(Bloomberg) —
Siemens AG will invest $510 million in new US manufacturing capacity, including an electrical-equipment plant in Texas, to expand its supply chain in North America.
The investments will focus on growing data-center, semiconductor and battery manufacturing, the German industrial giant said in a statement Friday. Siemens will also commit $150 million of the funds to build a facility in Fort Worth, Texas, to make equipment destined to power industrial plants and data centers. Overall, the plan will create 1,700 jobs, including 700 in Fort Worth, the company said.
The additional investment was motivated by both the available incentives and a boom in infrastructure demand for artificial intelligence.
“We are basically supporting the data center industry and Large Language Models data centers,” Chief Executive Officer Roland Busch said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Friday. “That’s the reason for investing.”Play Video
The announcement marks another boon for Fort Worth, which had the largest population growth of all US cities with more than 50,000 people last year. The city near Dallas is already home to American Airlines Group Inc. and the factory where Lockheed Martin Corp. makes F-35 jets.
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Siemens is committing the funds to the US as part of a broader $2.2 billion plan to expand high-tech manufacturing globally. The company also has plans for a new plant in Singapore and upgrades to an existing facility in Chengdu, China. Domestically, Siemens is using €1 billion ($1.1 billion) of the program’s funds for a new tech campus and expansion of production in Bavaria.
In the US, manufacturers in the chip supply chain are lining up to win funding from last year’s Chips Act, which set aside semiconductor subsidies worth $100 billion. And the Inflation Reduction Act, also passed in 2022, is offering subsidies with the intention of onshoring the supply chain for electric vehicles and sustainable energy projects.
(Updates with CEO’s comment in fourth paragraph.)
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