Inside the Chip Plants Racing to Power the AI Boom
Deep in the desert outside Phoenix, a new kind of factory is rising. Its clean rooms are sealed tighter than an operating theatre, its workers move in full-body suits, and inside, machines print circuits measured in billionths of a metre. These are the chip plants — fabs — racing to supply the processors behind the artificial intelligence boom.
Demand has outstripped anything the industry has seen. Training a single large AI model can require tens of thousands of specialised chips, and manufacturers are expanding at a pace their own engineers describe as exhausting. Governments have joined the race too, offering billions in subsidies to bring production back home.
The build-out will not be quick. A modern fab takes years to complete and costs more than an entire skyscraper district. But for the towns hosting them, the stakes are already clear: the next era of computing will be decided not in software labs, but on these factory floors.
