Taiwanese chip giant builds a hedge against China in Phoenix
SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. companies and officials have long worried about overly relying on Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, for the world’s most advanced computer chips. That’s because Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which is the biggest maker of leading-edge chips, is based there.
Now a hedge against that risk is taking shape in — of all places — the most populous city in Arizona.
TSMC plans to outline a $40 billion plan on Tuesday to expand and upgrade a U.S. production hub in Phoenix. At the site, which is buzzing with trucks, cranes and construction workers, the company plans to import advanced manufacturing technology that has been largely limited to its factories in Taiwan.
The enhancements could allow the Phoenix factory — TSMC’S first major U.S. production site — to eventually produce chips, for Apple’s iphones, that can perform nearly 17 trillion specialized calculations per second. TSMC later plans to build a second factory there that will feature even more advanced production technology, targeting future smartphones, computers and other smart devices.
“This announcement by TSMC is historic in every way,” said Ronnie Chatterji, an acting deputy director of the National Economic Council and an adviser to the Biden administration on chip policy.
The expansion is so signifi
cant that an event on Tuesday to celebrate the move is expected to draw President Joe Biden and Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, as well as other companies and government officials.
Advanced semiconductor factories, known as “fabs,” can fabricate hundreds of fingernail-size chips on 12-inch silicon wafers. The production requires costly and complicated machines, some of which are already beginning to arrive at the site in massive crates.
TSMC’S new $40 billion estimate for spending in Arizona includes the $12 billion it pledged when the initial factory was announced in 2020. It now says the site will employ 4,500 permanent workers, up from an earlier estimate of 2,000, while creating 21,000 construction jobs.
The upgraded plan is the latest sign of how geopolitical concerns are causing companies and governments to modify longtime strategies, countering historical trends that led companies to shift most semiconductor manufacturing to Asia. It also underscores the widening recognition of the importance of chips and new technologies for producing them, which add calculating power to consumer gadgets, cars and military equipment such as missiles and drones.
Former President Donald Trump and now Biden administration officials have pushed for measures to encourage both foreign and domestic chipmakers to build more factories in the United States. Democrats and Republicans, influenced by a recent chip shortage, agreed in July to a $52 billion package of subsidies in the CHIPS and Science Act for the greater expense of building such plants.
Chipmakers have responded with announcements of major factory projects, including by Intel in Ohio, Micron Technology in New York and Samsung Electronics in Texas. But the most coveted producer these days is TSMC, whose founder, Morris Chang, in 1987 pioneered the concept of manufacturing chips for other companies that design them.
TSMC is by far the world’s biggest “foundry,” as the industry calls such services, and has lately
boasted the most advanced manufacturing technology. Besides Apple, its big customers include Amazon, Qualcomm, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.
Those companies haven’t publicly expressed worries about the concentration of chip manufacturing in Taiwan, which faces risks associated with earthquakes and droughts in addition to China’s claims. But the presence of senior executives from several of the companies at Tuesday’s event suggests strong support for having more key components for their products manufactured close to home.
The expansion plan in Phoenix shows customer pressure is having greater sway over TSMC, which had long argued that concentrating production in giant “gigafabs” in Taiwan was most efficient, analysts and industry executives said.
TSMC relaxed that stance somewhat in 2020 by agreeing to open the factory in Phoenix. But the company set a limit on the factory’s level of production technology, which is rated by measuring how small a company can make key parts of individual transistors on a chip. The smaller those dimensions — measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter — the more transistors can be packed on a piece of silicon.
The company originally set the technology level at the Phoenix facility at five nanometers. That was an advance over most chips in 2020, but behind the level that TSMC would produce in Taiwan in 2024, when the U.S. factory was set to open. The new plan would upgrade the factory to also use four-nanometer technology, which Apple was first to adopt. The second factory, expected to begin operating in 2026, will be able to produce threenanometer
chips, TSMC said.
The new TSMC factories couldn’t by themselves fulfill U.S. demands for advanced chips. Handel Jones, an analyst who heads International Business Strategies, said TSMC’S factories in Taiwan would still be needed, both because of their production capacity and because they will be making more advanced technology by 2026.
TSMC operates four factories in Taiwan that each can process up to 100,000 semiconductor wafers each month. In Arizona, TSMC initially said the first factory could process 20,000 wafers a month. It now estimates that the two factories’ combined output will be 50,000 a month, or 600,000 a year.
But even relatively small operations in the United States can become important, industry executives said, particularly for individual customers like Apple or for the production of particularly crucial chips in emergencies.
By adding more advanced production technology in the United States, TSMC “would help address vulnerabilities associated with the shortage of semiconductors evident over the past few years,” said Bob Lefort, president of the U.S. arm of Infineon, a big German chipmaker.
TSMC’S move is also a sign that the CHIPS Act is having an impact on the plans of big companies, helping to not only spur their spending but galvanize investments by companies that supply them with production tools and materials.
“This sends the right signal for the whole ecosystem to do more,” said Raj Jammy, chief technologist at Mitre Engenuity, a nonprofit technology foundation. “It’s a step in the right direction.”