Micron commits $500 million to GlobalWafers' Texas plant; targets 40% of US DRAM production by 2035.

Micron committed up to $3 billion to the U.S. semiconductor supply chain, with $500 million going to GlobalWafers as strategic financing for its 300mm raw silicon wafer plant in Sherman, Texas. The companies will sign a 10-year agreement for access to that plant's output. Ben Tessone, Micron's senior vice president and chief procurement officer, tied the move to securing "critical input materials." In a separate announcement from Boise the same day, Micron raised its planned U.S. spending to more than $250 billion through 2035, up from $200 billion, and poured the first load of concrete at its Clay, New York megafab a quarter ahead of schedule.

The $250 billion spending target through 2035 is attached to a goal of making 40% of Micron's DRAM in the U.S. by the mid-2030s. Only a relatively modest $500 million of that $250 billion has been earmarked for wafer supply from GlobalWafers, the only U.S. supplier capable of producing 300mm wafers.

Roughly 85% of global 300mm wafer capacity sits with five suppliers: Shin-Etsu and SUMCO of Japan, Taiwan's GlobalWafers, Germany's Siltronic, and South Korea's SK Siltron, according to market research firm Mordor Intelligence. The two Japanese firms hold more than half between them.

GlobalWafers America opened the Sherman plant in May 2025 on an initial $3.5 billion investment. It's the first fully integrated 300mm raw wafer facility built in the U.S. in more than two decades and the only CHIPS-participating supplier capable of producing advanced 300mm wafers domestically. The site holds a CHIPS Act award of up to $406 million, finalized in December 2024 and shared with a silicon-on-insulator plant in St. Peters, Missouri. Commerce Department figures from 2022 put full-build capacity at around 1.2 million wafers per month across a six-phase campus, with one phase currently running.

Meanwhile, SUMCO is ending 200mm production at its Miyazaki site and has slowed new 300mm expansion. The leading-edge capacity Shin-Etsu and SUMCO added in 2025 was sized to match contracted demand rather than to build ahead of the market. Wafer suppliers have run this way for a decade, protecting margins instead of chasing volume, and with suppliers holding back, capital for new capacity increasingly comes from their customers.

GlobalWafers chairperson and CEO Doris Hsu set out her terms for expansion at the Sherman opening, announcing an additional $4 billion for the site and telling Reuters that further phases depended on the first two turning a profit, on customers signing long-term contracts, and on reasonable pricing, prepayments, and government support. Micron's $500 million in financing and decade-long supply commitment cover most of that list, and Hsu has since called the Micron agreement the largest long-term deal in her company's history and said a second Sherman phase is now necessary.

Micron is locking in its own customers on the same basis, having signed strategic customer agreements with General Motors on July 1 and with Ford on July 6—two of 16 such agreements the company cited on its fiscal Q3 2026 earnings call. Each ties future memory output to a named buyer.

The industry has pursued this strategy before. During the memory boom of 2017-2018, chipmakers signed prepaid, take-or-pay wafer agreements to guarantee supply, but those prepayments became balance-sheet liabilities when DRAM pricing fell through 2019. SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won told an audience at Nvidia's GTC conference that the current wafer shortage could last through 2030 with a deficit above 20%, which is the argument for signing now. Conversely, the 2019 write-downs are the argument against.

High-bandwidth memory is currently carrying the steepest premiums in the AI market, but a fabbed wafer is not yet HBM. The die has to be stacked and packaged using advanced 2.5D methods with through-silicon vias, capacity for which is located almost entirely in Asia. Micron's committed HBM packaging anchor is a roughly $7 billion facility in Singapore, with operations starting in 2026. Per a June 2025 SEC filing, the company lists U.S. HBM packaging as an intention, but no committed site or date has yet been announced.

As for U.S. packaging capacity that is scheduled, it's all clustered in or around 2028. SK hynix is building the first U.S. 2.5D advanced packaging plant in West Lafayette, Indiana—a roughly $3.87 billion project with mass production set for the second half of 2028. Amkor has expanded its Peoria, Arizona campus to $7 billion, with production slated for early 2028. TSMC's Arizona fabs run leading-edge logic but don't yet offer high-volume 2.5D packaging on U.S. soil; this is reportedly planned for 2029. While a wafer fabbed in New York and packaged in Singapore counts toward domestic DRAM, it doesn't make the finished HBM stack domestic.

Micron's Manassas, Virginia fab began producing 1-alpha DRAM in May, and it's the only U.S.-made memory in volume, representing roughly 2% of the world's supply. The first new Idaho fab should reach wafer output in mid-2027, and the second in late 2028, while the Clay, New York campus isn't expected to produce until around 2030. The $250 billion capex figure runs five years past that, while conventional DRAM contract prices continue to rise at record amounts—more than 90% quarter over quarter in early 2026, according to TrendForce—and manufacturers increase prices. Apple raised MacBook, iPad, and Vision Pro prices last month, citing memory costs, and none of the announced U.S. capacity will do anything to alleviate such shortages.

Samsung and SK hynix committed a combined $880 billion under a South Korean government-coordinated chip and AI program announced last month, spread over roughly a decade. That spending is domestic to Korea and separate from Samsung's $37 billion Texas footprint. But set next to Micron's $250 billion, a pattern emerges of companies announcing more capex than construction projects can physically absorb.

HBM consumes roughly three times the wafer area per bit of standard DDR5, so shifting production to HBM removes more commodity memory from the market. DRAM already takes around a fifth of global 300mm capacity, and memory is the largest single application for 300mm silicon. Micron's Sumit Sadana told CNBC in January the company could meet "at most" two-thirds of some customers' medium-term demand.