Sherman, Texas
Sherman is a town of about 54,000 people 60 miles north of Dallas that most land investors have never had a reason to think about. Texas Instruments is spending up to $40 billion there on a four-fab semiconductor campus, a second chipmaker just committed $5 billion next door, and the city has already permitted more than 4,000 new homes to catch up. Local officials are now planning for the population to double within five to ten years. That's the kind of setup that's easy to miss while everyone's still watching Austin.
Two chip companies just remade a farm town's economy
Texas Instruments began production at its first Sherman fab, SM1, in December 2025, roughly three and a half years after breaking ground, as part of a plan to spend up to $40 billion on four fabs at the site (out of a $60 billion, 7-fab investment nationally that TI says will support more than 60,000 jobs). The second fab's exterior shell is already complete, with cleanroom buildout and tool installation underway through 2026. Next door, GlobalWafers subsidiary GlobiTech is expanding its own semiconductor-materials plant with a $5 billion investment, aiming to eventually produce 2.4 million silicon wafers a month and add roughly 1,500 jobs. Sherman's population grew about 20% between the 2020 Census and 2025, and it's now growing at roughly 3% a year, fast enough that local planners are modeling a doubling within five to ten years.
TI's $40B campus is already running
SM1 isn't a groundbreaking-day promise, it started producing AI and automotive chips in December 2025. TI's plan calls for three more fabs on the same site, with SM2's shell complete and cleanroom installation underway in 2026. That's a multi-decade capital commitment with a real supply chain of vendors, contractors, and skilled trades behind it.
GlobiTech's $5B wafer plant
A second, independent chip-materials investment landing in the same small county is a meaningfully different signal than a single anchor employer. GlobiTech's expansion is expected to add about 1,500 jobs and scale to 2.4 million silicon wafers a month, deepening the local semiconductor cluster rather than resting it on TI alone.
The city already sees it coming
Sherman has issued permits for more than 4,000 new homes since the TI announcement, and Zillow puts the typical Sherman home value at roughly $260,000, up about 124% over the past decade with the pace of appreciation accelerating since the fab investments were announced. Builders are responding across single-family and multifamily product.
The city is betting big to keep up
Sherman's two major industrial customers now use roughly 2 million gallons of water a day, and the city has committed on the order of $500-600 million to water and wastewater infrastructure upgrades to support them. That's a strong forward signal: municipal capital only moves this fast when officials believe the growth is durable.
What could go wrong
Semiconductor demand is historically cyclical, TI and its peers have cut capex before, and a Sherman economy now built substantially around TI and GlobiTech carries real concentration risk if chip demand or either company's roadmap shifts. There are already early signs the housing market is getting ahead of the hiring curve: Sherman is a small market (roughly 54,000 residents), so monthly price data is volatile and thin, but Redfin has shown days-on-market stretching past 100 and some recent readings of year-over-year price softness even as Zillow's longer-run trend stays positive, a sign that the 4,000+ permitted homes may be outrunning near-term job creation while fabs two through four are still years from full ramp. The roughly $500-600 million the city is borrowing and spending on water and sewer capacity is also a real fiscal bet, if growth disappoints, that cost lands on local ratepayers and taxpayers rather than on TI or GlobiTech. None of this kills the thesis, but it's why this is a watch, not a scored Buy-tier market yet.
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