After President Trump announced his "Liberation Day" reciprocal tariffs back in April, semiconductor stocks went into a tailspin.
Shortly after, Oppenheimer analyst Rick Schafer warned in a client note that Trump’s escalating trade war could derail Big Tech’s AI infrastructure buildout.
The tariffs and proposed budget cuts only added to looming uncertainty surrounding the U.S. semiconductor sector.
Just a month earlier, during a joint session before Congress, Trump urged House Speaker Mike Johnson to kill the $50 billion CHIPS and Science Act, a bipartisan bill that was supposed to secure America’s leadership in semiconductors.
On one hand, Trump has made winning the global AI race a top priority of his administration. On the other hand, his moves have sometimes appeared at odds with that goal.
But this week, Micron Technology (MU) flipped the narrative.
In a bold move backed by the Trump administration, the semiconductor memory and storage giant announced a $200 billion domestic investment in U.S. manufacturing and R&D.
Micron said it will invest $150 billion into domestic memory manufacturing and another $50 billion into research and development, creating an estimated 90,000 direct and indirect jobs.
The company plans to build a second leading-edge memory fabrication plant in Boise, Idaho to ramp up U.S. DRAM production.
Semiconductor and AI analyst Ray Wang noted in a post on X that Micron’s latest low-power DRAM is "reportedly 20% more power-efficient than its competitors."
Not only that, he added, the company has become the first supplier of SOCAMM modules for Nvidia’s next-generation AI servers.
Micron has also emerged as a key memory supplier for Samsung smartphones, according to Wang.
The chipmaker is also expanding its existing facility in Manassas, Virginia and preparing to break ground on a mega fabrication site in New York.
Micron said the expansion will bring advanced packaging capabilities back to U.S. shores, supporting long-term growth in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), a critical technology for AI servers.
"This approximately $200 billion investment will reinforce America's technological leadership, create tens of thousands of American jobs across the semiconductor ecosystem, and secure a domestic supply of semiconductors, critical to economic and national security," Micron founder and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in the statement, while thanking Trump and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
In a rare move that underscores how aggressively Big Tech is now courting Trump, the press release included praise from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Dell founder Michael Dell.
CHIPS Act gets new life in the Senate
Micron also announced it had finalized a $275 million CHIPS Act direct funding award to support its Virginia expansion. That’s a meaningful win for the sector, especially after Trump previously threatened to gut the program.
The Senate is now moving to sweeten the CHIPS incentives further as part of Trump’s "Big, Beautiful" tax package.
According to sources familiar with the matter, lawmakers are raising the CHIPS Act tax credit to 30% from 25% for any chipmakers breaking ground on new U.S. facilities before the 2026 deadline.
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