O’FALLON, Mo. — A company here is set to build a new manufacturing facility thanks to as much as $400 million from the U.S. Department of Commerce to boost semiconductor research and manufacturing.
The White House on Wednesday announced that GlobalWafers will receive major financial support for its projects in O’Fallon, Missouri, and Sherman, Texas; it’s the latest round of federal funding made available through the CHIPS and Science Act.
GlobalWafers will construct a new building on its existing O’Fallon site. The facility will produce 300-millimeter silicon-on-insulator wafers, which are commonly used in defense and aerospace projects.
Last year, the company completed a $300 million expansion at the O’Fallon plant, which produces wafers that are used in the making of semiconductors, chips and microchips for electronic devices.
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Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House office of science and technology policy, said the manufacturing of semiconductors has become dangerously concentrated in just one part of the world, East Asia.
“Over time this became a very serious issue,” Prabhakar said.
President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022 to bolster American semiconductor research, development and production through millions of dollars in manufacturing incentives and billions of dollars for semiconductor research.
The up to $400 million will go toward the expansion and continued buildout of the GlobalWafers sites. Though the Texas project is larger and will see more money than Missouri, the new O’Fallon plant will create 500 construction jobs and 130 facility employees, senior administration officials said.
Prabhakar emphasized the importance of these facilities and the wafers they manufacture for the larger semiconductor supply chain.
“It’s like making a taco without a tortilla: It just won’t work,” she said. “Wafers are the foundations. If you don’t have wafers, you don’t have chips.”
GlobalWafers is the parent company of MEMC LLC in O’Fallon. The site is located near the intersection of Interstate 79 and Interstate 70.
The Texas project will use the federal funds to establish the first 300-millimeter silicon wafer manufacturing facility for advanced chips in the United States and convert a portion of its existing silicon epitaxy wafer manufacturing facility in Sherman to silicon carbide epitaxy wafer manufacturing.
