The CHIPS and Science Act, signed in August 2022, set aside $52.7 billion for US semiconductors, including $39 billion in manufacturing incentives run by the Commerce Department’s CHIPS Program Office. Those incentives pay for new fabs, packaging plants and suppliers of wafers, gases and equipment, mostly as direct grants, sometimes with loans. Most of the big awards were finalized in the last months of the Biden administration. The Trump administration kept the programme but changed how it works, most visibly by turning Intel’s grants into a government shareholding.

A “3nm” chip has no important feature that measures 3 nanometres. Node names stopped describing physical sizes decades ago and now work as generation labels, each one promising a denser, more efficient chip than the last. This page explains where the names came from, how the big foundries’ labels line up, and which numbers actually tell you something. Last updated: 15 September 2026. Where the names came from Through the 1990s a node name roughly matched the length of a transistor’s gate.