U.S. Department of Commerce

Department of Commerce
CHIPS for America

We Have the Billions, Now We Need the Brains.

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Micron groundbreaking ceremony in Clay, New York. Photo: Marilyn Hesler

Over $820 billion is flowing into 160 semiconductor projects across 30 states, driving the largest U.S. manufacturing renaissance since World War II.

But capital commitments do not run fabrication lines.

The chip industry must fill more than 100,000 new jobs every year to build a sustainable domestic workforce.

Long before the CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law, I drew on two decades of experience building brand fame and market value for Applied Materials, Marvell, Arm, KLA, and Micron. I spent nearly two years driving an independent, uninvited, and largely unpaid diagnostic phase — interrogating the research, auditing the pipeline, and engaging directly with industry execs, trade associations, and academic leaders.

That proactivity opened the ultimate door. The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Industrial Advisory Committee (IAC) R&D Workforce Working Group formally tasked me with developing a nationwide semiconductor-workforce marketing strategy.

A spectacular collection of syllables, certainly.

Strip away the institutional grandeur, and the reality is brutal. Talent scarcity in the chip industry is the single greatest risk to America’s technological leadership, prosperity, and national security.

A Financial Times film exploring America's chip war with China.

In 2021, global supply-chain gridlock made the semiconductor industry impossible to ignore. Yet visibility did not translate into career choice.

My diagnosis revealed three systemic market-orientation failures:

Career-consideration deficit: For decades, semiconductor fabs operated offstage under an invisibility cloak, silently interceding between flashy software designers and even flashier consumer marketers. As a result, the industry failed to build long-term memory structures and semiconductor careers were largely absent from the minds of young STEM talent. They dreamed of iconic software giants or agile startups. The chip sector was perceived as being a stale, soulless manufacturer of a commodity. Technically obscure and culturally distant.

Pathway and conversion failure: Capable candidates ruled themselves out before even investigating the opportunity. Top-tier university graduates were blind to domestic hardware careers, with only 1,500 engineers entering the chip sector annually — a mere 3% of available graduates.

The Perception Paradox: Community-college and vocational students assumed chip making roles either required a PhD or meant a grueling, high-stress, always-on factory grind.

To solve these problems, the industry had to become easier to think of, easier to understand, and easier to choose. However, the strategy could not just be about awareness. We had to fix the product, its distribution, and its pricing, forcing a fragmented workforce ecosystem to become market-oriented — redefining the job's nomenclature and identity from the perspective of the candidate, simplifying pathways, lowering perceived barriers, and pulling every single lever of the marketing mix simultaneously.

Micron Idaho. Photo: Todd Meier

"We have to nail the implementation of the CHIPS and Science Act. We have to execute like every detail matters, because it does. And we have to be bold enough with our vision—which is why I liken it to the space race."

Gina Raimondo, U.S. Secretary of Commerce

The space race had one mission control. The CHIPS workforce challenge sat within a sprawling, highly fragmented national ecosystem: multi-billion-dollar semiconductor giants, the Department of Commerce (DOC), federal science agencies, the Department of Defense, hundreds of universities and community colleges, regional economic development agencies, and local labor groups. Every single entity possessed legitimate authority, distinct funding cycles, incompatible operating tempos, and isolated measures of success.

The immediate barrier to progress was operational whiplash.

At one extreme stood academic paralysis — endless analysis that delayed execution. At the other stood chaotic tactical activism — local marketing campaigns, social media blitzes, and isolated training programs launched long before anyone had agreed on a strategic bedrock: target segmentation, industry positioning, and core objectives.

In May 2023, the American Semiconductor Academy (ASA) and the SEMI Foundation drafted a formal proposal to pilot a collaborative microelectronics education network coordination hub. The proposal integrated both my marketing strategy framework and communications platform architecture into its foundational blueprint. Our founding corporate partners — Intel, Micron, and Apple — quickly stepped up, committing the necessary seed capital to match a proposed investment from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

I was attempting to celebrate my birthday in Yosemite when I got the news.

It was the ultimate public-private reality check.

Corporate was a definitive yes. The public sector was a complicated maybe.

Navigating a model of this scale meant watching the blistering commercial urgency of industry collide head-on with the deeply deliberative, workshop-driven timelines of federal implementation. We thought we had unlocked the immediate funding required to execute. The reality was a year-long detour of cross-agency synthesis just to secure the matching capital.

Recording of the August 1, 2024 IAC Session

While the formal integration was a grind, the baseline architecture of that initial ASA / SEMI proposal endured.

In a sequence of decisive moves, due-process gave way to absolute national momentum, when on May 10, 2024, I presented a marketing strategy to the IAC, recommending that the SEMI Foundation host a central marketing hub.

The strategic effectiveness of that architecture is measured by its national scale:

Federal implementation: On July 24, 2024, the NSF and the CHIPS for America R&D Office at NIST signed a memorandum of understanding on semiconductor workforce development. The collaboration included up to $30 million over five years for a Network Coordination Hub and the National Network for Microelectronics Education.
IAC approval: On August 1, 2024, the IAC approved the working group’s recommendation to execute a nationwide marketing strategy out of a central hub hosted by the SEMI Foundation.
National activation: Following its formal selection as Hub Operator by the NSF and DOC in September 2024, the SEMI Foundation launched the network's first four Regional Nodes on May 26, 2026 — activating a nationwide ecosystem of more than 325 workforce-development partner organizations.