Micron is about halfway through constructing its new plant for memory-chip manufacturing in Southeast Boise.
As heavy machinery digs into the dirt, as big red and yellow cranes swing steel into the air and as concrete churns next to the site, the company’s footprint at its headquarters campus in the City of Trees is rapidly expanding.
Micron broke ground on the site of its $15 billion government-subsidized fab (industry shorthand for semiconductor-fabrication factory) in September 2022 and expects to complete construction in late 2025. Production is slated to begin in 2026.
During a bus tour of the construction site Monday, a building official listed various eye-opening statistics related to the work done so far:
Over 8,000 tons of steel have been delivered, with 13,000 tons more on the way. That’s about as much steel as in 23,000 cars.
Over 2 million pounds of explosives have been used to excavate the site, removing around 360 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of dirt (piles of which dot the site).
Three concrete batch plants have yielded about 10,000 cubic yards of concrete per week, poised to ramp up to 15,000 cubic yards a week by the end of June.
The company has 11 cranes at the site. It plans to have about 30 as construction hits its peak. The cranes are visible to passersby on Interstate 84.
Sen. Mike Crapo and U.S. Deputy Secretary of Treasury Wally Adeyemo joined the tour.
“Construction is coming along nicely,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told the Idaho Statesman in an interview following the tour. “The benefit of this fab that we are building here, of course, is that it will be right next to our world’s most advanced R&D fab.”
Micron’s primary research-and-development center at its Boise campus, a five-minute drive from the site of the new fab.
The 600,000-square-foot plant — that’s about 14 acres, larger than 10 football fields — will bring chip manufacturing back to the company’s home base in Boise. Micron used to make memory chips in Boise but ended manufacturing here in 2009.
The fab will make dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, which is used in smartphones, computers and other devices to temporarily store data as they function. Micron is the only U.S. manufacturer of DRAM. The company also makes flash memory, which is used in similar devices to store data permanently.
Micron estimates that the fab will lead to 2,000 jobs at the company itself, plus 15,000 indirect jobs related to the services and support the plant will require. The indirect jobs include people working for suppliers and contractors.
The 2,000 jobs at Micron will be “highly sophisticated,” Mehrotra has said.
He said Monday that having the research-and-development center and the new fab co-located will hasten the time it takes to design advanced memory technology and bring it to market.
“And that’s important because, memory is very much 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 manufactures.”
Micron is set to receive $6.1 billion in subsidies from the federal government to help pay for its chip-making plants in Boise and another it’s planning in New York state. The $100 billion “mega fab” coming to Clay, New York, would dwarf the one under construction in Boise.
The company also plans to build two administrative office buildings on its Boise campus, one at seven stories and the other at five, and a five-floor 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 multiple fabs and related operations overseas. Micron says it employs 44,000 people worldwide.
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