By Trevor Bach, The Dallas Morning News
Texas Instruments unveiled its first semiconductor facility in Sherman, Texas, on Wednesday, part of a planned Grayson County “megasite” the electronics giant says will cost more than $30 billion and produce more than 100 million microchips daily.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony, held in a pop-up event space outside the facility, was attended by dozens of TI employees and executives as well as local and state politicians, including Gov. Greg Abbott.
“Semiconductors are what I consider to be the most important product that we make in the United States,” Abbott said. “TI is a huge part of our booming economy,” he added. “It’s one reason why Texas ranks number one in America for the most new jobs, number one in America as the best state for doing business.”
In his own remarks, Haviv Ilan, Texas Instruments’ CEO, recounted the construction of the Sherman facility — a process that included the excavation of more than two million cubic yards of earth and the pouring of more than 240,000 cubic yards of concrete, he said — and spoke to the site’s grand ambitions.
“The chips coming out of this factory will unlock innovation for years to come, enabling data centers to meet growing demands for AI; driving advancements in robotics from factory floors to offices and even in our living rooms; paving the way for safer and more connected vehicles; and making the electronics we depend on every day — from the medical devices monitoring your health to the smartphone in your pocket — smarter, more efficient and more reliable.
“TI technology is at the heart of these investments.”
TI has dubbed the new semiconductor “fab,” or fabrication plant, as SM1. The million-square-foot facility is already operational and producing 300 mm-diameter semiconductor wafers, which are subsequently converted into the microchips that power electronic devices.
SM2, TI’s second Sherman factory, is also largely in place and could quickly begin production to meet market demand, said Brian Dunlap, TI’s vice president of 300mm fab operations. The company’s timeline for building SM3 and SM4 also depends on future economic conditions, he added.
“Our strategy that we’ve delivered here [is to] have capacity ahead of demand,” said Dunlap. “So as market conditions change, we can flex very quickly. We can manage through any type of supply chain challenge.”
The company broke ground on the Sherman site in 2022, an event also attended by Abbott and hailed as a milestone for American manufacturing amid a broader domestic chip-making push by former President Joe Biden’s administration in part as a counterweight to China. The estimated $30 billion price tag for the campus ranks among the largest private investments in Texas history, while TI says the megasite will also eventually provide 3,000 local jobs.
TI chose to build the megasite in Sherman, a rural city of about 50,000 some 60 miles north of Downtown Dallas, after receiving considerable local tax breaks, including a 10-year, 90% property tax abatement for each of the plants from the city and Grayson County. TI, which now counts some 34,000 employees on multiple continents, has been based in North Texas since its predecessor company was founded in 1930.
“Most people were going, ‘Where is Sherman, Texas?’” Sherman Mayor Shawn Teamann said in a speech on Wednesday. “TI announces, and all of a sudden we are on national news. Very exciting for this community, also a little bit scary.”
“The Silicon Prairie is now open for business,” he added.
The Sherman site, Texas Instruments’ largest campus, forms a key part of the company’s future ambitions: In June, amid broad tariff-related pressure from the Trump administration, the Texas company touted its plans to spend more than $60 billion on domestic manufacturing, including at the Sherman site and another facility in Utah.
Dunlap said TI has hundreds of employees currently working at the Sherman site, but declined to provide a more specific figure. This fall, the company also announced layoffs as part of what a representative called a “planned, multi-year transition to close our remaining 150-mm facilities in Dallas and Sherman.”
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