Cree CEO: Utica fab site timing ‘just perfect for us’
Firm had been planning to build in N.C. until Rome group made pitch
No one will be confusing the city of Utica with San Jose, Calif., anytime soon, but Gregg Lowe says they may one day have a lot in common.
Lowe, the CEO of Cree Inc., a Durham, N.C., semiconductor company, traveled to upstate New York last month to announce that his company would build a $1 billion factory next to the SUNY Polytechnic Institute campus in Marcy, a suburb of Utica.
While the state and Oneida County officials have been marketing the 400-acre Marcy Nanocenter site for years as an ideal location for a semiconductor fabrication facility, the deal with Cree came together rather quickly.
Back in May, Lowe had announced that Cree would spend $1 billion to increase its manufacturing capacity for silicon carbide chips with two new facilities in North Carolina. At the time, the announcement and investment were critical to help the firm’s automotive customers meet the demand for silicon carbide chips, which play a critical role in the batteries of electric vehicles.
Cree was planning to use an existing building it had in Durham for the new chip factory, which was going to be called the North Fab.
But then Cree got a call from officials with the Mohawk Valley EDGE, a Rome-based economic development group that markets the Marcy Nanocenter site, Lowe said.
With New York state having already earmarked $500 million in incentives to lure a company to the site, the decision was a no-brainer for Cree, which estimates that it will save $280 million while building a larger fab that will have 25 percent more capacity than its plan to build in North Carolina. The 480,000-square-foot North Fab is expected to be completed by 2022, just in time to begin making chips for Cree’s automotive customers.
“The timing was just perfect for us,” Lowe said in an interview this week with the Times Union. “Once we got talking to them, we got pretty interested.”
Cree’s silicon carbide chips are used to regulate power in
electronic components. While such chips have been made with just silicon in the past, silicon carbide is so much more durable and efficient than silicon that a car company can dramatically increase the range of an electric vehicle or shrink its batter y, ty pically the most expensive part in an electric car, by as much as 10 percent.
“Silicon carbide is one of the most pivotal technologies of our time,” Lowe said during his Sept. 23 visit to Utica.
Lowe said that he was blown away with the reception he received in the Mohawk Valley, where Cree plans to hire 600 people over eight years.
And Cree is going to establish a special internship program for engineering and science students in New York to have them get acclimated to the company and technolog y in North Carolina before offering them jobs in Utica when they graduate.
“There’s a good cadre of talent up there,” Lowe said.
Someday, Lowe believes, they will be calling the nexus between Utica and Durham the “silicon carbide corridor,” sort of a Silicon Valley 2.0.