Introduction
This is the opening installment of a series of issue briefs presenting regional workforce training responses in four regions across the United States—the sites of some of the nation’s largest semiconductor company investments. The briefs detail innovation and programmatic changes in the regions’ workforce training ecosystems and are based on extensive field work. That research followed passage of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which authorized $25B in federal spending. State-level funds and roughly $500B in private-sector investments were layered with the federal investment.
More recently, following the 2024 presidential election, investments in U.S. semiconductor factories have been marked by both aggressive expansion—through shifts in the federal government’s strategic approach, which has taken equity positions in semiconductor companies rather than providing grants—and some strategic slow-downs. While the Trump administration has criticized the CHIPS Act, it also has largely maintained and iterated the program—notably through an August 2025 deal where the federal government purchased a 10% stake in Intel for $8.9B. Semiconductor sector operations in the four regions continue to evolve in different ways.
For instance, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced plans to triple investments in its Arizona facilities, partly to avoid potential tariffs. Micron Technology earlier this year broke ground in upstate New York on a memory chip manufacturing facility. And Samsung’s semiconductor fab in Texas represents the largest foreign investment in the state.
While Intel has pushed back the completion timeline of its central Ohio fab several times, the company maintains a public commitment to the facility. At the same time, central Ohio workforce and business leaders—who have turned their attention to other new market entrants and advanced manufacturing investments, such as an Anduril facility that is slated to be the largest employer in the region once it’s completed, and a new Honda manufacturing facility—have articulated the benefits of the workforce training systems overhaul that was precipitated by the Intel deal, which has spilled over into workforce training for other facilities and sectors.
Overall, amid these industry movements, the regional workforce ecosystems discussed in these briefs continue to advance their training pipelines for both semiconductor facilities and adjacent advanced manufacturing sectors—which is enormously complex, systemic work playing out over the course of many years.
Can Semiconductor Investments Be Transformational?
Public and private sector investments in the semiconductor sector have set in motion irreversible changes in workforce development systems across four U.S. regions where investments in the industry are highly concentrated. In response to these expenditures, which include a mix of significant federal- and state-level public and private investments, the high-tech metropolitan regions of Austin and Phoenix, alongside two post-industrial regions in central Ohio and upstate New York, are putting in place new workforce training programs.
While still in the early stages, these programs are pioneering new innovations and collaborations across each of these regional workforce development systems—pushing their impact beyond the semiconductor sector with significant repercussions on training in advanced industries broadly. Conclusive proof of the efficacy of these new programs and strategies in training people for these jobs and ensuring better wages and advancement opportunities may still be a few years off. Yet, this initial field research finds promising developments, even alongside persistent and longstanding workforce training systems challenges.
The research, presented in this series of issue briefs, documents and assesses responses from the four U.S. regions hosting semiconductor companies that are receiving some of the largest outlays of funding subsidies, with the vast majority coming from private capital alongside public sector investments, as a catalyst. These massive semiconductor investments, initiated in 2022 under a different Congress and executive branch and sustained under the current administration—albeit with new investment models—all continue to propel the need for a significantly augmented supply of new technician workers.
Back in 2022, the CHIPS and Science Act authorized approximately $25B in new semiconductor research, science, and manufacturing, although the vast majority of the expansion of the semiconductor sector came from private sector capital. (CHIPS also authorized $39B in grants and loans to semiconductor companies.)
About $300M of the CHIPS Act funds, supplemented by additional funds from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s CHIPS Program Office, were deployed in new advanced manufacturing workforce and economic development collaborations, with a goal of broadening regional talent pipelines, leveraging workers with adjacent skillsets, and upskilling incumbent workers. In addition to direct funding subsidies to the semiconductor companies, the federal legislation stipulated workforce development funding tied to building a talent pipeline—at all levels—to fill the new jobs at the semiconductor factories.
After the legislation’s passage, the Commerce Department oversaw more than $2.9B in workforce development disbursements, including funds to train workers for technician jobs at the fabs (See Table 1). All together, these public and private sector investments are acting as major drivers of new regional workforce development strategies and innovation.
