The great chip race
‘THE ONLY OPERATORS ARE THE ONES IN THE CEILING,’ SAYS CHRIS BELFI, wrapped up in a Tyvek bunny suit, tinted yellow under the photo-safe lights. The robots rush by on overhead tracks, blinking and whirring. Every few seconds, one pauses above a giant machine. Out of its laundry-basket-size belly, a plastic box drops on thin wires, like Tom Cruise in a catsuit. It holds precious cargo: up to 25 shiny silicon wafers, each the size of a 12-in. pizza. The process of transforming them into tiny computer brains—call them microchips, semiconductors or just chips—takes nearly three months. “I use an analogy like baking a cake,” says Belfi, an automation engineer at chipmaker GlobalFoundries. “The only difference is our cake is about 66 layers.”
This $15 billion complex tucked away behind trees north of Albany, N.Y., is one of only a handful of advanced semiconductor factories, or “fabs,” in the U.S. Its receiving docks pull in 256 specialty chemicals, like argon and sulfuric acid. Its shipping docks send out finished wafers, ready to be cut up, encased in metal and ceramic shells, and assembled into everything from airbags to blenders, headphones to fighter jets.
Since it opened in 2011, Fab 8, as it’s known, has kept a low profile. But as with toilet paper and chicken wings, the pandemic shocked the global semiconductor supply chain, leading to shortages in surprising places—and pulling the U.S. semiconductor industry to center stage. The car industry has been hardest hit of all. When the initial lockdowns caused car sales to collapse, automakers cut their orders for parts, including semiconductors. (A typical new car can contain more than a thousand chips.) Chip manufacturers saw the slack and shifted their output to serve the surging demand for consumer electronics, like webcams and laptops.
But when car sales snapped back last fall, a dramatic misstep became apparent: the automakers couldn’t get enough chips. They still can’t. Missing chips are now expected to lower global output by 3.9 million vehicles in 2021,
