Published February 14, 2024
Welcome to Silicon Desert: How Biden helped boost an Arizona boomtown
Welcome to Silicon Desert: How Biden helped boost an Arizona boomtown
Computer-chip manufacturers are building giant factories in Phoenix, helping draw more blue voters to this vital swing county
Construction at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. facility in Phoenix. The company is investing about $40 billion in computer chip manufacturing plants, thanks in part to the passage of the Chips and Science Act of 2022. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)
MARICOPA COUNTY, Ariz.. — It took 170 flatbed trucks to haul one of the world’s biggest cranes — the height of two Statues of Liberty — to the outskirts of Phoenix to start building a $20 billion computer-chip factory. On the other side of town, an even bigger chip-manufacturing project is rising from the desert, requiring 12,000 construction workers and $40 billion of investment.
Phoenix is a boom town, thanks in part to President Biden. The promise of federal subsidies from the Biden-backed Chips and Science Act of 2022 has sparked some of the biggest investment projects in the nation’s history, transforming Maricopa County into one of the world’s most important manufacturing sites for the tiny components that power all modern electronics.
Whether the investments will benefit Biden’s presidential campaign in this vital swing county is unclear. But the projects are creating thousands of high-tech jobs that will draw more professionals who tend to vote blue, analysts say. Maricopa, the nation’s fourth most populous county, is already purple, having flipped from Trump to Biden in the 2020 election.
Obstacles remain before the factories are up and running. The Biden administration has not yet awarded any funding to the projects, though announcements are expected in a few weeks. The semiconductor companies are also facing a shortage of construction and technical workers, causing one of the manufacturers to delay its timetable and import more technicians from Taiwan. But local business leaders, politicians and labor unions say the investment is helping turbocharge Maricopa County’s already strong economy, which is far outpacing the nation’s as a whole.
Maricopa County is growing much faster than the U.S. as a whole
Change from a year earlier in gross domestic product
Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
“The Chips Act is a game changer for Phoenix for at least a generation,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said in an interview.
The Chips Act won bipartisan support in Congress as U.S. fears mounted that the nation had ceded too much semiconductor manufacturing to Asia. Computer chips are the brains that run everything from fighter jets and smartphones to autos, making them essential to national and economic security.
In Maricopa County, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) announced a $12 billion investment in 2020, under former president Trump, saying that the project would require “support” from the federal government. TSMC added a second factory after the Chips Act passed, more than tripling its investment.
California-based Intel, which has been producing chips in Maricopa County for more than 40 years, announced a significant expansion in March 2021, calling federal funding crucial.
The investments are helping transform Phoenix, bringing dozens of additional companies to the area to supply the mammoth factories. The change is most visible around the TSMC site in the county’s relatively undeveloped northwest corner, where warehouses, malls and housing developments are filling in the desert landscape.
Phoenix was already enjoying strong growth before the semiconductor projects arrived, after a push to diversify its economy away from real estate following the 2008 financial crash. But economists say the massive chip investment is amplifying the boom. Maricopa County’s GDP grew by 4.1% in 2022 against 1.9% for the United States as a whole, and its unemployment rate for most of the past several years has been below the national average.
The county has also experienced faster wage and population growth than the rest of the country. The expansion of the tech industry has helped push Maricopa County in a more blue direction, said Paul Bentz, a pollster at HighGround, a public-affairs and lobbying shop in Phoenix. The shift is already well underway east of Phoenix, in the area including Intel’s long-standing operations — accelerated by the local Republican Party’s embrace of far-right “MAGA candidates,” Bentz said.
Workers in the lobby of the TSMC facility in Phoenix. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)