Mapping $1 Trillion: Where the World Is Building Semiconductor Fabs

Across the 80 fab construction and capital investment projects FabPulse tracks, disclosed investment totals just over $1.04 trillion — and the geography of where that money is going is far more concentrated than the “global chip race” framing usually suggests. The United States, by a wide margin 49 of the 80 tracked projects — six in ten — are in the United States, representing $610.3 billion, or roughly 59% of all tracked global investment. That concentration is a direct downstream effect of the CHIPS and Science Act: nearly every major foundry, memory, and logic manufacturer with a US-eligible project has announced or expanded a US site since 2022, from TSMC's now three-phase Arizona campus to Samsung's Taylor, Texas foundry to Micron's dual-state memory buildout. The next tier: East Asia and Europe South Korea is a distant second at $155.3 billion across just 4 projects — Samsung and SK Hynix's domestic megafabs skew toward a small number of extremely large single sites rather than many mid-size ones. Japan tracks $84.0 billion across 6 projects, spread across Rapidus's Hokkaido leading-edge bet and TSMC's Kumamoto expansion. Germany, at $52.3 billion across 4 projects, is the largest European destination on paper — though one of its largest commitments, Intel's Magdeburg site, is currently tracked as cancelled, which overstates Germany's “active” total relative to what's actually under construction today. Everyone else is fighting for the remainder Ireland ($32.0B, 1 project — Intel's Leixlip Fab 34), Taiwan ($27.7B, 6 projects), Israel ($25.0B, 1 project — Intel's Kiryat Gat), China ($19.3B, 4 projects), Singapore ($16.8B, 3 projects), France ($7.5B, 1 project), and Italy ($5.0B, 1 project) round out the list. Taiwan's relatively modest tracked total is notable given its outsized role in global chip manufacturing — TSMC's dollar-heaviest expansions right now are happening abroad, in Arizona and Japan, not at home. What this means A “global” trillion-dollar semiconductor investment wave is, in dollar terms, close to a 60-cents-on-the-dollar US story right now, with South Korea and Japan a distant second and third. Watch this concentration for how durable it is: several of the largest US projects — TSMC Arizona Phase 3, Micron's Clay, NY megafab — are still years from completion, and how much of that $610 billion actually reaches production, on schedule, is a separate question from how much has been announced. Figures reflect FabPulse's tracked dataset as of September 2026, compiled from company press releases, SEC filings, and CHIPS for America disclosures. This is a snapshot of publicly disclosed, still-evolving projects — not a complete census of global semiconductor capital investment.