In sum, a great deal can be learned from what is already transpiring in these regions, as well as from the challenges that remain to meet not only the ongoing workforce demands of the semiconductor sector but also the talent needs across an array of advanced manufacturing sectors. Indeed, these historic investments in workforce development offer singular opportunities to apply lessons about ways to begin transforming currently outdated and fractured U.S. workforce development systems into ones that prepare the Americans for advanced manufacturing more broadly.
Table 1
Federal CHIPS Investments in Major Companies and Workforce Funding by State*
| Intel | Micron | TSMC | Samsung | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Direct Funding to Companies | ||||
| Arizona | $3.94B (Chandler) | $6.60B (Phoenix) | ||
| New York** | $6.44B** (Clay) | |||
| Ohio | $1.50B (New Albany) | |||
| Texas | $4.75B (Taylor) | |||
| Workforce Funding*** | ||||
| $65M | $65M | $65M | $45M | |
* This table documents the direct funding awards under the CHIPS and Science Act made to the four major CHIPS companies in the metropolitan areas of Phoenix, Ariz. (includes Chandler); Syracuse, N.Y. (referred to as “Clay” by NIST, also referred to as upstate New York in this report); Columbus, Ohio (referred to as “New Albany” by NIST, also referred to as central Ohio in this report); and Austin, Texas (referred to as “Taylor” by NIST). Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), US Department of Commerce. CHIPS for America Awards.
** This amount includes the Micron locations in Boise, Idaho and Manassas, Va., as it is not separately reported.
*** The workforce funding allocations are reported as made to the companies, as they are not separated out by location.
The field research that underpins this opening essay and series of detailed issue briefs was launched in the spring of 2024 to understand the impact of semiconductor investments on workforce systems and regional responses as implementation got underway. It probed questions such as:
- What challenges do regional workforce leaders face in preparing their regions for the new semiconductor factories?
- What implementation steps are they taking to meet and overcome these challenges?
- What transformations are occurring?
- What are the lessons learned that can be shared with other regions?
This extensive field research—involving dozens of interviews conducted with workforce and economic development leaders, state agencies, staff members of governors’ offices, workforce investment boards, community colleges and other educational institutions, as well as corporate representatives—focused on four U.S. regions slated for some of the largest investments to upgrade existing or build new semiconductor factories.
The study anticipated that regional level experimentation and innovation unleashed by these place-based investments could offer tremendous learning opportunities for other regions striving to overcome decades of stubborn challenges afflicting their own workforce development systems. Even regions undergoing more modest business sector growth, which might be lacking the urgency of the regions experiencing deep semiconductor investments, are in search of new training practices and strategies as they aspire to reform their workforce systems and supply new workers to keep up with the pace of business growth.
Why New Public and Private Semiconductor Industry Investments Are Workforce Development Drivers
The U.S. Congress passed the Chips and Science Act in August 2022, in response to national concerns surfacing across the political spectrum about our nation’s inability to boost stateside semiconductor production and meet commercial and national security demand during the pandemic.
As of July 2025, companies across the semiconductor industry have announced over half-a-trillion dollars in private-sector investments to revitalize the U.S. chip ecosystem, setting in motion a projected tripling of domestic chipmaking capacity by 2032. Three years on, more than $1B in public and private funds have been mobilized to support the creation of approximately 125K direct jobs via the development of stronger workforce development in advanced manufacturing, including more than 20 companies committing to apprenticeships, and more than 80 community colleges starting or expanding programs.
Additionally, as regions began ramping up their workforce training pipelines, the Commerce Department included allocations specifically reserved for workforce development, totaling approximately $293M. The agency and its dedicated CHIPS office, which oversaw the manufacturing incentives program that provided direct awards to the companies, recognized the pressures these new funds and the new or expanding semiconductor factories were exerting on regional workforce training systems. (The law also authorized the National Semiconductor Technology Center’s Workforce Center of Excellence and its workforce advisory board to operate as a separate, non-governmental entity. The center received $200M for workforce development, but its operations have since been restricted under the Trump administration.)
The Commerce Department also struck a series of deals with semiconductor companies that were receiving CHIPS funding, to outline companies’ community investment commitments. At the time, the companies receiving the largest workforce allocations were required to work with named local intermediaries. These workforce organizations have maintained responsibility for convening the different regional education and training partners, monitoring compliance, collecting data, surfacing local training ideas, and distributing funds to training providers, according to officials leading these intermediaries as well as training providers operating as their partners in the four regions.
