The Government of Canada and the Government of Québec are contributing nearly $85 million CAD to IBM as part of a $187.1-million CAD investment into developing IBM’s semiconductor assembly plant in Bromont, Québec.
The Prime Minister’s Office claimed its collective investment will help create more than 280 new jobs in the Bromont region.
The funding is part of IBM’s plan is to to spend $1-billion CAD on its Bromont facility over the next five years, IBM told BetaKit in an email statement.
The federal government will contribute $46 million from the Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) for research and development (R&D) and equipment, while Québec is giving IBM a $38.9 million loan, BNN Bloomberg reported, $32-million of which Québec Minister of Economy, Innovation and Energy, Pierre Fitzgibbon, said is forgivable without detailing the loan’s conditions.
IBM told BetaKit the provincial contribution is for equipment only, and that IBM is contributing the remaining $102.2 million for R&D and equipment.
“With the demand for compute surging in the age of AI, advanced packaging and chiplet technology is becoming critical for the acceleration of AI workloads,” IBM senior vice president and director of research Darío Gil said in a statement. “As one of the largest chip assembly and testing facilities in North America, IBM’s Bromont facility will play a central role in this future.”
The federal government also gave MiQro Innovation Collaborative Centre, a nearby semiconductor R&D centre that collaborates with IBM, $13.9 million CAD from the SIF to create more semiconductors. The Prime Minister’s Office claimed in a statement that the collective investment in the semiconductor facilities will help create more than 280 new jobs in the Bromont region, as well as 240 co-op positions.
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IBM said the initial funding will specifically help conduct R&D for scalable manufacturing and other advanced assembly processes to support the packaging of different chip technologies. IBM says chip packaging, the process of connecting integrated circuits on a chip or circuit board, has become more complex as electronic devices have shrunk and the components of chips get smaller.
Semiconductor modules are used in a wide variety of things, including telecommunications, high-performance computing, and generative AI. IBM claims the Bromont plant is one of North America’s largest chip assembly and testing facilities and has been in operation for 52 years. It also hosts one of the few IBM Quantum System One quantum computers in the world, which it officially installed in September.
Last year, semiconductor industry experts and organizations formed SILICAN to advocate for the semiconductor industry in Canada. In October, SILICAN called for the federal government to provide targeted domestic chip support as part of its first policy report.
While the federal government committed to provide up to $250 million CAD for semiconductor projects from the SIF in 2022, there has since been no semiconductor commitments in budget 2023 or budget 2024.
IBM also announced the expansion of its Technology Expert Labs in Markham, Ontario to create more opportunities in areas such generative AI, automation, sustainability, and security.
UPDATE (04/30/24): This article was updated to note IBM announcing the expansion of its Technology Expert Labs in Markham, Ontario.
Feature image courtesy IBM via LinkedIn.
