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A constellation of factors contributed to what in effect was a dramatic transformation, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, of a dormant city, in this case Utica.  Barely ten minutes away by car from the formerly decayed center was a semiconductor chip fabrication plant, sprouting among agricultural fields…and tantalizingly nearby, a relatively new (and growing) state university facility devoted to technology, SUNY Polytechnic Institute.

In that farm field north of Utica sits an imposing box of a plant, a recently-built silicon carbide chip plant. This was the northern extension of Wolfspeed, a North Carolina company long established there to make silicon chips – computer chips for the information age - out of silicon wafers.  In the former farm field on the way to the Adirondacks, with inexpensive hydropower, a limitless water supply and nearby technical and graduate educational resources, a new plant and an industry could blossom, and profitably so well into the future.

And there, just over a mile away, by bicycle or car, was my answer, at least for the Marcy plant: a major state technical university, one that began life as a technology-oriented higher-level college that morphed into a 4-year program, merged with a division of SUNY Albany (College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering) to be a 5-college university for the emerging nanotechnology industry in the Mohawk Valley.  While Nanoscale itself returned to the SUNY Albany umbrella, SUNY Polytechnic has grown in its own right, in a massive green bowl of land, to provide its graduates to companies nearby like Wolfspeed and many others east and west of Utica.

Upstate just happens to be rich in educational resources focused on technology, the beneficiary of a long-standing New York State commitment to higher education in general

What began in Upstate as isolated one-room schoolhouses in the early 1800s grew in number by the end of the century to 10,000, with secondary education later established in more centralized locations by the 20th century.  Post-secondary education has now mushroomed in New York State to over 300 colleges and universities.  There are 64 campuses that comprise the State University of New York system, including 30 community colleges, with the campuses scattered all over the state.

If limitless water and economical hydroelectric power foster chip production, education is just as critical – the third of three legs on the economic growth stool.  All were present, in that field combined with the field just a few miles away, in the same Oneida County town, Marcy.

After numerous financial transformations and multiple mergers, Malta NY became the global headquarters for GlobalFoundries, assuming the IBM chip mantle and now the second largest chip-making corporation in the US.  Saying that a chip plant is in Malta is deceptive.  Malta, the center of town itself, is a quiet residential town, without a hint of what is happening just outside of town.  The area around Malta had been in the late nineteenth century a failed agricultural region, covered with a thick layer of sand from a prior ice age. The thin cover of soil that had accumulated over time on top of the sand had long ago blown away, impoverishing the area for agriculture.

A part of it was later hived off to become home to a number of future-oriented companies in semiconductor and nanotechnology manufacturing, most notably the roughly $10 billion dollar Malta facility housing GlobalFoundries.  It needed to be doubled, to meet global needs, to accommodate the development of chips for silicon photonics along with 3D and heterogeneously integrated chips, essential to the development of artificial intelligence

An access road had been closed off, an additional building or complex of buildings in the process of being constructed, expanded, a wide field cleared and filled with construction material and a skeletal framework and crews and machinery, a doubling of the existing plant in process.  How to turn $10 billion into $20 billion. Intuitively obvious: with money.

While IBM provided the initial research impetus more than a half century before, up and down the length of the Hudson, there was an even more impressive research effort not far from Malta, in Albany, alongside the Interstate.  Looming next to the highway and over a massive construction site were at times, cranes that seemed to scrape

A public-private educational partnership complex adjoins the SUNY Albany campus:  the $15 billion Albany Nanotech Complex.  This great white whale of a multi-building site boasted of 1.65 million square feet of research and development space.  the largest chip fabrication research and development center outside of Taiwan.  It is now home to the National Semiconductor Technology Center, with academic input from SUNY Polytechnic Institute and SUNY Albany.  It works collaboratively with over 300 corporations and academic entities for advanced chip development. It had expanded from its original chip fabrication research intent to include nanotechnology research for clean and renewable energy technologies.

