Gov. Hochul’s $11B Micron economic-development gambit is looking like a bust

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s big jobs-creating win is melting away just as her 2026 re-election bid gets underway, as the Micron chip factory fades into the future — at best.

Micron just pushed back plans to open the upstate chipmaking operation by five years; instead, it’s reallocating federal CHIPS Act funding to rush construction of a second plant in its home state of Idaho.

In October 2022, Hochul and Micron Technology CEO Sanjay Mehrotra announced a $100 billion investment in a mega-complex of four computer chip plants in Central New York, promising to create 40,000 construction jobs and 9,000 factory jobs over 20 years.

If that payoff ever comes, it now won’t be before 2030 at the earliest.

So what Hochul hailed as the single-largest private investment in state history, creating a 21st century leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing hub, is now just another hopeful wish.

Even though the gov offered Micron the largest corporate welfare handout in state history — about $5.5 billion in subsidies.

Micron was slated to receive close to $4.9 billion in exemptions from sales and use taxes on construction and building materials, plus discounted electricity when the plants were up and running; the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency granted a 49-year property tax break valued at $284 million.

And last year, the Biden administration pledged $6.1 billion in taxpayer support from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act for Micron — which now apparently will go for a factory in Idaho.

Even billions in federal-state-local bribes turn out to not be enough to get a leading global semiconductor manufacturer to build a plant in New York: That’s how atrocious the state’s business climate has become.

Sky-high taxes, soaring energy costs, hostile regulations — and a still-rising hard-left political class that’s likely to make it all worse in coming years — counteract the state’s many virtues.

Bringing in Micron was supposed to show that Hochul’s leadership could turn things around; the gambit’s failure proves just the opposite.

Kathy Hochul doesn’t have it in her to turn the Empire State around.