President Trump announced $1.5 billion in War Department funding for North Carolina semiconductor chips, pairing the investment with a new Sibelco plant ahead of the midterms.
President Donald Trump told a North Carolina rally crowd Tuesday night that the Department of War will put serious money into domestic chip production on home soil. The pledge landed as part of a broader manufacturing pitch ahead of the November midterms.
Just The News reported that Trump framed the move as a direct bet on the state’s industrial base, with Sibelco set to build a massive manufacturing plant in North Carolina and the War Department committing more than $1 billion to boost semiconductor work there.
Trump put the figure in plain terms from the stage.
"The Department of War will be investing $1.5 billion dollars to produce cutting-edge semiconductor chips right here in North Carolina,"
he said.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick backed the announcement and tied it to a core White House goal. He said one of the president’s fundamental objectives has been to restore semiconductor manufacturing inside the United States.
Lutnick did not hedge on the supply-chain problem.
"So, the president had as one of his fundamental objectives was to bring semiconductor manufacturing home to America, right?"
he said. Then he drove the point home:
"It’s all made in Taiwan, right? And that’s just too far away for America. So he’s bringing it home."
He added that the new North Carolina facility will focus on quartz manufacturing. Lutnick called quartz “basically the foundation of semiconductors.”
Trump used the rally to stack the chip pledge next to recent manufacturing wins he said the state has already secured. Those include about 15,000 jobs and billions of dollars in investments tied to companies such as Johnson & Johnson, JetZero, Merck, and Biogen.
The Sibelco plant announcement sat alongside the War Department funding language. Reporting described both a $1.5 billion chip-production investment and a separate phrasing of more than $1 billion to lift the state’s semiconductor manufacturing. Officials presented the projects as part of the same home-front push.
Trump has made similar investment and deal claims at other campaign stops. Tuesday night’s North Carolina event continued that pattern with a defense-linked manufacturing angle.
Beyond the chip money, Trump told the crowd that Taiwan will invest $4.4 billion in the Alaska pipeline and that South Korea is putting $200 billion into U.S. energy infrastructure. Those figures came as campaign-trail claims tied to his broader industrial message.
The through-line was straightforward: pull critical production out of distant supply chains, put factories and defense-relevant capacity in American states, and show voters tangible plant and job announcements before November.
Details on the exact funding vehicle, construction timeline, and specific North Carolina site were not laid out in the initial report. What was clear was the political and industrial frame Trump and Lutnick chose, Department of War dollars, a Sibelco plant, quartz at the base of the chip stack, and a break from total reliance on Taiwan.
Secure supply chains and American factories beat distant dependence every time, and North Carolina just got the next public down payment.
