Semiconductor History | Onondaga Community College, Syracuse — The Model on the Table, and the Three Years Before Anyone Dug

On 27 October 2022 the President of the United States stood in a hall at Onondaga Community College and looked at a scale model of four semiconductor fabrication plants that did not exist.

Micron's chairman and chief executive, Sanjay Mehrotra, is at the left of the photograph, pointing at it. The governor of New York and the Senate majority leader are across the table.

The announcement was a memory campus at White Pine Commerce Park in Clay, north of Syracuse: up to four fabs, up to $100 billion over roughly two decades, the largest private investment in the state's history.

It followed the CHIPS and Science Act, signed that August. Micron was later awarded $6.165 billion in direct federal funding toward fabs in New York and Idaho, with a further $275 million added, and New York offered up to $5.5 billion in state credits tied to jobs and capital milestones.

Why a memory company was being courted this hard is the rest of this collection's subject.

DRAM had consolidated to three manufacturers, only one of them American, and that one made almost none of its memory in America.

Then, for three years, nothing was built.

Construction had originally been targeted for 2024. Environmental review, permits, a two-mile 345-kilovolt underground transmission line to the site and a labour market that could not supply the trades pushed the start back and back.

Micron broke ground at Clay on 16 January 2026. On the schedule published then, the first fab is equipment-ready in 2028 and producing around 2029, with the fourth not finished until 2041.

The company's stated aim is to make 40 percent of its DRAM in the United States.

That is the real tempo of industrial policy: a model on a table in 2022, a hole in the ground in 2026, wafers around 2029, and a finished campus nineteen years after the photograph.

The college is a public campus on West Seneca Turnpike and can be visited; the hall in the picture is an ordinary one. The fab site is on the far side of Syracuse and is an active construction site with no public access.

The photograph is an official White House photograph of the briefing, taken on the day.

Photo: The White House, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons