Patrick Leahy: “as the Senate prepares to vote on the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, I wanted to take moment to highlight the…”

“as the Senate prepares to vote on the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, I wanted to take moment to highlight the support this bill provides to the U.S. semiconductor industry. I want to commend the leadership that Senators Warner, Cornyn, and Schumer have shown in highlighting the need for our country to ensure that we maintain leading edge manufacture capabilities in the United States. I strongly support the over $50 billion provided in this bill for the Department of Commerce to join in partnerships with U.S. semiconductor companies. My history with microelectronics spans my career in the Senate, and I can remember when Tom Watson selected Essex Junction as the location for an IBM fab to produce some of the first generations of mass produced integrated circuit memory and processing chips. Of course, it revolutionized computing. Over the years, Vermonters working out of Essex led the way in inventing new kinds of chips and new ways to make chips, at the same time making Vermont the State with the most patents per capita. Over that time, I heard again and again from national security leaders from both political parties that one of the biggest threats facing the United States was that our revolutionary technology was threatened by the production of chips increasingly moving to foreign countries.…”