Apple A16 chip is now being produced in the USA

AppleInsider

TSMC has reportedly started production of Apple's iPhone chips in its Arizona foundry, with the first to be made in America set to be the A16.

A TSMC office sign

The TSMC foundry in Arizona has been under construction for years, with planning for the project dating back to 2020. After four years, the facility is now allegedly operational and has started to make chips for Apple.

According to sources of Tim Culpan, Phase 1 of TSMC's Fab 21 in Arizona is making the A16 SoC of the iPhone 14 Pro in "small, but significant, numbers. The production is largely a test for the facility at this stage, but more production is expected in the coming months.

The volume will ramp up massively once the second stage of the Phase 1 fab actually concludes. If everything stays on schedule, the Arizona plant will hit a target for production sometime in the first half of 2025.

The chips being made are said to be using the same N4P process that is used to make the A16 in TSMC's Taiwan facilities. It is considered an enhanced version of a 5-nanometer process rather than a 4-nanometer production.

"The Arizona project is proceeding as planned with good progress," a TSMC spokeswoman told Culpan, but they stopped short of naming Apple as the first client being produced at the location.

Sources say TSMC is achieving yields that are marginally behind those of Taiwan-based factories. Yield parity is expected to happen within months.

The production is important for chip manufacturing in the United States, in part due to how much TSMC received from the U.S. government. Aside from its original $12 billion investment in the plant dating back to 2020, it also won a $6.6 billion subsidy from the U.S. Commerce Department, as part of the CHIPS for America Fund.

TSMC has also raised its investment and moved to build additional plants in Arizona, with three set to be constructed in total. The U.S. Commerce Department previously claimed this will create 6,000 direct manufacturing jobs, on top of an estimated 20,000 construction jobs.



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muaddib

So are these chips then shipped to Foxconn in China for assembly?

ssfe11

These chips would be shipped to China AND India for assembly? 

NYC362

ssfe11 said:

These chips would be shipped to China AND India for assembly? 

Yup.. that's exactly how it would work.  It might sounds nuts, but the costs of everything are figured out to the penny and if it was cheaper to do it elsewhere, they would. 

9secondkox2

the labors started all those years ago finally bearing fruit. 

It’s just early days, but it’s a great thing. 

9secondkox2

ssfe11 said:

These chips would be shipped to China AND India for assembly? 

Yep. It’s interesting. With China continue using to increase its asking prices, it might make sense to do assembly in the USA in the not too distant future. 

davidmalcolm

For people saying, “oh these chips are made in the US then shipped somewhere else” you don’t seem to get it. Right now Apple is so incredibly dependent on operations in China. If war broke out between the US and China. (Realistically right now a China would be much smarter to look north and absorb large chunks of Russia. Winning a land war with Russia would seem to be much easier than picking a fight with its many heavily populated south Asian countries. Though China clearly would like to reabsorb Taiwan.)

Right now if America went to war with China or Taiwan that would mean no access to the best fabs in the world (also the fabs would be destroyed and the kinda behind them lost.)

by ensuring Apple and other companies can build advanced chips off the Island it gives China less leverage and motivation. One of the benefits for taking Taiwan would be disrupting the west. Because without Taiwan we as a society would be falling back on much older less efficient fabs in the US and Europe they can’t make power efficient chips that are perfect for mobile devices.

also Apple has manufacturing operations in China, India and Brazil. I suspect those plants in Brazil are in part there because Apple is hedging their bets not just because the labour is cheap. 

It’s also pretty obvious that as soon as it’s practical Apple will move device assembly to robots. Even if it costs more they’ll have at least some products being made in part by robots so that as climate change destabilizes the warmer/poorer parts of the world, they’re still able to pump out devices. (Also let’s be honest, COVID  put a huge wrench into things. So the sooner they can move to a system where they don’t have to rely on large groups of humans breathing the same air, the sooner they will.)

tht

NYC362 said:

ssfe11 said:

These chips would be shipped to China AND India for assembly? 

Yup.. that's exactly how it would work.  It might sounds nuts, but the costs of everything are figured out to the penny and if it was cheaper to do it elsewhere, they would. 

I think the silicon dies might go back to Taiwan, Japan or South Korea for chip packaging, then to where ever for assembly into the final product. Could be China, Vietnam, India, Brazil, who knows. It's global supply chain. A lot of people moan about Apple products being assembled in China, but that is akin to complaining about wanting to do landscaping or grass cutting jobs.

Most of the high skill jobs needed for an iPhone or a Mac or an iPad are not in China. Camera sensors come from Japan, until recently. Memory chips come from Korea or the USA (Micron, Sk Hynix or Samsung). Glass is designed by Corning in the USA, fabbed in the USA and China. Logic chips are designed by Apple and fabbed in Taiwan. Wireless chips are designed by Qualcomm, Broadcom, Skyworks, and fabbed at TSMC or other lower end fabs. If Apple actually ships its own modem, a lot of the design and work for it may come from Europe/Germany. A lot of the software is designed, coded in the USA, not only Apple's, but all the other operating systems running on an iPhone.

