The CHIPS and Science Act—the Biden administration’s $53 billion boost to the domestic semiconductor industry—turned one year old on August 9.

• The law, which received bipartisan support in the House and Senate, set aside funding for semiconductor research and development, workforce efforts, and supply chain reliability, and created a 25% tax credit for manufacturing expenses.

Tech Brew caught up with Allen Thompson, who leads US-Canada government affairs at semiconductor chip maker Intel, to find out about how the first 12 months of funding have impacted the chip giant and its US production capabilities.

“There’s been a lot of seismic movement, and I would say the CHIPS Act has catalyzed the investments in a way that I think the bipartisan majorities in Congress envisioned,” Thompson told Tech Brew.

Still processing: Thompson credits some of Intel’s own plans for growth—doubling semiconductor factories in Arizona to four, investing in equipment upgrades for its New Mexico packaging operations, and developing two new fabrication plants in Ohio—to the legislation.

Keep reading here.—MA

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“There are a few things you can’t learn in an office or from a PowerPoint.”

That’s how Ford CEO Jim Farley announced the start of his August road trip in the auto maker’s $50,000 electric truck, the F-150 Lightning. So far, he’s driven from the Bay Area, through Los Angeles, along Route 66, and is ending his trip in Las Vegas, and he’s documented the tour—from storing luggage in the “frunk” to inflating a bouncy house—on Twitter and in abundant press coverage.

By the time Tech Brew caught up with Farley last weekend, he was back in California for Monterey Car Week, but he still had EV charging on the brain, saying that the trip changed the way he’s thinking about the electrification transition.

“We’re entering kind of the messy middle of this transition…which is going from an analog to a digital product, where software will define much or most of the differentiation for customers’ experience,” Farley said.

Driving forces: EV adoption is on the rise globally, and EVs are projected to account for 18% of total car sales in 2023. Some challenges remain: Ford, which has around 8% EV market share in the US, and whose Mustang Mach-E was among the most-sold EVs last year, has continued to report billion-dollar losses on that business, in part due to production problems.

Keep reading here.—MA

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

My job is to take a successful food company and transform it into a leader at the intersection of food and tech. At Kraft Heinz, this means setting the North Star, defining an investment strategy focused on growth and innovation.

To truly transform, we need to transform ourselves first by breaking old routines and habits. The best part of my role as chief strategy and transformation officer is positioning digital as the key enabler of our transformation, exploring cutting-edge technologies, and choosing to scale the capabilities that best serve our purpose, customers, and consumers.

What’s the most compelling tech project you’ve worked on, and why?

We are moving fast to deliver on many emerging tech projects as a team right now. One I’m proud of is the recent launch of our Tech Innovation Lab. Our goal is to create an ecosystem connecting all our digital products to give Kraft Heinz the ability to react in real time to any new signal impacting logistics, supply chain, operations, sales, and marketing.

This real-time farm-to-fork approach will help us predict the best set of actions to better serve our community, both B2B and B2C. Most importantly, I love having our entire suite of digital products at our fingertips, so we can learn and pivot our plans with agility. It’s a dream of ours to democratize information and empower each Kraft Heinz colleague to act as if the business were their own.

Keep reading here.—AS

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Stat: Del Monte surged 26% percent last quarter because of booming sales of its pink pineapple. (Morning Brew Daily)

Quote: “By listening to reefs, we realised we could start to unlock their language.”—Steve Simpson, a professor of marine biology and global change at the University of Bristol in the UK, on the use of underwater recordings to research oceanic life (BBC)

Read: “Sponge cities” are designed urban buildings and environments where rainwater is utilized and managed more consciously—why shouldn’t countries with rain management concerns like New Zealand build more of them? (The Conversation)