) - The city of Sherman and Grayson county celebrated another historic groundbreaking on Thursday.
This time the area is welcoming a factory with GolbalWafers.
“It will submit Sherman’s place as the technology hub of North Texas,” said Sherman Mayor David Plyler.
GlobalWafers America broke ground on a 300-millimeter silicon wafer factory.
“I hope that we will be not only the best and biggest of its kind in the U.S., but also it will be a very good silicon wafer fab in the world,” said GlobalWafers Chairman and CEO Doris Hsu.
GlobalWafers said it chose Sherman over Ohio and South Korea for its $5 billion investment.
“I think the main reason is because of the team,” said Hsu. “We have a very strong management team in Sherman. They are so good. They were just so dedicated.”
Once the factory is built, the company expects to produce 1.2 million wafers per month, a crucial component of the chips Texas Instruments creates.
It’s a product U.S. leaders said the country critically needs.
“One percent of all silicon in the world is manufactured in the U.S., so any types of disruption we would have from overseas delivery of silicon would immediately shut down the chips that are being manufactured,” said GlobalWafers President Mark England.
“We started to see that a distribution in a factory half a world away could actually put an auto worker out of a job here in the United States,” said Dr. Ronnie Chatterji, White House Sr. Advisor for the Chips Act implementation.
The factory isn’t just a big win for the U.S., but for Sherman too, said Mayor David Plyler.
“It’s going to help us expand our infrastructure,” said Plyler. “It’s going to bring folks to our new neighborhoods.”
Together international, federal, and local officials said Thursday is the turn of a new era for chip and wafer manufacturing.
“Thank you for being part of the future because as we look around us, this is the future,” said U.S. Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson.
GlobalWafers expects construction to finish in the next 18 to 24 months, and the factory will employ 1500 people.
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