[caption id="" align="alignright" width="407"] Danielle Merfeld oversees more than 500 employees around the world as the director for power electronics at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, New York. Her division is part of the push to build a silicon carbide manufacturing plant in Utica, New York. (Donna Abbott-Vlahos / Albany Business Review)[/caption]

Hiring has already started for General Electric's new chip plant in upstate New York, said Danielle Merfeld, director of GE's power electronics unit.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced last month that  GE Global Research and the SUNY Polytechnic Institute will develop a power electronics facility to make silicon carbide chips in Utica.

The small city, about 100 miles northwest of Albany, lost thousands of manufacturing jobs when GE, Lockheed Martin and other employers closed factories in the 1980s. This move will bring GE back to the Mohawk Valley and create 470 jobs.

The GE power electronics manufacturing facility was first announced at the Global Research center headquarters in Niskayuna last summer. The plan is to set up a manufacturing line at SUNY Poly in Utica by 2017. That line could produce about 30,000 chips a year — about 10 percent of the market, or $150 million a year.

"We're getting the equipment in now. We already ordered it, so they'll need people to set the equipment up and get it running and build the processes on the equipment both here [in Niskayuna] and in Utica," Merfeld said. "There's lots of opportunity for growth."

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