With the completion of the second chip plant, TSMC will produce enough advanced chips to meet the U.S. annual demand of 600,000 wafers per year and will start producing 3-nanometer chips by 2026. Further, TSMC’s first U.S. production site will produce more technically advanced chips than originally proposed with the goal of making chips for Apple’s iPhones, which can perform 17 trillion specialized calculations per second. “At scale, these two [plants] could meet the entire U.S. demand for U.S. chips when they’re completed,” the National Economic Council’s Ronnie Chatterji told CNBC. “That’s the definition of supply chain resilience. We won’t have to rely on anyone else to make the chips we need.”
One of the largest direct foreign investments in the US
Since the Chinese government has always claimed Taiwan to be part of mainland China, U.S. companies and officials have always worried about overly relying on Taiwan to manufacture the world’s most advanced computer chips. Which led President Biden to sign the CHIPS and Science Act into law in early August. The law includes $52.7 billion in loans, grants and other incentives and billions more in tax credits to persuade companies to manufacture domestically. Another aim of the legislation is to provide a stable supply of semiconductors. “When complete, TSMC Arizona will be the greenest semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States producing the most advanced semiconductor-process technology in the country, enabling next-generation high-performance and low-power computing products for years to come,” said TSMC’s Chairman, Dr Mark Liu, in a prepared statement. The announcement of the new factory also means more employment for the people. TSMC was planning on hiring about 2,000 people at its north Phoenix complex, but it will rise to 4,500, including the second phase.
