Feature article - America’s semiconductor facilities are being built: The speciality chemical supply chains that feed them are not

The CHIPS Act has created the largest demand signal for speciality chemicals in a generation. Whether your company captures it is an operational question, not a chemistry one, says Stephen Ottley, managing director and head of chemicals and pharmaceuticals at Maine Pointe

America’s semiconductor renaissance is underway. TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is making advanced chips in Arizona. Intel has broken the 2nm barrier on US soil. Samsung is building a next-generation semiconductor manufacturing facility in Texas. Over $630 billion in announced private investment has been committed since 2020, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. 

By any measure, the policy has worked. And yet the hardest part has not started.

The story told in Washington is a story about capital: $39 billion in manufacturing incentives, a 25% investment tax credit, 40 projects across 19 states. The story being lived in Phoenix, Syracuse and Taylor, Texas, is something different: a supply chain crisis at industrial scale, with no domestic playbook and a countdown clock built into every milestone-gated funding release at semiconductor fabrication facilities (fabs) that are still years from full production.

For speciality chemicals executives, that gap between Washington’s story and the operational reality is not someone else’s problem. It is the context in which every supply agreement, qualification cycle and capacity investment their company makes over the next decade will be judged.

Structural cost gap

TSMC itself has stated that construction costs for its Arizona facilities run four to five times higher than an equivalent facility in Taiwan, due to higher labour costs, regulatory requirements and training demands. That figure is a structural indictment of North America’s semiconductor supply chain readiness. Labour, materials, specialist contractors, ultra-pure chemicals, process gases and cleanroom construction expertise: the domestic ecosystem simply does not exist at the required depth.

Intel’s Ohio ‘Silicon Heartland’, the flagship of the domestic reshoring narrative, has been pushed to 2030 due to capital management challenges and weaker-than-anticipated demand for foundry capacity. These are not isolated execution failures. They are symptoms of an ecosystem problem that additional federal dollars cannot solve.

The real bottleneck

Every CHIPS Act recipient is simultaneously managing a megaproject construction program, standing up a domestic supplier base, qualifying new materials vendors, and hiring into a market where the SIA and Oxford Economics project a shortfall of 67,000 technical and engineering roles by 2030. The procurement and supply chain functions of these organisations are being asked to perform tasks they have never performed at this scale, in a region that has not done this for over a decade.

Meanwhile, funding is milestone-gated. Miss a milestone, lose the tranche. The pressure is not abstract.

The speciality chemicals challenge alone illustrates the depth of the problem. A leading-edge fab requires more than 200 critical chemical inputs, including photoresists, CMP slurries, etch gases and ultra-pure solvents, most of which have zero domestic production at semiconductor grade. Hemlock Semiconductor, the only US-owned hyper-pure polysilicon manufacturer, required a $325 million CHIPS award simply to build the capacity to supply one upstream input. That story repeats across dozens of material categories.

The scale of the opportunity for speciality chemicals producers is significant. According to Precedence Research, the global semiconductor chemicals market is projected to grow from $18.8 billion this year to $52.4 billion by 2035, a CAGR of 12%. North America is forecast as the fastest-growing regional market over that period, at 14.4%/year. This is a direct consequence of CHIPS Act fabs generating domestic demand for ultra-pure chemicals and process materials that previously had no US customer base at scale.

The consequences of supply failure in this environment are already visible. Bromine, essential for circuit etching, has surged to $12,000/tonne as geopolitical concentration risk materialises. Helium is being rationed at fabs across Taiwan and South Korea. Naphtha supply disruption since early 2026 has directly curtailed production of EUV photoresists at the precise moment US fabs are building their qualification pipelines. 

These are not future scenarios. They are current failures in product categories that speciality chemicals companies own.

Opportunity hiding in plain sight

The companies that will define North America’s semiconductor decade are not looking for advice. They are looking for execution. The distinction matters. Traditional consulting, built on frameworks, recommendations and governance reviews, cannot close a 4x construction cost gap or qualify a new speciality gas supplier under construction schedule pressure.

What closes that gap is embedded procurement and supply chain expertise that works inside the problem, not alongside it. Expertise that can accelerate category strategies, stand up dual-source programmes, build contractor governance frameworks and deliver working capital improvement simultaneously, with results guaranteed and visible within weeks, not months.

The qualification cycles are long. The purity specifications are exacting. Customer relationships in semiconductor supply, once established, are deeply sticky, which means that speciality chemicals companies who get in early and perform will hold their positions for years. 

Companies that treated operational build-out as parallel work, not a downstream consequence of winning the contract, are compressing qualification timelines that once ran for 18 months down to 90 days. The window to build that infrastructure ahead of the qualification waves the 2026–2028 facility ramp will generate is open, but will not stay open.

The CHIPS Act has done its job. It has moved capital, signalled intent and triggered a genuine industrial transformation. What it cannot do is build the operating infrastructure, the procurement organisations, supplier networks, logistics architectures and S&OP disciplines that will determine whether these facilities run at designed cost and yield when the funding runs out.

That work is already behind schedule. The companies that recognise it now and move to close the gap with the right capabilities will define the next chapter of American manufacturing. The ones that do not will find that the hardest part of building a semiconductor industry is not the silicon but the supply chain.

Contact

Stephen Ottley 

Managing Director/Head of Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals 

Maine Pointe

[email protected]