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Springs Wins Entegris Project After Highly Competitive Process Advanced Manufacturing
Entegris’s new manufacturing facility will be built in phases, with the first phase slated to open in early 2025.
BY JEANNE DAVANT
In December of 2022, high-tech supplier Entegris publicly revealed plans to build a $600 million manufacturing center of excellence in northwest Colorado Springs. The announcement was celebrated with champagne toasts by city and state economic development officials.
Entegris had been a key part of Colorado Springs’ high-tech manufacturing industry for 30 years. Its Arrowswest Drive facility off Garden of the Gods Road employs about 350 people.
The new facility will bring up to 600 new jobs with an average annual wage of almost $75,000 and could have a $2.47 billion total impact on the local economy, Colorado Springs Chamber & EDC President and CEO Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer exulted then.
It was a big win, but it wasn’t a sure thing as it still needed a lot of negotiation, savvy pitches and millions of dollars in incentives.
Expansion rationale
Headquartered in Billerica, Massachusetts, Entegris operates sites in 14 states and 10 other countries, from Canada to Taiwan, and employs more than 9,000 worldwide. It is the world’s leading supplier of a product essential to the semiconductor manufacturing process — the carriers that transport and protect silicon disks within highly automated manufacturing plants and other specialty materials and delivery systems.
“We sell to big chip manufacturers like Taiwan Semiconductor, Intel, Microchip and Micron Technology, and the smaller guys too,” says Senior Vice President Bill Shaner, who heads the company’s Advanced Materials Handling division.
The past two and a half years have witnessed significant growth in the semiconductor industry, driven by 5G communications and the Internet of Things, Shaner says. To meet the increasing demand, Entegris made a large investment in its facilities in Taiwan, the location of its biggest customer.
“We also made a decision that we wanted to build our presence in North America,” he says. The engineering for the wafer carriers was done in Colorado Springs, but as of now, they are produced in Malaysia. “It was a strategic decision by Entegris to have the ability to manufacture these products in the United States,” he says.
Selection process
Entegris developed a highly competitive process to determine where that expansion would happen, evaluating locations in 14 states before selecting the 88-acre site between South Rockrimmon Boulevard and Ute Valley Park.
Colorado Springs was a sentimental favorite. The company’s founder fell in love with the area when looking to move his original company, Empak, out of Minnesota, says Shaner, a Colorado Springs native who joined the company in 1992 as a young engineer. The city also provided a welcoming environment for high-tech companies, a good source of talent, a strong military presence and better access to customers locally and abroad.
The site proposed for the new plant has a high-tech manufacturing history — at one time, it was the location of a large Hewlett-Packard campus. Those buildings were torn down in 2012, but the site is designated as an enterprise zone, which makes it eligible for tax breaks.
The site’s existing infrastructure was also a plus, and Colorado Springs’ quality of life, labor costs and quality educational facilities, taxes and local business climate helped narrow down the search to a few locations, including Austin, Texas, and Denver. The company also considered that, in Colorado Springs, it could be a big player in a smaller ecosystem, Shaner says.
“We felt very confident that the city, county and mayor’s office in Colorado Springs, along with the EDC, were really committed to collaborating and helping us to be successful,” Shaner says. “We’ve had exceptional responses from the school districts that are wanting to collaborate with us. When we looked at all those things, Colorado Springs became the clear leader.”
Of course, financial incentives played a huge role. Entegris’s $115 million state and local incentives package includes city and county tax rebates, rebates from Colorado
Springs Utilities and urban renewal and enterprise zone funding, plus performance-based tax credits approved by the Colorado Economic Development Commission. The company has applied for $130 million in federal CHIPS and Science Act funding.
In June 2023, Entegris broke ground on the project’s first phase: a 100,000-square-foot building that will cost about $200 million. It will house the company’s micro-contamination control and advanced materials handling divisions and employ about 350 people when it begins operations in early 2025, Shaner says.
The company expects the new plant to bolster Colorado Springs’ and the state’s positions as leaders in the semiconductor ecosystem, says Entegris CEO Bertrand Loy.
“The semiconductor manufacturing industry is set to expand in the United States, and Entegris’ manufacturing center of excellence will enable our organization to play a meaningful role in this important effort,” he says.
Jeanne Davant is a senior writer for the SoCo Business Forum & Digest.
