THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 14, 1995 TAG: 9508130026
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 46 lines
Let the good times roll.
Last April, Motorola announced it would spend up to $3 billion on a computer-chip plant in the Richmond area that could someday employ 5,000.
Last week, IBM Corp. and Japan's Toshiba Corp. announced they will spend as much as $4 billion for a computer-chip plant in Northern Virginia that could employ 4,000.
Robert T. Skunda, state secretary of commerce and trade, said Motorola's decision to build here played a crucial role in IBM and Toshiba's decision to put their plant at Manassas.
As was reported in this paper Wednesday, those two plants combined ``will vault Virginia into the top five chip-making states - and position it to recruit potentially tens of thousands of related jobs in the fast-growing industry.''
The high-tech snowball is rolling and growing in Virginia.
Gov. George F. Allen said of the IBM-Toshiba plant, ``This confirms Virginia's emergence as the new technology center of the Eastern United States.''
Even before the announcements that the two chip plants were coming here, Virginia was hardly high-tech chopped liver. The Pensinsula has NASA Langley and the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. The latter attracts many of the top physicists in the world. The Washington suburbs contain a concentration of information technology exceeded only by Silicon Valley and the Boston beltway. Roanoke has more fiber-optic capacity per capita than any other city between Boston and San Jose.
Still, the two new plants will truly position Virginia to prosper in the 21st century.
Kevin Brett, a spokesman for the Semiconductor Industry Association in San Jose, said, ``You can't overestimate the impact of these announcements on the economy in the state.''
Just as wealth begets wealth and knowledge begets knowledge, high-tech plants beget more high-tech plants. And the jobs pay well. by CNB