The chip jobs
haven't arrived

Ask an agent whether the CHIPS Act is working and you'll get a story about TSMC Arizona and fifty billion dollars in subsidies. Here is the same question answered from the payroll record: every quarter of US semiconductor-manufacturing employment since 2014, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' census of actual paychecks — each figure one call from the cell it came from. The factories are real. The jobs haven't followed.

National semiconductor-manufacturing employment — NAICS 334413, the industry that makes the chips — ended 2025 at 195,374. That is almost exactly where it sat a decade earlier: 180,234 in early 2014. The CHIPS Act, signed in August 2022, was meant to be the inflection. It hasn't shown up in the headcount. After climbing to a peak of 206,512 in mid-2024, employment turned down through 2025 — shedding 11,138 jobs (−5.4%) from that peak, and 3.3% year over year.

If the headcount is flat, two other measures are anything but. The number of establishments — distinct semiconductor-manufacturing locations — rose 60%, from 1,603 in 2014 to 2,570 in 2025, climbing every single year, adding another 57 even through 2025 as employment fell. And total wages more than doubled, from $24.4B in 2014 to a record $55.5B in 2025 — up 6.5% in 2025 alone, the year the jobs went backwards. Index all three to 2014 and the lines fan wide apart:

Pay per worker tells the same story. Average weekly wages in the industry went from $2,598 in 2014 to $5,416 in 2025 — they more than doubled while headcount stood still. That is what a buildout looks like before the hiring wave: capital equipment ordered, fabs constructed, scarce engineers bid up — but the production lines not yet staffed to the level the buildings are sized for.

The national total barely moves because the states are pulling in opposite directions. From the CHIPS Act's first full quarter (2022Q1) to the end of 2025, Texas added 3,522 chip-manufacturing jobs and California 3,209 — while Oregon, a top-three chip state, shed 6,000, the steepest fall anywhere. Even Arizona — the marquee CHIPS destination, home to TSMC's flagship US fab — came in net −1,351, the new-fab ramp not yet outweighing cuts elsewhere in the state.

This is why a single national number misleads — and why every row in the data carries a state and county anchor. The reshoring is real and it is regional: Texas and California up, the Pacific Northwest down, netting to almost nothing at the headline. An agent that stops at "semiconductor employment was flat" misses the entire map underneath it.

The same BLS census carries the industry on the other side of the AI buildout: the data-center sector (NAICS 518210 — computing infrastructure, hosting, data processing) that the compute actually runs in. Since 2020 its employment is up 34%, from 362,000 to 484,000. Over the very same window, the semiconductor manufacturing that supplies it grew about 7%, from 185,000 to 197,000. The industry that operates the machines is staffing up; the one that makes the silicon is not — at least not on American soil, not yet. One source, two NAICS codes, the same hash-verified receipt on every number.

source BLS QCEW · NAICS 518210 vs. 334413 · US national · 2020 → 2025 annual avg · both sha256-verified raw

The demand these chips would feed is not in doubt. US power demand rose 101 TWh in 2025 — the biggest jump in a generation (that model is here), and load-interconnection queues are filling with data-center requests. The compute is being built, and it is drawing power now. The domestic capacity to manufacture the chips inside it is, by the payroll record, still sitting at the level it held a decade ago.