Micron said July 9 it will put $500 million into GlobalWafers’ 300mm raw silicon wafer plant in Sherman, Texas, a deal meant to secure one of the least glamorous and most necessary inputs in memory manufacturing: the blank silicon disks chips are built on.
The financing is part of up to $3 billion Micron said it may commit to the U.S. semiconductor supply chain. The GlobalWafers funding remains subject to final agreements and closing conditions, Micron said. The two companies also plan a 10-year supply agreement giving Micron access to output from the Sherman facility.
Ben Tessone, Micron’s senior vice president and chief procurement officer, said the arrangement is aimed at locking down critical materials. That is corporate procurement language, but the mechanism is plain enough: Micron wants U.S. wafer supply before its planned U.S. DRAM fabs need to run at scale.
On the same day, Micron said it had raised planned U.S. spending to more than $250 billion through 2035, up from $200 billion. The company also said it poured the first concrete at its Clay, New York, fab one quarter earlier than planned. Micron has tied the spending plan to a goal of making 40% of its DRAM in the United States by the mid-2030s.
Why the wafer deal matters
Market researcher Mordor Intelligence says about 85% of global 300mm wafer capacity is controlled by five companies: Japan’s Shin-Etsu and SUMCO, Taiwan’s GlobalWafers, Germany’s Siltronic, and South Korea’s SK Siltron. Mordor says Shin-Etsu and SUMCO together account for more than half of that capacity.
GlobalWafers America opened the Sherman plant in May 2025 after an initial $3.5 billion investment. The company says the site is the first fully integrated U.S. 300mm raw wafer plant built in more than 20 years, and the only CHIPS Act participant able to make advanced 300mm wafers domestically.
The U.S. Commerce Department said in 2022 that a fully built Sherman campus could reach about 1.2 million wafers per month across six phases. One phase is operating. GlobalWafers also has 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.
GlobalWafers chair and chief executive Doris Hsu said at the Sherman opening that later phases depended on profitability in the first two phases, long-term customer contracts, reasonable prices, prepayments, and government support, according to Reuters. Since Micron’s announcement, Hsu has called the Micron arrangement the largest long-term agreement in GlobalWafers’ history and said a second Sherman phase is now needed.
Memory supply is still the hard part
Micron is also signing up buyers for its own future output. The company announced strategic customer agreements with General Motors on July 1 and Ford on July 6, and cited 16 such agreements on its fiscal third-quarter 2026 earnings call.
The risk is familiar. During the 2017 to 2018 memory boom, chipmakers used prepaid and take-or-pay wafer deals to protect supply. Those prepayments later became liabilities when DRAM prices fell in 2019. SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won told an audience at Nvidia’s GTC conference that the current wafer shortage could last through 2030 and leave a deficit above 20%.
Micron’s U.S. production timeline does not offer quick relief. Its Manassas, Virginia, fab began making 1-alpha DRAM in May and accounts for about 2% of global memory supply. Micron expects its first new Idaho fab to produce wafers in mid-2027 and the second in late 2028. The Clay, New York, site is not expected to start production until around 2030.
High-bandwidth memory adds another constraint. A DRAM wafer is not a finished HBM product until the die are stacked and packaged with advanced 2.5D methods and through-silicon vias. Micron has committed roughly $7 billion to an HBM packaging facility in Singapore, with operations scheduled to start in 2026. In a June 2025 SEC filing, Micron said it intends to do HBM packaging in the United States, but it has not announced a U.S. site or date.
This story draws on original reporting from Tom's Hardware.