Another of IBM’s interests lay in supercomputers, an outgrowth of quantum mechanics research in the 1980s.  This led to the development of a quantum computing chip, initially offered remotely as a service, over the Internet in 2016.  The company further developed it into stand-alone facilities, with the first implementation in a university setting at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Voorhees Computing Center Chapel, in Troy NY.

On one side of that technological campus sits a glass-enclosed facility housed in a former Catholic chapel.  It rests now – it did not as a chapel – atop a basement housing extensive refrigeration technology, designed to maintain the small quantum chip in that glass housing at absolute-zero temperature.  In a metaphorical touch, the working computer itself is planted in the middle of the arched chapel, with four ancient stained-glass windows representing the 4 Doctors of the Church, Gregory the Great, Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo and Jerome.  They are among the saints recognized as having made a significant contribution to theology or doctrine through their research, study, or writing.  Their stained-glass images cast a benevolent gaze upon the forefront of contemporary computing and knowledge creation.

Edmund Wilson described Syracuse and what lay beyond to the west as “monotonous and dreary, perfectly flat” [Upstate / Wilson / p 359].  That flat land, long left as reasonably productive agricultural territory, is now undergoing site preparation and the initial stages of construction for one of the largest semiconductor chip fabrication complexes in the United States, a massive private development for Micron, being developed with additional state and Federal support.

The project is extensive, in terms of square feet, square feet of clean rooms, dollar investment and yield in high-paying tech jobs in the midst of farm fields.  The 4-stage $100 billion complex rolls out over nearly two decades, with site planning complete and ground broken in 2026. The first two of the four chip fab facilities are slated to begin shipping products by 2030 and the final two planned to be online and working by 2041.

Optics and vision research that has made Rochester the global center for this work has had a beneficial effect on another aspect of technology, drone development.

The cluster of advanced drone research entities has resulted in a drone highway, a formal designation for development and testing.  The FAA-Designated New York Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Test Site stretches from Rome (Griffiss International Airport) west to Syracuse (Syracuse Hancock International Airport).  It is one of seven authorized in the country, but at present the only one in the United States operating from commercial airports.  It facilitates the testing of many types of unmanned autonomous vehicles flying in active commercial air space and amidst passenger air traffic.

The Rochester Institute of Technology, the result of a merger in 1891 between a struggling literary society, the Rochester Athenaeum from 1829, and a technical trade school, the Mechanics Institute, begun in 1885.  In 1944, the technical school morphed into a fledgling research university, with the first degree-granting program in semiconductor chip fabrication and integrated circuits (1983).  the first-in-the-nation program in imaging science (1993) and the first US college to offer an undergraduate software engineering degree (1996).

RIT has expanded well beyond its original technical roots.  It now extends to encompass 75 buildings sprawling over an expansive and bucolic 1300-acre campus.  The main campus has 19,000 students enrolled, offers over 200 academic programs and has satellite branches in 4 countries.  Its co-op program is the fourth oldest in the world, involving over 2000 businesses as real-world learning environments for its students.

The optics influence from Rochester was evident heading south past the wine-growing Finger Lakes, to the Corning Glass Works…shortened to reflect its product diversity now as simply Corning.  Begun in 1851 in Massachusetts as a traditional glass-making works, it moved to Brooklyn, NY and ultimately in 1868 to its present location in Upstate.  Set in an understated farming community among gentle hills, the company has had world-wide impact on developments in glass, ceramics and advanced optics.

The range of materials and discoveries from Corning have over generations played a part in display technologies, life sciences, optical communication, specialty materials and environmental technology, everything from light bulbs to cathode ray tubes, optical fiber cable connecting the world, smartphone glass in billions of hands and telescopes that peer from isolated mountaintops into outer space, shattering one’s expectations to show us the future and the past.

As spring returned faithfully to the hills around Corning, the cycle of innovation and invention that had never abandoned this community appeared to be favoring so much more of Upstate.

Quietly, this part of the country has become a global epicenter for chip fabrication research and development, drone development, cybersecurity, quantum computing, artificial intelligence/machine learning and vision and optics investigations.

A long way from the Erie Canal to the future.