Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has said it will build its second U.S. computer chip manufacturing plant in Taylor, Texas.

The $17 billion plant will make advanced semiconductors that can be used to power smartphones, 5G and artificial intelligence workloads. It’s expected to create 2,000 new high-tech jobs in the state.

Construction is set to begin in the first half of the year, and officials say it’s expected to go online by the second half of 2024. At least 6,500 construction jobs will also be created.

Samsung is one of the world’s largest contract chip manufacturers and the world’s No. 1 supplier of memory chips. It had also been considering sites in Arizona and New York for the plant, which will be much larger than its existing U.S. facility in Austin, Texas.

The company said it chose Texas again due to factors such as its infrastructure stability, proximity to that existing plant and government support.

The claim about Texas’s infrastructure might be questionable, as the state was hit by a widespread, multiday power outage last winter that famously took Samsung’s Austin plant offline, causing damage in the region of $254 million to $399 million, Reuters reported.

But Texas Governor Greg Abbot told reporters he is “extremely confident that the power grid is stable, resilient and reliable.”

Sources told Reuters the site in Williamson County offered the best incentives of the three locations Samsung had been considering. It’s known Samsung will receive a $27 million grant by the Texas Enterprise Fund for its job creation.

Samsung is the latest big chipmaker to deepen its investments in the U.S., and it comes at a time when the industry is desperate to boost output to ease a global shortage of semiconductors. U.S. policymakers have been eager to attract that investment as domestic chip production has become a high priority for President Joe Biden’s administration.

In March, Intel Corp. said it is planning to spend around $20 billion to build a pair of new factories in Arizona. Then in June, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest chipmaker, broke ground on its own $12 billion Arizona facility. More recently, Texas Instruments Inc. said it will build up to four new semiconductor fabs in Sherman, Texas, as part of an estimated $30 billion investment.

Samsung’s new fab in Texas is part of a planned $205 billion investment the company is making into what it considers to be “strategic industries” over the next three years. Part of that cash will also be invested into telecommunications and biopharmaceuticals.

Biden’s White House has promised billions of dollars in federal funds to boost chip manufacturing and research, with the goal being to maintain its edge over China when it comes to advanced technologies. At the same time, it wants a reliable supply of chips for critical industries such as auto manufacturing.

Samsung has not yet revealed exactly what kinds of chips it intends to make at the new plant, beyond saying it will manufacture advanced logic chips.

However, analysts say the new fab is expected to be at the cutting edge of chip development, making chips of 5 nanometers or less using billions of dollars worth of equipment from companies such as ASML Holding N.V. Such chips would therefore be far more powerful than the 14- and 28-nanometer chips made at Samsung’s existing plant in Austin.

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