One year after Trump’s Foxconn groundbreaking, there is almost nothing to show for it

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It’s been exactly one year since President Trump pushed a golden shovel into a field in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, breaking ground on a planned Foxconn factory he called “the eighth wonder of the world.”

“This is one of the great deals, ever,” he said at the ceremony. The proposed facility would employ more than 13,000 Wisconsin workers and manufacture high-resolution LCD screens. And it would be huge, he said. “Think of it: more than 20 million feet, and that’s probably going to be a minimal number,” he claimed. The factory, Trump said, was evidence he was bringing manufacturing back to the United States, “restoring America’s industrial might.”

But Foxconn’s plans were already shrinking. When then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wooed the company to the state with a subsidy package that came to total $4.5 billion, Foxconn had agreed to build a “Generation 10.5” facility that manufactured 75-inch LCD screens. But days before Trump’s groundbreaking, the company acknowledged it would build a much smaller “Gen6” LCD factory, a type that makes smaller screens and requires far fewer workers.

It would be the first of many changes. The last year has seen the factory shrink, get canceled, reappear, and undergo other shifts chronicled below. Even now, as concrete is finally being poured, it’s unclear what exactly Foxconn is building in Mount Pleasant. Industry experts shown Foxconn’s building plans say it does not appear to even be the scaled-down Gen6 LCD factory. If the last year is any guide, the whipsawing is far from over.

May 2018: The shrinking factory

Shortly before the groundbreaking, reports began to surface that Foxconn had radically scaled back its planned factory. The sticking point was Corning Glass. Large LCDs require glass panels that are too unwieldy and fragile to ship, so Corning would need to build its own factory on-site and wouldn’t do so without lucrative subsidies of its own. A Gen 6 plant, however, produces LCD panels small enough to safely ship glass in from elsewhere.

Foxconn first denied the reports, then confirmed them while denying they constituted a change of plans at all. The company had always planned a phased approach to construction, Foxconn said, and remained committed to building the larger factory and employing 13,000 people. (The contract with the state of Wisconsin is quite explicit about building a Gen 10.5, however, and includes an aggressive timeline for hiring.)

June 2018: AI 8K+5G

After the groundbreaking, Foxconn started buying buildings across Wisconsin to serve as “innovation centers.” The company said each would employ several hundred people and serve as the “cornerstones in the AI 8K+5G ecosystem that Foxconn is building.” Exactly what “AI 8K+5G” means has never been coherently explained.

Though Foxconn said the innovation centers would begin operations in the end of 2018 and early 2019, most remain empty. (Foxconn has never issued a promised update or correction to Verge stories with photos of those empty buildings.) Nevertheless, Foxconn closed a previously announced deal for another building in Madison last week.

August 2018: Robots

When Walker and others were promoting the project, one of the major selling points was the number of blue-collar jobs it would bring back to the former manufacturing center. The prospect of those jobs vanished in August, when Foxconn’s Louis Woo told The Journal Times that most of the factory work would be automated.

“If, six months ago, you asked me: What would be the mix of labor? I would pull out the experience that we have in China and say, ‘Well, 75 percent assembly line workers, 25 percent engineers and managers,’” Woo told The Journal Times. “So, ask me the question today, now it looks like about 10 percent assembly line workers, 90 percent knowledge workers.”

Regardless, Woo said the company still planned to employ 2,000 people by the end of 2019, and 13,000 people by 2023. He also said he was “not really interested in (building) television,” but instead was interested in “vertical solutions” to everything from health care to education.

January 2019: The factory vanishes

On January 30th, Woo blindsided Wisconsin officials when he told Reuters that Foxconn no longer planned to build a television LCD factory at all, because “we can’t compete” with low-cost displays built in other countries. Instead, he said the company would focus on research and specialized products for industry, health care, and other professions.

As Wisconsin officials expressed consternation, Foxconn released an outline of a new plan. Over the next 18 months, the company said it would build a plastic-molding factory, a backend-packaging plant, and other assembly facilities that suggested Wisconsin would serve as the final step in putting together materials produced elsewhere. While this plan could be considered a manufacturing plant, experts said it would employ far fewer people and require much less investment than an LCD factory. Foxconn, however, maintained it would still meet its original hiring and investment targets.

February 2019: The factory returns

Two days after Woo told Reuters Foxconn wouldn’t build a factory, the company reversed course, citing a “personal conversation” between Foxconn CEO Terry Gou and Trump. Observers like Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, which tracks development subsidies, saw the brief cancellation as a trial balloon sent up to test whether Foxconn could back away from an economically unviable project without angering Trump, who was waging a trade war against China.

March 2019: The factory returns, again

After months of stasis in Mount Pleasant, Foxconn announced it was moving forward with a Gen6 LCD factory, which would be operational by late 2020. Over the following months, Foxconn began issuing contracts for roads and infrastructure at the manufacturing site.