There's like 3 to 4 different operating system running on an iPhone. The user facing one that Apple makes. Apple also writes the boot firmware. Then, there is an OS that runs the wireless modem, currently Qualcomm, probably in San Diego. The one that runs the secure enclave, which might have its majority contribution from Germany? The one that runs the camera systems, probably Japan? Apple has semiconductor design teams in Israel, whose code and designs you use whenever you use Touch ID.

Intel should be trying to get all their chips on TSMC N4P post-haste. Their server and desktop chips really need it. It is an easy win. AMD GPUs too. Their own fabs have been cratering, but the opportunity presents itself here. Tough situation they are in though.

Xed

9secondkox2 said:

the labors started all those years ago finally bearing fruit. 

It’s just early days, but it’s a great thing. 

Thanks to the Biden economy, unlike that Foxconn scam in Wisconsin under the previous administration.

avon b7

davidmalcolm said:

For people saying, “oh these chips are made in the US then shipped somewhere else” you don’t seem to get it. Right now Apple is so incredibly dependent on operations in China. If war broke out between the US and China. (Realistically right now a China would be much smarter to look north and absorb large chunks of Russia. Winning a land war with Russia would seem to be much easier than picking a fight with its many heavily populated south Asian countries. Though China clearly would like to reabsorb Taiwan.)

Right now if America went to war with China or Taiwan that would mean no access to the best fabs in the world (also the fabs would be destroyed and the kinda behind them lost.)

by ensuring Apple and other companies can build advanced chips off the Island it gives China less leverage and motivation. One of the benefits for taking Taiwan would be disrupting the west. Because without Taiwan we as a society would be falling back on much older less efficient fabs in the US and Europe they can’t make power efficient chips that are perfect for mobile devices.

also Apple has manufacturing operations in China, India and Brazil. I suspect those plants in Brazil are in part there because Apple is hedging their bets not just because the labour is cheap. 

It’s also pretty obvious that as soon as it’s practical Apple will move device assembly to robots. Even if it costs more they’ll have at least some products being made in part by robots so that as climate change destabilizes the warmer/poorer parts of the world, they’re still able to pump out devices. (Also let’s be honest, COVID  put a huge wrench into things. So the sooner they can move to a system where they don’t have to rely on large groups of humans breathing the same air, the sooner they will.)

I can't see how that is relevant in a war scenario. China would target semiconductor facilities on US soil, just as the US would do the same to China. 

However, for 'disruption' everyone is fully aware that all the undersea fibre cabling (powering the digital age) would be snipped, causing digital havoc worldwide. Satellites would be targeted too.

And let's not forget that military hardware mostly doesn't run off the bleeding edge nodes. 

The military tries to build computing/communications resilience into its designs but while the military may be able to get by to some degree, the rest of the world isn't prepared for any such situations. It is highly susceptible to many types of disaster scenarios, from energy, supply, raw materials, extraction, refining, manufacturing, distribution...

Not to mention the financial side of things. 

The modern world is very different to the world of previous World Wars and people (especially in the developed world) are very different too. 

A major superpower conflict (even without the use of nuclear resources) is hard to imagine right now, although you can never completely rule out some madman taking the wrong decisions and pulling the wrong triggers and getting something started. 

avon b7

NYC362 said:

ssfe11 said:

These chips would be shipped to China AND India for assembly? 

Yup.. that's exactly how it would work.  It might sounds nuts, but the costs of everything are figured out to the penny and if it was cheaper to do it elsewhere, they would. 

TSMC has spoken about this:

https://interconnected.blog/tsmc-where-and-how-will-it-raise-prices/

Prices will be higher for chips produced away from where its economies of scale are. The question remains exactly how much and who the increase is passed on to. 

libertyandfree

avon b7 said:

davidmalcolm said:

For people saying, “oh these chips are made in the US then shipped somewhere else” you don’t seem to get it. Right now Apple is so incredibly dependent on operations in China. If war broke out between the US and China. (Realistically right now a China would be much smarter to look north and absorb large chunks of Russia. Winning a land war with Russia would seem to be much easier than picking a fight with its many heavily populated south Asian countries. Though China clearly would like to reabsorb Taiwan.)

