On December 17, 2025, Texas Instruments began production at a new chip plant in Sherman, Texas — a city about 60 miles north of Dallas, in its own separate Sherman-Denison metro area, not part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro at all. Governor Greg Abbott cut the ribbon himself.[3][4] TI's own language for the moment: three and a half years after breaking ground.[3]
Texas Instruments' name has nothing to do with electronics. In 1930, J. Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott founded Geophysical Service Inc. in Dallas, using a reflection-seismology technique Karcher developed to help oil companies find underground deposits — sound waves instead of guesswork.[1] On December 6, 1941, McDermott and three GSI employees — J. Erik Jonsson, Cecil H. Green, and H.B. Peacock — bought the company outright. A defense-electronics division added during World War II grew faster than the original oil-services business; by 1951 the company had outgrown its own name. It reorganized, found "General Instruments" already taken by another firm, and settled on Texas Instruments instead — with the original seismology business folded in underneath it as a subsidiary.[2]
The company that opened a $40 billion chip complex in Sherman was, ninety-five years earlier, four men buying a seismic-surveying outfit for a fraction of that. Nothing about what TI builds today has anything to do with finding oil. What survived the whole way from there to here is the name, the corporate shell — and Texas.
What happened in the three and a half years before the December 2025 opening, on the federal-money side of the project, is a cleaner story than the ribbon-cutting suggests.
TI broke ground on the Sherman site in May 2022, describing it then as a "potential $30 billion investment" across four planned fabs, with as many as 3,000 direct jobs.[5] In August 2024, TI signed preliminary terms for CHIPS and Science Act funding covering Sherman's first two fabs plus a related plant in Lehi, Utah: up to $1.6 billion in direct federal funding, roughly $3 billion in proposed loans, an estimated $6–8 billion from a separate 25 percent investment tax credit, and $10 million in workforce funding.[6]
The final award agreement was signed December 20, 2024 — almost exactly a month before the Biden administration left office. Its terms: up to $1.6 billion in direct funding, of which $900 million was earmarked specifically for the Sherman site (the rest for Lehi), tied to roughly 1,500 manufacturing jobs at Sherman.[7][8] The $3 billion loan from the August preliminary terms doesn't appear anywhere in the final December documents. Nothing in TI's own materials or the federal announcement says the loan was cancelled — it's simply absent from the final terms, which isn't the same claim.
Seven months into the following administration, TI announced a much larger figure. On June 18, 2025, the company said it now planned "more than $60 billion" in total U.S. investment across Sherman and Lehi — of which "up to $40 billion" was specifically for Sherman, covering the original two fabs already underway plus two new ones, SM3 and SM4.[9] That's roughly $10 billion more committed to Sherman alone than the original 2022 figure, four years earlier.
The announcement didn't attach any new federal grant, loan, or tax credit to that increase — the CHIPS money had already been finalized six months earlier, under the prior administration. What it did attach was a direct statement of political alignment. CNBC's coverage of the same announcement described it explicitly: TI's expansion came "amid Trump's onshoring push."[10]
TI's business was genuinely down when the CHIPS deal was negotiated. Full-year 2024 revenue was $15.6 billion, down 11 percent from 2023's $17.5 billion; net income fell 25 percent.[11] That's real context, not a company padding its balance sheet while collecting federal money.
By the time of the June 2025 expansion announcement, that had reversed. Second-quarter 2025 revenue was up 16 percent year-over-year to $4.45 billion; third-quarter revenue was up 14 percent to $4.74 billion.[12][13] In the trailing twelve months through Q2 2025, TI generated $6.9 billion in operating cash flow and returned $6.7 billion to shareholders through dividends and buybacks[12] — in a single year, roughly four times the $1.6 billion it received in direct CHIPS grant funding for two countries' worth of fabs.
Federal money isn't the only public money at Sherman. Grayson County commissioners approved a 90 percent property tax abatement running a full 30 years for TI in October 2021, before groundbreaking.[14] GlobiTech, a TI spinoff that supplies wafers to the Sherman plant, went further: it filed four separate agreements under Texas's Chapter 313 school-tax-abatement program, staggered roughly a decade apart, ahead of the program's original December 2022 sunset — the last one tied to a facility not scheduled to be built until 2040.[15] The program that authorized the abatement will have been gone for nearly two decades before its final installment even applies.
None of this requires bad faith on anyone's part. Semiconductor fabs take years to plan, fund, and build, and federal awards move on their own bureaucratic clock, independent of who happens to be in office when the ribbon gets cut. But the sequence is on the record either way: the actual federal money was negotiated and finalized under one administration, a month before it left. The larger number, and the credit for it, went to the next one — with no comparable new federal commitment attached to the difference. Money, tax credits, and the announcement that gets to claim them don't always move on the same timeline, and Sherman is a specific, dated case where you can watch all three separately.