A logic fab on US soil, run by GlobalFoundries and bankrolled with Japanese capital, is under discussion between Tokyo and Washington, Nikkei reported.
The price tag would land between ¥2T and ¥3T, the report said, citing officials from both governments. GlobalFoundries shares rose more than 2 percent in premarket trading on the news.
Such a plant would sit under the $550B investment framework Japan accepted last year in exchange for tariff relief, pushing that package past power projects into chip manufacturing. SoftBank is separately discussing a large data center inside the same arrangement.
Location, schedule and ownership structure remain undisclosed, though the facility would make logic chips and widen GlobalFoundries’ US footprint.
The talks land inside a broad push to onshore production. TSMC has committed $265B to US manufacturing and packaging, including 12 Arizona facilities, Samsung is building in Texas, Intel is expanding in Arizona and Ohio, and Micron is adding memory capacity at home.
Washington has combined tariffs, trade leverage and subsidies to move capacity westward. In January it imposed a 25 percent tariff on certain advanced computing chips while exempting imports tied to domestic supply chains.
For GlobalFoundries, a government-backed anchor fab would extend a run of US wins that includes a $375M Commerce award for its quantum business, a partnership with Monolithic Power Systems, and US-built GaN shipments with Navitas.
Tokyo has spent this decade rebuilding its own logic base through Rapidus, so bankrolling an American plant hedges its position either way.
