Investments Of $50B And Counting Spurring Silicon Prairie Growth Across North Texas

With more than $50B in investments on the way for North Texas’ growing semiconductor industry, the area known as Silicon Prairie has become a global powerhouse that’s also sparking development for nearby communities.

Texas Instruments announced in June that it would invest around $40B in its semiconductor fabrication plants in Sherman.

Much of that investment is centered in Sherman, a city around 60 miles north of Dallas that had been known for manufacturing plants for companies like Johnson & Johnson, Tyson Foods and Sunny Delight. It also has had a Texas Instruments plant since the 1960s, and that helped the company decide to build a nearly $30B semiconductor chip manufacturing facility in the city in 2021. Sherman has also seen multibillion-dollar plants built for semiconductor companies GlobalWafers and Coherent.

That has led to a boom in residential construction and all types of commercial property throughout the county and neighboring communities. 

Now other cities in the Metroplex are looking to get in on the action and prepare for the inevitable offshoots from the growth of the industry.

“This is just the first stage of the build-out,” said James Grimsley, regional innovation officer at the Southern Methodist University-led Texoma Semiconductor Tech Hub. “The next areas that will be built out will be these tremendous commercialization opportunities that revolve around building … the printed circuit boards and things that the chips go on.”

In early August, Apple announced a new $100B commitment to U.S. manufacturing, with the bulk of that sum slated to go to plants in Sherman. GlobalWafers received $200M from the CHIPS and Science Act this year and nearly doubled its investment in Sherman to produce 300-millimeter silicon wafers used in iPhones. That plant will account for a significant amount of the global supply of those wafers, Grimsley said. 

“We’re at the early stages [of the industry], but we’re nowhere near what we’re going to see with the cap,” he said. 

Texas Instruments announced plans in June to spend more than $60B on semiconductor fabrication plants to produce processing chips for companies like Apple, Nvidia, Ford and SpaceX. Around $40B of that investment will go to Sherman, with another $7.5B planned for the company’s facility in Richardson. 

Texas Instruments plans to build four semiconductor fabrication plants in Sherman.

Fort Worth has broken into the space in recent months, with a couple of semiconductor manufacturers planning to invest nearly $1B in the city. Adom Industries Inc. plans to spend $229M on a headquarters, a prototyping lab and a semiconductor fabrication facility. And Taiwanese tech giant Wistron InfoComm Corp. confirmed it would invest $761M in two facilities to manufacture components for Nvidia’s artificial intelligence-powered supercomputers.

“It’s go-time in Fort Worth, and this investment from Wistron, which will create significant job growth and economic impact in our city, is just more proof,” Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker said in a statement. “Fort Worth is already at the forefront of aviation, energy and logistics, and we are now positioned to lead in both AI and the future of advanced manufacturing as well.”

The Metroplex’s extensive logistics infrastructure, industrial ecosystem and deep, talented workforce were key contributors to Wistron choosing Fort Worth for its more than 1M SF of facilities, according to Jackie Lai, the company’s senior vice president of global manufacturing for American and European operations.

Those positives, as well as Texas’ lack of a state income tax and business-friendly environment, are also major reasons it has become a choice destination for corporate relocations, Grimsley said. Semiconductor manufacturers moving into the state can also gain access to the Texas CHIPS Act and cities willing to open their checkbooks. 

“They’re actually writing incentive checks and it makes it an incredibly compelling option to move to North Texas,” Grimsley said. “You have the local, state [and] federal all aligned to really promote an industry and all committed to growth.”

Fort Worth offered up around $20M in incentives for the Adom and Wistron projects, while the various taxing entities in Sherman gave approximately $3B in tax abatements and monetary payments for the projects there. 

Courtesy of Sherman Economic Development Corp.

Sherman Economic Development Corp. staff present a $5.5M incentive check to GlobalWafers representatives.

Those incentive packages won the Texas Instruments and GlobalWafer deals for the city, according to Sherman Economic Development Corp. CEO Kent Sharp. Texas Instruments was choosing between Sherman and a site in Singapore, so the city made an offer the company couldn’t turn down.

“We gave them a huge incentive, the biggest incentive Sherman has ever offered a company,” Sharp said. 

GlobalWafers chose Sherman over a site in Ohio thanks to another big incentive package from Sherman and SEDCO, the city’s EDC.

Those incentives have paid off, as Sherman collected nearly $7M in sales tax last year — its highest total ever. While that sum is expected to level off, Sharp expects it will rebound once the semiconductor manufacturers start their next rounds of construction. 

“What you see now is just Phase 1 of Texas Instruments and GlobalWafers,” Sharp said. “It’s going to continue to grow.”

GlobalWafers spent $3.5B on the first phase of its Sherman project and then announced it would invest an additional $4B. Texas Instruments has one building constructed, one on the way and two more planned. Sharp also anticipates Sherman will see more suppliers moving to the city to be near the manufacturers. 

The region’s abundance of land and water have proven attractive to the semiconductor industry, but SEDCO Chief Financial Officer Ashton Bellows said the city’s rich industrial history and aligned leadership also set Sherman up for success. The city put its initial incentive offer for Texas Instruments together in just six weeks. 

“That just doesn’t happen that quickly unless everybody really has a shared vision of where we’re going and goals for the community,” Bellows said.