GoKawiilMicron committed up to $3 billion to the U.S. semiconductor supply chain last week. Of that, $500 million goes to GlobalWafers as strategic financing — subject to definitive agreements and closing conditions — for its 300mm raw silicon wafer plant in Sherman, Texas, and the two companies will sign a 10-year agreement for access to that plant's output. Ben Tessone, Micron's senior vice president and chief procurement officer, tied the move to securing "critical input materials." In a second announcement from Boise the same day, Micron raised its planned US spending to more than $250 billion through 2035, up from $200 billion, and poured the first load of concrete at its Clay, New York megafab a quarter ahead of schedule.
Running until 2035, the $250 billion spending target is attached to a goal of making 40% of Micron's DRAM in the U.S. by the mid-2030s. Only a relatively paltry $500 million of that $250 billion has been earmarked for buying wafer supply from GlobalFoundries, the only U.S. supplier that’s capable of producing 300mm wafers.
The 300mm wafer market
Roughly 85% of global 300mm wafer capacity sits with five suppliers, according to market research firm Mordor Intelligence: Shin-Etsu and SUMCO of Japan, Taiwan's GlobalWafers, Germany's Siltronic, and South Korea's SK Siltron. The two Japanese firms hold more than half between them.
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GlobalWafers America opened the Sherman plant in May last year on an initial $3.5 billion investment. It’s the first fully integrated 300mm raw wafer facility built in the U.S. in more than two decades, and the company says it’s the only CHIPS-participating supplier capable of producing advanced 300mm wafers domestically. The site holds a CHIPS Act award of up to $406 million, finalized in December 2024 and shared with a silicon-on-insulator plant in St. Peters, Missouri. Commerce Department figures from 2022 put full-build capacity at around 1.2 million wafers per month across a six-phase campus, with one phase currently running.
Meanwhile, SUMCO is ending 200mm production at its Miyazaki site and has slowed new 300mm expansion. The leading-edge capacity Shin-Etsu and SUMCO added in 2025 was sized to match contracted demand rather than to build ahead of the market. Wafer suppliers have run this way for a decade, protecting margins instead of chasing volume, and with suppliers holding back, the capital for new capacity increasingly comes from their customers.
GlobalWafers chairperson and CEO Doris Hsu set out her terms for that at the Sherman opening, announcing an additional $4 billion for the site and telling Reuters that further phases depended on the first two turning a profit, on customers signing long-term contracts, and on reasonable pricing, prepayments, and government support. Micron's $500 million in financing and a decade-long supply commitment cover most of that list, and Hsu has since called the Micron agreement the largest long-term deal in her company's history and said a second Sherman phase is now necessary.
Micron is locking in its own customers on the same basis, having signed a strategic customer agreement with General Motors on July 1 and another with Ford on July 6, two of 16 such agreements the company cited on its fiscal Q3 2026 earnings call. Each ties future memory output to a named buyer.
We’ve seen the industry do this before. During the memory boom of 2017-2018, chipmakers signed prepaid, take-or-pay wafer agreements to guarantee supply, but those prepayments became balance-sheet liabilities when DRAM pricing fell through 2019. SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won told an audience at Nvidia's GTC conference that the current wafer shortage could last through 2030 with a deficit above 20%, which is the argument for signing now. Conversely, the 2019 write-downs are the argument against.
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