Someone correct me here, but Texas Instruments was one of the companies that mortgaged their future in the name of financialization (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/yeah-its-still-water-ben-hunt...) and their market cap right now is ~170B...

How are they going to afford an investment thats ~1/3rd the value of the company? Seems like one of those announcements that no one follows up on to keep them honest?

What's a "foundational semiconductor"?

This seems to be a political term, not one the electronics industry uses.[1] "Foundational chips (also called “legacy,” “lagging edge,” and “mature node” semiconductors) are often defined as chips made with a 22nm manufacturing process or above."

Is there actually a lack of 22nm and larger fab capacity in the US? Or is it just that they're not being used much.

[1] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...

Also already building a new fab up in Sherman, Texas.

Fabs have pretty decent electricity demand, I actually sited a battery against that one after we did a bit of modeling with the new load vs the solar flows in the area. Siting just means make a land deal, figure out easements, and start working its way through the queue. Might not ever get built though, lot of money and hurdles in the way ha.

Every time I see an industrial announcement like this power is the first thing I think of - where it’s gonna come from and what impact it will have on the existing grid.

It seems like a reprise of this December 2024 announcement re CHIPS act during the previous administration.

The fact sheets (linked on the page) amount to $51bn from what I can see.

https://www.ti.com/about-ti/newsroom/news-releases/2024/2024...

The key phrase here is:

"we are honored to work alongside them and the U.S. government to unleash what’s next in American innovation.”

They're expecting to get money from government to make this happen. If it will be done is anyone's guess.

Do they actually plan this, or is it just to make the current administration happy? $60B sounds like a lot of money.

I feel like this is a fairly small investment on the scale of the semiconductor industry, although it would be large for a single company if we were talking about a single year. See, for example, https://wccftech.com/chinese-chip-giant-smic-shaken-by-tarif... US$7.5 billion in capex at SMIC this year. But SMIC is just the largest of dozens of Mainland China semiconductor firms, and a lot of that investment is going into cutting-edge strategic nodes, not 180nm stuff from last millennium.

Don't get me wrong, you need that stuff from last millennium—not just 180nm but also the 6 μm I suspect "foundational" actually refers to. You need power regulation, precision measurement, and RF frontends in analog, and analog can't scale down the way digital can. And TI actually retains a world-leading position in those chips, with better and cheaper ICs than anything out of Mainland China today. But it's potentially a game of chasing China's taillights.

SiGe might be an exception; even at 130nm, IHP's SiGe BiCMOS process can hit 450GHz oscillation frequency and 350GHz ft, so even at fairly coarse process node sizes, SiGe could be a strategic enabling technology for submillimeter communication such as Starlink, which is reportedly critical for weapons such as Ukraine's naval drones.

Last I checked, a lot of the US manufactured dies got shipped overseas for packaging. I wonder when they'll have that capability domestically.

Need a new rule: you have to write the cheque before you receive congratulations for an announcement

The adjective "foundational" for semiconductors can be ignored here, it is simply that TI will make more of their existing chips in the US with nothing being different in their current IC lineup of mostly MCUs, ADCs, etc simple ICs.

Worth noting that TI primarily makes logic semiconductors, and those don't require the advanced 2nm, 3nm or even 5nm node processes that TSMC's and Samsung's most advanced fabs support. However logic semiconductors may have special operating constraints, like extremes of temperature, that the semiconductors produced by foundries don't require.

Hopefully they invest in actual QC.

I hate doing a first article, seeing nothing wrong on the IC side of the LED board, then apply power and have the IC explode and rocket off the board, taking traces and pads with it (or if I'm lucky, it just craters its packaging.)

And it is BAD. I'm talking 1/20 kind of bad, off multiple reels (I've gone though tens of thousands of them.) Only TI stuff.

Plans "to invest" can always change. Appears someone has been promised a tax break along with Mar-a-lago chocolate cake.

The article mentions SiGe at the Sherman site, which is an RF node. These are usually at 22-100+ nm scale, so "mature" or "foundational" compared to 2nm stuff, but the really tight nodes aren't always inherently better for RF.

the TSMC founder was once a Ti employee. Yet due to cism he got denied the opportunity to steer the org. Now it's time to play to trump's whims and earn a quick payout.

These are the kind of figures the EU should be looking at. Not the meagre hundreds of millions.

I was wondering where the money comes from. This article [1] says it's government money provided through the CHIPS act:

> In December, the [prior] administration finalized a $1.61 billion government subsidy for Texas Instruments to support construction of three new facilities after the company announced plans to invest at least $18 billion under the $52.7 billion CHIPS and Science bill.

[1] "Texas Instruments plans $60 billion US investment under Trump push" https://www.reuters.com/business/texas-instruments-plans-inv...

Edit: Did the HN link change? I thought the link was to a TI press release with few details.

Where is Ti getting $60B from?

anyone know if their fab automation scripts are still not under version control

I'll believe it when I can buy an op-amp or mosfet with a little "USA" etched onto it. Til then, it's as fake as Foxconn and TSMC.

what's up with those AI generated articles?

So the chips they don't have in stock will be made in the US? So what?

Title shortened by me from "Texas Instruments plans to invest more than $60 billion to manufacture billions of foundational semiconductors in the U.S."

CNBC: <https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/18/texas-instruments-plans-60-b...>