Bromont, Quebec, might be viewed as a pleasant ski town with plenty of parks and a big lake. But the booming semiconductor industry and recent plans of the leaders of Canada, the United States and Mexico are set to give the area a reputation as a bustling hub of high-tech activity.

The 50-year-old Bromont IBM plant next to the city’s tiny airport has generated a microchip ecosphere that is set to create more high-skilled jobs in the area as the industry scrambles to produce more computer chips in North America.

That expectation is perhaps best understood by Normand Bourbonnais, who moved to a much smaller version of Bromont from Montreal 37 years ago to work in the local semiconductor industry centered on the IBM plant that now hums 24 hours a day to pump out 5.2 million microelectronic modules annually.

The Bromont facility is IBM’s only Canadian plant and is the company’s largest semiconductor and assembly facility, creating a line of 200 different high-tech products. The bustling factory has also inspired other chip-related facilities to open nearby, including its neighbors on Airport Boulevard, C2MI and Teledyne Dalsa Semiconductor.

Bourbonnais is enthusiastic about the area's growth prospects as head of Technum Quebec, a group that aims to boost the local high-tech electronics industry. He notes that the provincial government of Quebec has earmarked Bromont as an innovation zone, which he said will be at the heart of turbocharged economic and population growth, as the fast-reshoring North American semiconductor industry struggles to meet the ever-growing demand.

Bourbonnais sees Quebec emerging as a hub for semiconductor production within Canada and his town of Bromont being in the middle of the action. “Quebec is really the manufacturing place in Canada for semiconductors," said Bourbonnais. “The concentration we have in Quebec is by far the most important in Canada.”

Bromont’s population has doubled over the past two decades. The town was Quebec’s second-fastest growing municipality in the most recent census as its population rose 25% to about 12,000 residents between 2016 and 2021. Bromont sits 15 minutes south of Granby, a city of 70,000, which is the second-largest municipality in the Eastern Townships area behind Sherbrooke. Cowansville,15 minutes to the south of Bromont, was ranked as the second-fastest growing town in Canada in 2021, as its population rose 3.7% in a single year, raising it to 15,000.

Those population totals could keep growing after a meeting between the leaders of Canada, the United States and Mexico last spring during which they outlined a plan to create a northeast semiconductor corridor, which would incentivize chip production in New York State and Vermont with the chip components shipped to Bromont for assembly.

Quebec’s semiconductor industry is already bigger than the province’s much-celebrated aerospace industry, according to Bourbonnais’s calculations, as he notes that about 44,000 Quebecers are employed in semiconductor-related jobs spread out over around 700 companies, whereas the aerospace industry in Quebec employs 39,000 among approximately 400 companies.

The production of semiconductors, used in a variety of electronic devices, has become a top priority for North America, as authorities aim to transfer much of the chip production that transferred to Taiwan over the past two decades back to domestic sources. Bourbonnais seeks to promote Bromont as a good place to start with a pool of skilled workers.

However, he acknowledges that recruiting talent will be a major challenge, as the industry needs an estimated 50,000 specialized semiconductor engineers over the next five years and North American education institutions are currently only able to produce about half of that number.

Bromont, about an hour southeast of Montreal, might not be a big city but it sits within two hours of multiple universities across the province. Bourbonnais sees a future where graduates from those educational institutions can find jobs and relocate to his town. “It’s a wonderful place to work,” he said.