ALBANY — U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer traveled to Saratoga County on Monday afternoon to help announce a “landmark” deal in which GlobalFoundries will make computer chips for Lockheed Martin, the $66 billion defense contractor that makes helicopters, fighter jets and other weapons and equipment for the U.S. military.
Schumer’s visit to GlobalFoundries’ Fab 8 headquarters and manufacturing campus in Malta came about an hour after he visited the Albany Nanotech Complex to announce a new federally funded workforce training program that will benefit tech companies across the state.
Both announcements are likely to help Albany NanoTech and GlobalFoundries win billions of dollars in federal aid through the federal CHIPS and Science Act, a $52 billion program Schumer authored and pushed through Congress last year. It’s designed to re-establish the domestic chip industry and its supply chain after decades of migration to Asia and China, which has become America’s largest geopolitical and economic foe.
The biggest announcement was made at GlobalFoundries, which said it has entered into a “strategic collaboration” to make chips for Lockheed Martin, the maker of helicopters and fighter jets for the U.S. military.
“This is great news,” Schumer said, standing on a stage outside Fab 8 with Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet and GlobalFoundries CEO Thomas Caufield. “We can’t rely on supply chains that are overseas.”
Taiclet, who said Lockheed already has “dozens” of chip suppliers currently that are based in the U.S. to conform with Department of Defense regulations, wouldn’t say how many chips it has agreed to buy from GlobalFoundries or if the two companies have signed a contract.
But the scope of the deal appears to be substantial in terms of cooperation.
Taiclet and Caulfield said the two companies would work on developing chips that can be made faster and cheaper than Lockheed Martin’s current chip supply chain can accomplish — as well as chips that can withstand higher temperatures using gallium nitride as the substrate instead of traditional silicon. The two firms will also work on new types of chip “packaging” that improves chip performance and photonics-based chips that run on light instead of electrons.
“This is going to make (our supply chain) stronger,” Taiclet said.
The deal with Lockheed Martin also improves GlobalFoundries’ chances of being awarded up to $2 billion through the CHIPS and Science Act for a second factory it wants to build at Fab 8.
Not only would additional orders from Lockkheed Martin help justify the need for a second factory, or fab, but it would increase its chances of winning a CHIPS and Science Act grant, which favors projects that have national security implications. GlobalFoundries employs 3,000 people at the current Fab 8 chip factory, and a second fab would employ another 1,000 workers.
“It makes it far more likely that GlobalFoundries will grow here in the Capital Region,” Schumer added.
But nearly as important was an announcement Schumer attended at Albany Nanotech about an hour before his visit to Fab 8.
At that event, Schumer, along with officials from the U.S. Department of Labor and the non-profit National Institute for Innovation and Technology, announced that New York will host a Career Opportunity Hub, a federally funded workforce training program that will prepare students from kindergarten to the university level for high-tech jobs in chip manufacturing and other sectors.
The NIIT is not a federal agency but is a workforce development nonprofit that was awarded a four-year $9.6 million grant from the federal DOL to create high-tech apprenticeship programs. Mike Russo, the former head of government relations for GlobalFoundries and a former senior staffer for U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, started the NIIT in 2021. The nonprofit is based outside of Washington, D.C.
“It’s not a coincidence that this will happen in New York,” Russo said.
Schumer said Monday that the new Career Opportunity Hub will help companies like Micron, Wolfspeed and GlobalFoundries to fill jobs at new chip factories being built, or recently built, across upstate. The program would also train future workers for companies like Plug Power, which makes hydrogen-powered fuel cells used in industrial vehicles.
Micron is planning a $100 billion chip manufacturing campus outside of Syracuse. Wolfspeed has built a $1 billion chip factory just outside Utica, and GlobalFoundries has Fab 8 with Fab 8.2 being considered. The CHIPS and Science Act will help fund those projects, which will need thousands of new, qualified semiconductor workers. The new Career Opportunity Hub will train those workers at Albany Nanotech and sites across the state.
“It is one of the key ways we can ensure those jobs are being filled by upstate New Yorkers,” Schumer said at the Albany Nanotech event.
The new workforce training hub will also help Albany Nanotech’s quest to be designated as the headquarters of the National Semiconductor Training Center that is also going to be funded by the CHIPS and Science Act, Schumer added.
“There’s no better place in the country to supercharge upstate New York than here,” Schumer said.
