Tim Steller Back when I was business editor, 15 years ago, nobody in Tucson was talking about batteries.
On Dec. 6, a new company called American Battery Factory announced it had chosen a site near Tucson International Airport to establish a headquarters and its first"gigafactory" for the production of lithium iron phosphate battery cells. It could eventually employ 1,000 people. What is going on in this town, the place where logistics and space still look promising, but batteries are booming? It all has to do with what's happening in the state, and the country, and the world.
So did Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which is heightening the need to break the world's dependence on Russian fossil fuels and minerals. Lucid and Nikola have begun production of electric vehicles at new plants in Pinal County. Intel is opening two new semiconductor fabrication plants at its Chandler campus, and on Dec. 6, TSMC announced a new $40 billion investment in Phoenix-area fab plants.
Tucson and Pima County have been laying the groundwork for something like the American Battery Factory plant, though. The county bought 400 acres south of the Raytheon plant in 2012 and began realigning Aerospace Parkway in 2015, to make room for Raytheon to expand and for other aerospace and defense businesses to come in.