Friday, May 27, 2011

Manufacturing Jobs Return To Hudson Valley

Also via Ritholtz, some good news from Albany, New York:
He has also made the school, part of the State University of New York, a magnet for forward-looking industries across the region.

About 250 companies, including such major high-tech firms as IBM Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Applied Materials Inc., have provided $6 billion to the school for equipment, labs, clean rooms and other resources. Kaloyeros has persuaded New York state to kick in nearly $1 billion more.

At the same time, the promise of what the research center can contribute to developing fresh products and technologies is attracting new manufacturing plants.

Next year, Silicon Valley chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will open a $4.6-billion semiconductor factory in Luther Forest, about 20 miles north of Albany. The two-story facility, with a clean room the size of six football fields, is the first major chip plant built in the country in a decade.

The U.S. share of global chip-production capacity, practically 100% in the 1970s, has been sliding for years — down to just 14% in 2009. The domestic industry's workforce has shrunk 45% in the last decade.

The Albany plant is expected to employ about 1,400 workers, many of them $40,000-a-year technicians and equipment operators.

AMD represents the biggest payoff yet for an effort Kaloyeros started some 15 years ago.
It is an interesting article.  It features the work of a professor at SUNY Albany, who has recruited a number of companies to work with the school in research.  I don't know whether such work can be reproduced on a larger scale, but it is definitely interesting.

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