Tag: Siler City

I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.

Wolfspeed has pivoted before. Until the early 2020s, the large Durham company made both LED lights and a unique semiconductor called silicon carbide. Then, faced with subsidized competition out of China, Wolfspeed ditched its LED division and its original name (Cree) to become, as they say in the business, a “pure-play” silicon carbide supplier.

Today, the chipmaker isn’t diversifying from silicon carbide, but four months removed from bankruptcy, it aspires to evolve again. “At the end of the day, what we’re doing is we’re pretty much looking to pivot away from being a one-trick pony focused on EVs,” Wolfspeed CEO Robert Feurle told investors on an earnings call Wednesday.

Under his predecessor, Wolfspeed bet big on a U.S. electric vehicle revolution powered by lighter, hyperefficient silicon carbide chips. It took out massive loans to finance new SiC factories in New York State and North Carolina’s Chatham County, debt that hastened its plunge into Chapter 11. The company’s creditors became its new shareholders post-bankruptcy; its old shareholders got pennies on the dollar.

The restructured chipmaker now wants its silicon carbide in more places while spending less money. Wolfspeed has officially closed its 150-millimeter device factory in Durham and reduced its total workforce by roughly one-third in the year leading up to bankruptcy. It made additional layoffs in North Carolina this fall. Such efforts have contributed to $200 million in annual operating expense savings, Wolfspeed reported this week.

Its Chatham County materials factory near Siler City is finished but largely dormant due to lack of demand, a massive gray complex surrounded by empty parking lots. What could revive this promised 1,800-worker plant?

A surge in new EV sales is one answer. Yet while electric vehicles remain its largest segment, Wolfspeed wants to expand more into defense and aerospace, materials (supplying silicon carbide to other manufacturers), and energy. Like many, it has identified data centers as a growth area: Wolfspeed SiC chips can be used in the solid-state transformers and cooling apparatuses that keep these proliferating facilities humming.

Wall Street didn’t love what Wolfspeed reported this week. Its stock slumped 10% as the company missed earnings expectations. The chipmaker also lowered its future revenue guidance, which it attributed to elevated sales from customers rushing orders last quarter before the Durham device factory closed. In an analyst note this week, the investment firm Susquehanna also noted “continuing weakness in EVs.”

“Overall, while results were largely disappointing, we look forward to learning more on how the company intends [to] transform the business to better capture its opportunity in SiC, particularly in Data Centers,” Susquehanna wrote. The firm dropped its Wolfspeed target share price from $20 to $15. (For those who remember the company’s shares recently hovering around $1, its Chapter 11 restructuring makes before-and-after price comparisons apples to oranges.)

Another salvation for the Siler City plant may lie in something Wolfspeed announced last month: a new 300-millimeter SiC wafer. A substrate of this size isn’t for power devices in products like electric vehicles. That’s what 200-millimeter silicon carbide wafers are for. Wolfspeed envisions 300mm wafers will be applied “beyond” power devices — like in the optical glass of future virtual reality systems. Or to improve thermal conductivity within, yes, data centers.

On Wednesday’s call, an investor asked Feurle if he foresees interest in 300mm silicon carbide wafers jumpstarting the Siler City factory. The CEO said Wolfspeed is ready to scale when demand “picks up.” He then offered the glass-half-full view of having an underused North Carolina factory: A company conscious of future spending already has it built.

Clearing my cache

• Raleigh software provider Pendo has acquired its fourth company in the past year and a half. Its latest buy is the product management software firm Chisel Labs, which has dual headquarters in California and India.
• Wells Fargo, one of North Carolina’s largest employers, is laying off 112 people in Raleigh.
• Siemens Energy vows to grow its local manufacturing footprint to the tune of $421 million and 500 more jobs across Charlotte, Winston-Salem and Raleigh. Data centers and broader electrification needs are driving this announcement, the company said. Siemens also pledged new investments in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Florida and New York.
• The City of Durham won’t consider a surveillance software that critics feared could help the federal government assist in immigration raids. Durham Police Chief Patrice Andrews said this software, from Peregrine Technologies, would help the city establish a “mission control center” to solve crimes faster.
• Duke University professor Dan Ariely appeared in more than 700 of the latest Epstein files, including one where he inquired about a “redhead” he wished to see again. “My correspondence with him was infrequent, largely logistical pertaining to conferences and academia, and was often mediated by assistants,” Ariely wrote in an email to The N&O on Monday. “Importantly, there was zero financial, professional, or ongoing relationship.” A well-known behavioral psychologist and economist, Ariely sparked past controversy around manipulated data that appeared in his research on honesty.
• Pro-union Amazon workers and supporters plan to protest the e-commerce company starting this weekend at three Durham facilities as part of the independent union Carolina Amazonians for Solidarity and Empowerment’s push to organize in the Bull City.

National Tech Happenings

• Tech stocks took a beating as investors forecast new AI tools like Claude eating into company revenues. Bitcoin has tumbled so far in 2026 too.
• The buzzy thing in tech this week is Moltbook, a social media site with only AI chatbot contributors.
• Chinese cars are effectively banned in the United States market due to restrictions on China-based automotive software. But if that ever changes (and President Trump has hinted it could), then U.S. customers will have several high-quality options, according to journalists who recently test-drove Chinese vehicles.
• “Everyone is stealing TV,” writes The Verge, ahead of this weekend’s big football game. From sketchy sites to rogue streaming boxes, there are more ways for people to watch without paying for numerous subscriptions. BTW, as a bitter Bills fan, I hope the Patriots lose by 40.

Thanks for reading! And for those interested in higher education happenings in North Carolina, The News & Observer has a new newsletter called Higher Stakes from our new higher education reporter, Jane Winik Sartwell. You can sign up for it, and all other N&O newsletters, here.

This story was originally published February 6, 2026 at 9:13 AM.