Micron is about halfway through construction of its new memory chip manufacturing plant in Southeast Boise.
As heavy machinery digs into the ground, as large red and yellow cranes swing steel into the air and concrete turns along the site, the company’s footprint on its headquarters campus in the City of Trees is rapidly expanding.
Micron broke ground on the site of its $15 billion government-subsidized factory (industry shorthand for semiconductor manufacturing plant) in September 2022 and expects to complete construction by the end of 2025. Production is expected to begin in 2026.
During a bus tour of the construction site Monday, a construction official listed several startling statistics regarding the work accomplished to date:
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More than 8,000 tons of steel have been delivered and another 13,000 tons are on their way. That’s about as much steel as in 23,000 cars.
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More than 2 million pounds of explosives were used to excavate the site, removing approximately 360 Olympic swimming pools worth of dirt (piles of which are scattered throughout the site).
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Three concrete plants have produced approximately 10,000 cubic meters of concrete per week, and are expected to reach 15,000 cubic meters per week by the end of June.
The company has 11 cranes on site. It plans to have about 30 as construction reaches its peak. The cranes are visible to passersby on Interstate 84.
Senator Mike Crapo and US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo joined the tour.
“Construction is progressing well,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told the Idaho Statesman in an interview after the tour. “The advantage of this factory that we are building here is of course that it will be located right next to the most advanced R&D factory in the world.”
Micron’s main research and development center on the Boise campus, a five-minute drive from the new factory site.
The 600,000-square-foot factory — that’s about 14 acres, larger than 10 football fields — will bring chip production back to the company’s home base in Boise. Micron used to make memory chips in Boise, but ended production here in 2009.
The factory will make dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), which is used in smartphones, computers and other devices to temporarily store data while they function. Micron is the only American manufacturer of DRAM. The company also makes flash memory, which is used in similar devices to permanently store data.
Micron estimates that the plant will create 2,000 corporate jobs, plus 15,000 indirect jobs related to the services and support the plant requires. Indirect jobs include people who work for suppliers and contractors.
The 2,000 jobs at Micron will be “highly sophisticated,” Mehrotra said.
He said Monday that bringing together the research and development center and the new factory will speed up the time it takes to design and commercialize advanced memory technology.
“And that’s important because memory is at the heart of the AI revolution today,” he said, referring to artificial intelligence. “It’s all about data, and data lives in the memory products that Micron develops and produces.”
Micron is expected to receive $6.1 billion in grants from the federal government to help pay for its chip factories in Boise and another plant in upstate New York. The $100 billion “megafactory” coming to Clay, New York, would dwarf the one under construction in Boise.
The company also plans to build two administrative office buildings on the Boise campus, one seven stories and the other five, and a five-story parking garage — the largest in the state, according to the company.
Micron is Idaho’s largest for-profit employer, with 5,400 employees in the Boise area, a company spokesperson said in May. The company has several factories and related activities abroad. Micron says it employs 44,000 people worldwide.
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