On April 12, 2021, days before SkyWater's IPO, President Biden held up one of its silicon wafers at the White House and called chips infrastructure. The Minnesota company was the only U.S.-owned pure-play foundry, a factory that makes chips designed by others. Most of the world's chipmaking had moved to Asia. A global chip shortage was stalling car plants. SkyWater went public in April 2021 as a small fab with a national security story.

Cypress's Old Fab

SkyWater began in 2017, when the private equity firm Oxbow Industries bought Cypress Semiconductor's chip factory in Bloomington, Minnesota. The plant made chips on 200-millimeter wafers at older 90 and 130 nanometer sizes. SkyWater held the Pentagon's Trusted Foundry status, so it could build chips for defense programs. It also worked with customers to take new technologies from the lab to production. With Google and Efabless, it opened its 130 nanometer design kit to anyone in 2020.

Bought by a Quantum Company

SkyWater sold 6.96 million shares at $14 each in April 2021 and listed on Nasdaq as SKYT. Oxbow kept about 73.6 percent of the stock. The company added a fab in Florida and, in June 2025, bought Infineon's 200-millimeter plant in Austin. In January 2026 the quantum computing company IonQ agreed to buy SkyWater for about $1.8 billion in cash and stock. The deal closed in July 2026.

Cover: Brig on the Water, Gustave Le Gray. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for sky over water (SkyWater).