Very few chip factories are built from the ground up these days. So I leaped at the chance to visit GlobalFoundries‘ new facility in upstate New York. Though the factory is still years away from mass producing chips for our computers and cell phones, it’s still impressive, both in the magnitude of the facility and the advanced technology that it represents.

There are two main approaches to making high-end chips. A few companies, notably Intel and the memory manufacturers, design their own chips and manufacture them in their chip fabrication facilities, known as “fabs.” Most of the rest of the industry consists of “fabless” semiconductor companies that design chips (examples include Qualcomm and Nvidia); and “foundries,” companies that manufacture chips for the design companies. The leading foundries have been TSMC and UMC, both based in Taiwan, along with China’s SMIC and until recently Singapore’s Chartered. Samsung and IBM both have foundry groups that are parts of the larger companies.

GlobalFoundries is a new foundry company that combines the chip-making operations that used to be part of AMD along with Chartered Semiconductor in an alliance funded by ATIC, an investment arm of Abu Dhabi. GlobalFoundries is different from the other companies in having foundries in lots of locations, including six in Singapore (which used to be Chartered), one large one in Dresden, Germany (which used to be called two foundries by AMD); and one under construction in the Luther Forest Technology Campus in Saratoga County, New York, about half an hour north of Albany.

This new facility, called Fab 8, is huge. The project underway, which is just the first stage of what could eventually be built on site, will be 1.3 million square feet and cost about $4.6 billion (including the equipment), according to Norm Armour, VP and General Manager of the facility, who said he believes it is the largest current construction project in the U.S. The construction cost alone is estimated at about $880 million, with the rest of the cost going to the high-end tools it takes to make chips these days.

View the GlobalFoundries slideshow.