3/27/2011 7:43:00 AM

Gannett News Service: With Albany area as model, state looks to create high-tech regional hubs

Gannett News Service

ALBANY — At a business park encircled with mature pine trees in Saratoga County, 1,500 construction workers earlier this month were busily welding air ducts and laying floorboards for a 300,000-square-foot computer chip factory.

At the same time, recruiters from the facility's owner, GlobalFoundries, were in an administrative building trying to lure top engineering students from some of New York's top colleges, including Cornell University, the Rochester Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

By late next year, GlobalFoundries plans to hire 1,400 employees — a remarkable number for the struggling upstate economy — as it opens a state-of-the-art $4.6 billion factory to manufacture 12-inch silicon wafers to power electronic devices such as cell phones and computers. Full article