By Steve Zylstra | Phoenix Business Journal
A recent New York Times article painted a picture of Arizona’s semiconductor expansion unrecognizable to those of us who live and work within the ecosystem daily. The story suggests Arizona lacks the workforce, infrastructure, expertise and certainty needed to support advanced chip manufacturing. Most of that narrative is false, and it reads as if reporting was conducted far from the state the article attempts to describe.
Let’s start with the most fundamental point: Arizona has been a cornerstone of U.S. semiconductor manufacturing for decades. The industry did not suddenly arrive when TSMC broke ground. Motorola opened its first semiconductor operations here in the 1950s following the launch of its research lab in 1949. Intel has been expanding continuously since 1980 and now employs more than 10,000 Arizonans. Microchip, ON Semiconductor (Onsemi), NXP, ASM, ASML, Medtronic and a long list of suppliers were here long before the current wave of investment. Today Arizona is home to approximately 280 semiconductor and semiconductor-adjacent companies employing more than 40,000 people, a fact the article mentions but fails to contextualize.
