TSMC triples spending on Arizona advanced chip site with extra 3nm fab TSMC has confirmed it will build not one, but two advanced chip manufacturing plants in Arizona, more than tripling the Asian foundry giant's original investment to $40 billion, even though the company has complained about the US project becoming a major headache for multiple reasons. The Taiwanese contract chipmaker said on …
Which are ramping up '3nm' production right now, and are scheduled to bring '2nm' online in 2025.
So the breathless press reports that Apple will get all their chips from these Arizona fabs are totally wrong, but Apple does need some older chips since not everything they sell contains the latest and greatest. But they won't be able to supply more than maybe a third of Apple's chips, the rest will have to continue to come from Taiwan.
Still, that's an improvement, and in case of trouble in Taiwan presumably the Arizona fabs could be upgraded to the latest a lot more quickly than new fabs could be built from scratch.
I see this as a positive, regardless. Manufacturing in more places than just China means less disruption when China parties like it's 2019.. Eventually more advanced chips will be made in more places, and even Taiwan will recognize the need to make the most advanced chips in more than one nation. Not to mention, Taiwan is still at serious risk of being taken over. It's doubtful TSMC will want to risk losing its most advanced fabs if China decides to go in.
I see that almost no one has noticed, well I guess its a secret. ;) The DPP the party that was in power and cooperating with Biden, has been handily defeated by the Kuomintang party. It ran on a platform that supports rapprochement with mainland China.
So everything has changed, but not where its a secret, I guess. ;)
That was in the local elections and they are all about local issues, the current president made a big tactical error and tried to make it about international politics. KMT may want to reunite with mainland China, but they most certainly don’t want to do it on Xi:s terms ( and they mostly want to hang the communists in the nearest lamp post)
Every time I hear about the KMT's dovish attitude towards the CCP these days it always throws me for a loop because the KMT were the ones that bitterly fought against Mao's Communist revolutionaries for control of the country after WWII.
I wonder what Chiang Kai-shek would have thought of this modern development..
The TSMC article crows that this will be a record for foreign direct investment in Arizona. Wow - I am so underwhelmed - measured against whom?
But the same claim may be made even if only a fraction of the cash is coming from TSMC's reserves. A huge chunk must be coming from Uncle Sam and another subvention from the state of Arizona.
P.S. Recommend not to hold one's breath until wafers start spilling out. ..... Display manufacturing cough! cough!
You'll probably find a lot of the equipment from the most advanced nodes will be shipped for reuse in the US. Seems like a sensible stragety to increase ROI and there's probably still going to be a big market for N-1 chips if they are a resonable fraction of the cost of N. There's the whole supply chain to think about though. How independant will these factories really be?
It is a fraction of Taiwans output now, but it will be enough in the event that Taiwan is unable to make some for a while under whatever circumstance. In some ways we were lucky that COVID showed us how dependent we had become on foreign manufacture. A lesson that I hope is pushing Russia to its end.
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