June 2019: Foxconn starts building… something

Last week, Foxconn began pouring a concrete foundation at the Mount Pleasant site. But just what Foxconn is building remains unclear.

Before work began, Foxconn submitted floor plans to Wisconsin’s Department of Safety and Professional Services, which The Verge obtained through a records request. The plans are partially redacted, but according to Willy Shih, a Harvard Business School professor who consulted in the screen industry, the foundations and structural support more closely resemble an assembly facility than an LCD fab.

“If you wanted to build the actual LCD fab, you’d need a lot of steel, and you’d need a deep, deep foundation to support it,” Shih says. His guess is the building would receive LCDs made elsewhere, then attach electronics and assemble them into finished devices.

Paul Semenza, a consultant in the LCD manufacturing industry, agrees: “From what I can see there is no fab in this fab plan.”

A Foxconn spokesperson directed The Verge to previous statements of confidence in the foundation. During a recent update, a spokesperson for the project’s general contractor said that though LCD factories elsewhere require deep foundations, differences in Wisconsin’s soil meant that a clay foundation would be sufficient.

What the plans do include: a “VR experience room,” a meditation room, a VIP viewing bridge, and various meeting rooms. Additional renderings released by Mount Pleasant earlier this month note that there will be a “Japanese garden,” and provide detailed descriptions of the shrubbery. They do not, however, say anything about LCD manufacturing. Though the documents refer to the building as “The FAB,” all they say about what will happen there is that it “will be used for the manufacture and assembly of a variety of finished products, and office/conference space for workers.”

Bob O’Brien is the president of Display Supply Chain Consultants, and he was recently brought on by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers to advise on the LCD industry. He has been watching for orders of the photolithography equipment and other machinery an LCD fab would require. Foxconn would have to order the equipment by the end of June in order to begin operations by the end of 2020, O’Brien says, and he has yet to see any orders. Which isn’t to say that Foxconn definitely won’t build an LCD factory, O’Brien says, but he would have to give them “every possible benefit of the doubt” to see how the company would meet its schedule: maybe, for instance, Foxconn could build vibration-dampening pads around the machinery, or take the unusual move of bringing in equipment from existing factories elsewhere.

Even as Foxconn lays the foundation for its factory, it continues to expand the list of devices it might make there. First it went from televisions and monitors to “vertical solutions” for education, health care, medicine, entertainment, sports, security, and smart cities. Earlier this month, an executive said the factory might also produce servers, networking products, and automotive controls. Though the expanding product line was treated as a sign of Foxconn’s commitment, it actually creates more uncertainty around the project. Manufacturing servers is, after all, quite a different process from LCDs.

Asked whether Foxconn was building an LCD factory or something else, and if something else, what it might be, spokespeople for the Evers administration and the state economic development corporation deferred to Foxconn. A Foxconn spokesperson referred The Verge to prior statements saying that the company would build a Gen6 LCD factory, which would “manufacture LCD screens for use in a variety of product applications, including vertical solutions for industries such as education, medical and healthcare, entertainment and sports, security, and smart cities.”

One thing that’s clear is that the factory will be far smaller than what was initially envisioned. Rather than the 20 million square feet Trump announced a year ago, the current facility appears to be a bit less than a million square feet.

Rendering of Foxconn’s high-tech campus released in the fall of 2018.

In anticipation of the factory, Mount Pleasant spent over $100 million acquiring more than 2,000 acres for Foxconn. The village rushed to relocate dozens of residents, pushing some to leave under threat of eminent domain. But now it appears much of that land will not be needed, at least not any time soon. In April, the village leased almost 1,000 acres back to a farmer whom the village had paid $1.6 million the year before, because the land was unused.

Foxconn says it will still eventually employ 13,000 people, and that this factory is only the initial phase. The company says the factory will come online in the fourth quarter of 2020, though Gou also recently told reporters that Trump would attend the start of production next May. Foxconn has said the factory will employ 1,500 people.

Yet the building plans Foxconn submitted to the village show only 570 parking spots. At the end of last year, the company employed just 156 people in the state. It’s possible Foxconn could make up the remaining thousand or so workers by filling its currently vacant innovation centers, though its current rate of hiring makes that unlikely, and it’s probably not what anyone had in mind when they envisioned the return of manufacturing jobs to Wisconsin. To put this shortfall in perspective, Foxconn’s original target was to employ 5,200 people next year.

So one year after the groundbreaking, Foxconn owns a lot of vacant office space across Wisconsin, and it’s building something, but that something has gone from the first Gen 10.5 outside of Asia, to a much smaller Gen 6, to an assembly facility, back to a Gen 6, to possibly not even that.

And no one is any closer to knowing what an AI 8K+5G ecosystem actually is.