‘Silicon Heartland’? Why Ohio could be next US tech stronghold.
Fat snowflakes fall on a field of broken yellow corn stalks less than 25 miles northeast of Columbus. Trash litters the side of the two-lane road; grain silos rise in the distance.
“It won’t look like much,” President Joe Biden confessed in his State of the Union address in March, “but if you stop and look closely, you’ll see a ‘field of dreams,’ the ground on which America’s future will be built.”
Later this year, Intel, one of the world’s largest tech companies, plans to break ground on two new semiconductor fabrication plants on this 1,000-acre plot of land in New Albany, Ohio – a $20 billion investment that could create 3,000 jobs. Most notably, this New Albany plant could help ease America’s unmet demand for semiconductors: small computer chips that are needed in everything from cellphones to dishwashers to cars to military equipment.
A shortage of these chips has become a leading symbol of supply-chain troubles deepened by the pandemic and by rising geopolitical tensions with Russia and
