BURLINGTON — Monday’s announcement that EMP Shield plans to construct a $1.9 billion computer chip manufacturing plant in rural Coffey County will have ripple effects throughout southeast Kansas.
Some of those largest ripples will be felt almost immediately at Allen Community College, one of the educational partners tasked with workforce training for the new facility.
Gov. Laura Kelly, Lt. Gov. David Toland and EMP Shield founder Tim Carty were joined by scores of other dignitaries, including ACC President Bruce Moses, for the announcement.
Kelly said EMP Shield will build its facility on a 300-acre campus near Beto Junction — dubbed Silicon Prairie Industrial Park — and will create more than 1,200 jobs with an average salary of $66,000.
The new plant will have four production lines within the 235,000-square-foot facility, and be able to produce thousands of chips a week that can be utilized with everything from cell phones to automobiles.
Construction is expected to take about three years.
Allen’s educational partners include Flint Hills Technical College, the University of Kansas and Pittsburg State University.
THE PROJECT came together shortly after the federal CHIPS Act (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) was signed into law last August, with the goal of ramping up computer chip production in the United States, particularly in rural areas across the Midwest.
The bipartisan legislation called for every aspect of computer chip production to be brought back to the United States. Additional stipulations include private-public partnerships as well as the involvement of higher education institutions.
Kansas is contributing $660 million to the plant’s construction in addition to applying for CHIPS Act funding, said Carty.
Gov. Kelly said, “Right now, computer chips, the technology that powers everything from cars to smartphones to broadband, are mostly made in China. That’s a problem.
“It means that both our national defense systems and the goods and services Americans rely upon are vulnerable to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.
“And, it means that if there’s a computer chip shortage, like we’re experiencing now, we have no control as prices skyrocket.
“This is where EMP Shield comes in,” Kelly continued. “The company is a leader in protecting our electronic devices from external threats, like the destructive magnetic pulses known as EMPs or the type that could be emitted from nuclear attacks.”
EMP Shield, which was founded in Burlington in 2018, manufactures more than 50 models of electrical surge suppressors designed and built to exceed military standards for EMP surge protection.
The company’s customer base includes the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and other federal agencies.
