I doubt that Ohio was the top of the list of possible locations for an advanced semiconductor fab for many people. In the end, after a lengthy beauty contest that doubtless involved many incentives, Intel picked the midwestern as the site for its next US-homed fab and a long way from existing fabs in the country that almost all lie west of the Rockies in Oregon and Arizona.
The outlier in Intel’s current canon is a small R&D facility in Massachusetts. The planned fab near Columbus will be far larger and, along with TSMC’s construction of a somewhat smaller facility the other side of Phoenix from Intel’s existing plants there, represents an apparent change in the geopolitics of chipmaking – in an industry that has long had a relationship with geopolitics it never wanted.
In the past, those geopolitics were realised mainly through export controls on leading-edge technology and where it could not be sent. Traditionally, these were the Iron Curtain...