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| 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 Company, 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 northern outskirts of the most populous city in Arizona. |
| TSMC outlined a $40 billion plan on Tuesday to expand and upgrade a U.S. production hub that it is building in Phoenix. At the 1,100-acre site, where gleaming buildings bearing the company’s logo are springing up among the desert shrubbery and cactus-dotted foothills, TSMC plans to import advanced manufacturing technology that has largely been 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. |
| The expansion is so significant that an event on Tuesday to celebrate the move drew President Biden and Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, as well as other companies and government officials. |
| “This is an incredibly significant moment,” Mr. Cook said during his turn onstage, as Arizona political leaders and corporate executives snacked on ceviche, drank champagne and listened to orchestra musicians. Mr. Cook tied TSMC’s semiconductor production capacities to the “unrivaled ingenuity of American workers.” |
| Later, after Mr. Biden toured the massive facility, he framed the semiconductor investment as part of his plan to help position America “to win the economic competition of the 21st century” and reverse the decline in domestically produced computer chips. |
| “Folks, where is it written that America can’t lead the world once again in manufacturing?” Mr. Biden asked the crowd. “I don’t know where that’s written. And we’re proving it can.” |
| 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 J. Trump and now Biden administration officials have pushed for measures to encourage both foreign and domestic chip makers 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. |
| Chip makers 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. |
| Mr. Chang, 91, previously questioned the feasibility of TSMC expanding in the United States, but he appeared at the event in Phoenix — held in front of a huge flag proclaiming “A Future Made in America” — to endorse the expansion, seemingly bowing to the inevitable rise of domestic chip production. |
| “Globalization is almost dead,” Mr. Chang said. “Free trade is almost dead.” He said that he had long dreamed of building semiconductor factories in the United States, but that his first attempt in the late 1990s, a site in Washington State called WaferTech, had turned into a “nightmare.” With this Phoenix project, he said, “we are far more prepared.” |
| 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. |
| Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo raised concerns about reliance on overseas production at Tuesday’s event. |
| “Right now in the United States, we don’t really make any of the world’s most sophisticated, bleeding-edge, cutting-edge chips,” she said. “That’s a national security issue, a national security vulnerability. Today, we say we’re changing that.” |
| 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 site 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 is 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 three-nanometer chips, TSMC said. |
| Intel, which hopes to introduce its own new production processes over the next two years, took issue with TSMC’s suggestions that its technology in Arizona will be the most advanced in the United States in 2024. |
| “I would disagree with that point of view,” said Ann Kelleher, the executive vice president who heads Intel’s manufacturing technology development. |
| State and local officials in Arizona have already agreed to offer financial incentives for the first phase of TSMC’s construction, and the company is expected to apply for federal grants for both phases under the CHIPS Act. |
| 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 chip maker. |
| 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.” |
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