The US government is granting GlobalWafers up to $400 million in CHIPS Act cash to help finance its 300mm wafer manufacturing facilities in Texas and Missouri.

The Commerce Department said GlobalWafer's Texas plant is an important milestone for the United States because it is the nation's first facility to manufacture 300mm wafers, the kind used for modern processes. The Missouri site will produce a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) variant of 300mm wafers, which are more targeted at defense and aerospace applications where chips need to be less prone to failure.

The plans to build the Texas wafer factory were first revealed just over two years ago by the Taiwanese chip biz. It was an alternative use of a few billion dollars originally earmarked to acquire German wafer maker Siltronic, an acquisition that did not go as hoped due to opposition from German regulators.

The Missouri factory, meanwhile, was announced in 2021 as a partnership between GlobalWafers and GlobalFoundries, the chip factory spun off from AMD that now focuses on legacy nodes rather than cutting-edge. This fab appears to be the smaller of the two, given that its budget when first announced was just $800 million, and it also appears to cover an expansion of a 200mm SOI wafer facility.