“Boise is showing that affordable housing can lead on clean heat, not wait for it,” said Jake Wood, managing director of affordable housing development for J. Fisher Co., in a statement. “No other U.S. city has tried this, and we’re proud to build it alongside a city willing to go first and partners like Micron willing to back it.”

The initiative reportedly marks a milestone for a U.S. city to utilize a municipal geothermal network to serve a multifamily affordable housing complex. To achieve this, the city-owned utility will tap into the 177°F underground water, piping and routing it through more than 20 miles of city infrastructure to reach the 300-unit complex.

Boise’s municipal geothermal approach to carbon neutrality

The City of Boise Public Works Department, operating as a geothermal developer and operator, reportedly manages the largest municipally owned geothermal heating district in the U.S. Boise’s geothermal heating system currently warms about 90 buildings, covering over 6 million square feet of indoor space with its geothermal infrastructure below the city.

Earlier this year, the city received $1 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, a multi-year global competition that attracted over 600 cities worldwide. Boise won the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge grand prize during February’s global summit held in Madrid, Spain, and was selected to pilot the expansion of its geothermal system.

As outlined in the city’s system overview, rain and snow fall onto the Boise Mountains and are later absorbed into the ground. That groundwater is then heated by granitic rocks deep below the surface. Once that groundwater is drawn up from 800-foot wells below, hot water then flows through underground pipes to heat city buildings, warm domestic water and even assist with melting snow on sidewalks during the winter months.

Once the water cools, it is pumped straight back down into the geothermal reservoir (aquifer) below the earth, making it a highly resourceful, sustainable process for Boise. The new project supports the city’s strict climate targets: achieving 100% clean energy for all government facilities by 2030 and becoming 100% carbon neutral for government operations by 2035.

City officials note that the community cuts thousands of tons of carbon emissions each year, equal to taking more than 2,000 gas-powered cars off the road through this geothermal initiative.

Micron's local strategy to scale domestic semiconductor manufacturing

Micron is supporting this development effort, which is leading the charge for a U.S. city to use geothermal heat to serve multifamily affordable housing. The Idaho-based memory and storage solutions provider is investing heavily in the state after securing up to $6.4 billion in direct federal funding under the CHIPS and Science Act. The federal legislation is providing qualified Idaho semiconductor companies with a sales and use tax exemption on qualifying construction.

Signed into law in 2022, the legislation enabled the Department of Commerce to funnel $50 billion toward a suite of U.S. programs aimed at strengthening and revitalizing domestic leadership in semiconductor research, development and manufacturing. Semiconductors, the chips that power modern electronics, play a major role in the evolving energy landscape involving automobiles, data centers, critical infrastructure and the majority of military systems.

Micron is investing $67 million into Idaho’s overall community framework, including the geothermal and affordable workforce housing initiative. Among the federal CHIPS requirements, tech companies must prove that their massive new factory expansions “won't crush local communities by spiking rent, overcrowding schools or gridlocking traffic.”

This requirement is paving the way for the company’s massive multi-billion-dollar semiconductor expansions across the Boise footprint, which is primarily funded through corporate revenue and public-private partnerships.

These regional expansions include: Micron’s planned $15 billion fabrication facility to scale domestic production of computer memory chips, specifically dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), to integrate and power AI and data centers. The company is also building its Research Labs Campus in Boise. The innovation hub, backed by a planned $10 billion investment over the next decade, will aim to advance next-gen development of computer memory and storage tech.

“Boise has been Micron’s headquarters for 48 years, and investing in this community means investing in the people who call it home,” said April Arnzen, executive vice president, chief people officer and president of the Micron Foundation.