Sources say an announcement is planned next week for a multi-billion-dollar computer chip manufacturing facility near New Albany in central Ohio. Sources confirm to the Statehouse News Bureau the Intel facility will be built on more than 3,000 acres of land in a rural Licking County township annexed into New Albany.
Ohio’s US Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) isn’t confirming the deal, but notes that he and Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) have urged passage of bipartisan legislation on reshoring jobs back from overseas, investing in manufacturing and cracking down on unfair trade practices.
“One of the biggest problems we face coming out of this pandemic is our supply chain was so disrupted, partly because the economy was so disrupted," Brown said in an interview. "But it was also so disrupted because of bad trade policy and bad tax policy lobbied by some of the largest corporations in America to move jobs offshore."
And Brown said bringing semiconductor chip manufacturing jobs to the US would be important to economic growth overall.
“We used to make a huge number of percentage of the chips made in the world, and now we're down, I believe, below 10%," Brown said. "So this is mostly an investment by our country, by our government, by our taxpayers into production of a central component of almost everything that’s manufactured.”
New Albany already is the home of data centers for Amazon, Google and Facebook.
The Intel project has been described by sources as at least the biggest economic development deal for Ohio since Honda built its 4 million-square-foot manufacturing plant near Marysville in the early 1980s.
Sources say an official announcement is planned for next Jan. 21.
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