The Biden administration Thursday announced it is committing up to $75 million toward a semiconductor component manufacturing plant being built in Covington.

Absolics, a subsidiary of South Korea-based SK Group, broke ground on the facility in 2022. The project will create more than 1,200 manufacturing and construction jobs, said U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., who has made several economic development trips to South Korea since taking office in 2021.

The federal grant will come from the CHIPS and Science Act Congress passed two years ago, part of Biden’s plan to revitalize American manufacturing.

On Thursday, Ossoff described growing a domestic semiconductor industry now dominated by China as crucial to U.S. national security.

“It has been my vision since I took office that Georgia should lead the nation and America should lead the world in the advanced manufacturing of semiconductor chips,” he said. “Chips are in almost everything we use. They’re crucial to major national security technologies … and to our military.”

SK already has a major presence in Georgia. The company operates an electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant in Commerce, and a second facility is under construction in Cartersville.

The 120,000-square-foot plant in Covington will produce glass substrates, which increase the performance of leading-edge chips by enabling smaller, more densely packed connections resulting in faster and more energy-efficient computing.

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