Taylor, Texas' chip-fueled renaissance
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The Samsung facility under construction in Taylor. Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Taylor, a pretty community to Austin's northeast, is about to go very big.
Why it matters: The pending opening of a $17 billion Samsung computer chip factory has thrust this Williamson County town, with its rutted roads and stately, semi-occupied old brick Main Street buildings, into a role as a key player in world geopolitics.
Driving the news: In April, the Biden administration announced $6.4 billion in grants to Samsung to help the South Korean company expand production in the Austin area — part of a national push to boost domestic chip manufacturing.
- The agreement covered Samsung's Austin chip fabrication plant and a new chip manufacturing hub in Taylor — and the White House expects it to lead to more than 20,000 jobs.
- The company also received incentives from the city of Taylor, Williamson County and the state of Texas.
Flashback: Settled 150 years ago by Czech and German immigrants, Taylor prospered in the late 19th century as a train depot for cattle, grain and cotton shipments.
- Located about 35 minutes from Austin, Taylor's population, 17,300 as of 2023, has increased by about 2,150 people, or 14%, since 2010.
As in satellite cities like Buda, Kyle, Lockhart, Elgin and Bastrop, some of those people are former Austinites, driven out of town by the high real estate costs.
What they're saying: "Your money goes a lot further out here," Curio Mrvosa bookstore co-owner Alex Cuervo tells Axios.
- He and his wife moved to Taylor from Austin in 2016, selling their condo near Anderson Lane.
- "We got a lot more house for our money and a lot more space," he said.
Between the lines: The Samsung breakthrough helps Taylor remake its story.
- In the last decade or so it was most likely in the news as the operations headquarters of ERCOT, the state electrical grid operator embattled after ice-storm blackouts in 2021 and 2022, or for the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a guarded, fenced-in facility used to detain non-US citizens awaiting a determination of their immigration status.
Zoom in: The 1,200-acre Samsung site is almost twice as large as Samsung's flagship campus in South Korea, per Forbes.
- The facility will be built atop 20,000 110-feet-deep piers set into the clay soil to eliminate vibration on the floors.
- The company could potentially build multiple fabs in Taylor as a secondary cluster to their Austin site.
- The Williamson County Economic Development Partnership recently opened an office in South Korea to attract other companies to the county.
Behind the scenes: Samsung announced it would build its new chip plant in Taylor — and not in Austin — in November 2021, after the company had been forced to shut down its Austin facility for more than a month due to power outages, costing the firm at least $268 million.
💭 Our thought bubble: With the Taylor announcement, the prosperity that Austin has enjoyed as a semiconductor hub appears poised to spill out into small-town Texas.