Arizona State University opened a new $270 million research project that officials say will put the state at the forefront in developing new semiconductor manufacturing technologies. But an even larger federal investment in the school’s semiconductor research appears dead in the water.
Gov. Katie Hobbs joined ASU President Michael Crow at the school’s Research Park in Tempe to celebrate the opening of the new Materials-to-Fab Center, a collaboration between the university and Applied Materials, one of the largest producers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
“It will fuel the AI, robotics and quantum computing industries,” Hobbs said. “Arizona has always been a place where people come together to solve problems and push boundaries; this center carries that tradition forward, setting the standard for what collaboration and innovation can achieve.”
Crow said the new center will facilitate the development of new tools needed to manufacture the microchips that power everything from smartphones to new artificial intelligence tools.
“What we are is, ‘how do you build the best mechanisms by which you have the capacity to engineer anything, design anything, solve anything?’” Crow said.
Another facility canceled
After the event, Crow said he believes the semiconductor facility — a $1.1 billion research and development center funded by federal dollars — that was planned to open as early as 2028 will no longer be coming to ASU’s Research Park.
In the final days of the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that ASU would be home to a NSTC Prototyping and NAPMP Advanced Packaging Piloting Facility, one of three new research centers funded by the CHIPS Act.
But the Trump administration clawed back funding for the centers in August, arguing the Biden administration’s mechanism for doling out those dollars violated federal law.
The collection of government bodies involved in the project — from ASU to the governor’s office to the feds — were largely silent on how the clawback would impact the facility in the months since the announcement.
But Crow now said he believes the federal government will invest those dollars elsewhere.
“What I think will happen is that the Commerce Department under Secretary Lutnick will now take those dollars and use them for stimulating advanced research, as opposed to building facilities,” Crow said.
The Department of Commerce did not respond to a request for comment.
The show must go on
Still, Crow remains bullish on the future of ASU’s semiconductor research, starting with the new collaboration with Applied Materials.
“This is the tool development factory working to now plug better tools into the research factory from which you then get the chips,” he said.
And Crow set lofty goals for what students, researchers and businesses can achieve at the new Materials-to-Fab Center.
“The weird thing is that we're sitting here at this facility in the year 2025 thinking about how you make the tools to build the devices that will alter the species, more than any devices have ever altered our species, except maybe fire,” he said.
Applied Materials is providing a bulk of the funding — about $200 million — for the new project. The rest of the dollars are coming from the university and the Arizona Commerce Authority.
“So they're not building the building,” Crow said. “They're just putting stuff in the building, and these machines, some of the machines are $10 million each.”
He said those investments will be mutually beneficial for the company and university.
“The key thing here is a state of the art, greatest manufacturing tools available to build microchips will be available to both innovators, people with new ideas, to students, to training, all those things, all in this facility,” Crow said.
According to ASU, Applied Materials has already been working at the Research Park for around 18 months.
In that time, the company has already developed eight patents, said Dr. Prabu Raja, president of the Semiconductor Products Group.
“The MTF Center has already accomplished a lot, and we are just getting started,” he said.
Next project up
Crow also says he is confident the university can replace the federal funding pulled by the Department of Commerce.
“What we're hoping to do is now win that money in new configurations around the most advanced research project … even and beyond this,” Crow said. “Because now with that kind of money, that's $11.8 billion, that's a large amount of money. And so with that amount of money, you can do almost anything.”
So what would Crow do with that money?
Again, he set audacious goals, including developing the tools and technology needed to drastically reduce the energy needed to power microchips.
“So if you could lower the energy by 10,000 times, 100,000 times, a million times, we wouldn't have to build 900 gigawatts of … data centers,” he said. “They'd still be data centers, but they wouldn't be using energy like that.”
Those types of developments could have a significant impact on Arizona, a state that continues to set energy demand records, partially driven by an increase in data centers in recent years.