While the education and training providers are not eligible to apply directly for federal workforce dollars, the combined impact of the private and public investments means the regional workforce systems remain “on point” to respond to the new or expanded workforce demands, as well as to manage broader labor market pressures. That means the impacts on our workforce systems persist as the Trump administration puts its mark on the semiconductor sector and domestic expansion continues.
This field research focused sharply on the technician jobs being created in the wake of the semiconductor sector expansion. These jobs are commonly defined as skilled professionals who perform technical tasks, using specialized tools and equipment to install, maintain, repair, and service various systems and equipment. But it is worth noting the larger employment context, which frames the depth and breadth of the systemic challenges.
In 2023, a Semiconductor Industry Association and Oxford Economics report quantified sizable semiconductor-specific and economy-wide workforce gaps. It projected that the industry’s workforce would grow by nearly 115K jobs by 2030, from about 345K jobs today to about 460K jobs by the end of the decade, representing 33% growth. Of these new jobs, roughly 67K—or 58% of projected new jobs and 80% of projected new technical jobs—risk going unfilled at the current level of credential completion rates. About 39% of those anticipated unfilled jobs will be technician roles, mostly requiring industry certificates or two-year degrees.
Broadly, the SIA and Oxford report estimated that some 3.8M additional STEM jobs, as well as an array of technical jobs, could be created in the U.S. by 2030. Of those, 1.4M positions risk going unfilled, with more than 100K of those being technicians. What’s more, technician jobs are viewed as some of the most difficult to fill, due to multiple barriers in finding and training workers and long-standing dysfunctional workforce training systems. As colleagues at the Brookings Institution have observed:
“The U.S. faces an economy-wide shortage of skilled workers focused on two categories of skilled professionals: first, engineers and computer scientists with four-year and advanced degrees; and second, skilled technicians with two-year degrees or less and additional on-the-job or “earn and learn” training. Exacerbating these dynamics are persistent degree and certification shortfalls as well as stubborn racial and gender inequities, many of them exacerbated by the nation’s “college for all” approach to developing STEM talent and the paucity of paid, work-based pathways into advanced industries. The upshot is that too few American students now pursue university STEM degrees and stick with STEM work, or train at community colleges and other settings to obtain the skills needed for technician roles in advanced industry work.”
With these persistent challenges in securing sufficient workers at all levels in our nation across STEM professions and skilled technicians, expanding the semiconductor sector is only expected to aggravate this shortage. Prior to these investments, America’s advanced manufacturing industries were struggling, both nationally and regionally, with worker shortages plaguing the sector for several decades, which has contributed to the tight labor market around hiring for these positions. Even with recent signs of the market softening and the labor market loosening up, the supply of trained technicians is insufficient to fill these and other advanced manufacturing roles.
This talent crisis is particularly evident in the mismatch between the supply and demand of skilled workers to fill existing technician jobs. This gap has profound implications for efforts by workforce systems to ramp up and augment the flow of workers in the talent pipeline, pointing to deeper, more chronic workforce training systems problems. The billions of semiconductor dollars flowing to these regions have the potential to further amplify workforce system fragmentation and systemic gaps, while threatening to outright derail implementation of the new domestic semiconductor production sector.
At the same time, these pressures on our regional workforce systems offer a unique opportunity to track how the workforce systems are responding in ways that benefit the advanced manufacturing sector and workers. Further, these lessons have broader implications: without significant changes in the systems, additional onshoring of manufacturing and corporate demand for skilled labor could further outpace the supply of trained technicians and drive further workforce shortages—even in an economy that may be seeing signs of slower growth.
Lavea Brachman is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an honorary visiting fellow at the University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning, and the author of this series of issue briefs.
Brachman expresses deep appreciation to the Lumina Foundation for funding and supporting this work and to colleagues: Martha Ross, Mark Muro, Joe Parilla, Rachel Lipson, Harry Holzer, Annelies Groger, and David Johnson for their review and excellent comments. Any errors, inaccuracies, or omissions are solely the responsibility of the author.