Right now if America went to war with China or Taiwan that would mean no access to the best fabs in the world (also the fabs would be destroyed and the kinda behind them lost.)

by ensuring Apple and other companies can build advanced chips off the Island it gives China less leverage and motivation. One of the benefits for taking Taiwan would be disrupting the west. Because without Taiwan we as a society would be falling back on much older less efficient fabs in the US and Europe they can’t make power efficient chips that are perfect for mobile devices.

also Apple has manufacturing operations in China, India and Brazil. I suspect those plants in Brazil are in part there because Apple is hedging their bets not just because the labour is cheap. 

It’s also pretty obvious that as soon as it’s practical Apple will move device assembly to robots. Even if it costs more they’ll have at least some products being made in part by robots so that as climate change destabilizes the warmer/poorer parts of the world, they’re still able to pump out devices. (Also let’s be honest, COVID  put a huge wrench into things. So the sooner they can move to a system where they don’t have to rely on large groups of humans breathing the same air, the sooner they will.)

I can't see how that is relevant in a war scenario. China would target semiconductor facilities on US soil, just as the US would do the same to China. 

However, for 'disruption' everyone is fully aware that all the undersea fibre cabling (powering the digital age) would be snipped, causing digital havoc worldwide. Satellites would be targeted too.

And let's not forget that military hardware mostly doesn't run off the bleeding edge nodes. 

The military tries to build computing/communications resilience into its designs but while the military may be able to get by to some degree, the rest of the world isn't prepared for any such situations. It is highly susceptible to many types of disaster scenarios, from energy, supply, raw materials, extraction, refining, manufacturing, distribution...

Not to mention the financial side of things. 

The modern world is very different to the world of previous World Wars and people (especially in the developed world) are very different too. 

A major superpower conflict (even without the use of nuclear resources) is hard to imagine right now, although you can never completely rule out some madman taking the wrong decisions and pulling the wrong triggers and getting something started. 

  Every modern society is so interdependent on other countries, both friendly and not so, thus if a major war broke out every country would be significantly impacted economically including energy, information, communications, medical, food etc.   All world leaders certainly understand this as well. 

danox

If there is a war, the , stock market will crash and most consumer goods, particularly electronic consumer goods will come to a halt, the US should be more concerned about the fact that the Chinese are building a full-size Thorium Reactor courtesy of Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the 50 year dithering process of the United States government, the Chinese have also built out their high speed rail system all the way out to Urumqi in far western China and they intend to build out their high-speed rail system north and south around the Caucasus Mountains all the way, to Europe while we dither some more. I don’t know what the Chinese ultimately will do however, they’re not incompetent like the Russians they actually do complete their infrastructure projects all those dams on the Mekong and Brahmaputra rivers.

There seems to be plenty of USA Maga people hoping for a war with China, too bad they don’t really feel like helping the Ukrainians against the Russians whom they seem to love. Two of them are currently running for office Badly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China#/media/File:Growth_of_China's_high-speed_rail_network,_2017.jpg High speed rail has already reached Urumqi in far western China and the Chinese won’t dither going north or south of the Caucasus.

I’m hopeful that we will wake up about Thorium Reactors and high-speed rail before it’s too late.

BlueLightning

Many other countries are also subsidizing chip foundries.  Germany, Japan and Israel have major chip fab projects.  Chip building for defense purposes in the US is largely funded by the Department of Defense, with small amounts from the CHIPS act.  

Before high tariffs, war was less likely.  Tariffs are a main cause of inflation, and contributed to the depression from 1929 onward.  Of course, our prior and current presidents appear to have flunked world history, economics, diplomacy and manners.  Still, I doubt there will be a major war.  Russia is having a hard time with relatively small and scrappy Ukraine.  China still gets a ton of business from other major powers.  No president has substantially reduced imports from China.  Prices would spike up, unless work was moved to lower cost Vietnam or even lower costs in parts of Africa.  If Trump and Biden are right on tariffs, then Reagan thru Obama were wrong.  

Reagan supported peaceful and hardworking immigrants (who by the way cut cost of US production).  Immigrants have been subject to indentured servitude or slavery in the past.  Immigrants are not eating cats or dogs (any more than those whose families immigrated here long ago).  Only Indian Tribe descendants are true natives, and they appear to have originated from elsewhere long ago.  Remember it is illegal to eat beef in most of India (cows are considered Holy, and it can land you in jail).  Stranded US born folks have been known to eat sled dogs and even fellow explorers in the past.  In dire situations, US military members have eaten dogs, cats and just about everything else.  

War always costs both sides a lot of money and productivity.  First targets in any wars would be roller and ball bearing plants, jet engine and turboprop plants, airline plants and shipbuilders.  Oil and gas pipelines and refineries, along with electric  and gas utilities would be targeted.  Chips for defense use are likely stockpiled in some secure location (along with medical and pandemic supplies).  We could survive without new cars, trucks, laptops, desktops, tablets and phones for a few years.  Parts could be grabbed from broken equipment.  Gasoline would probably be rationed, along with many foods.  

AlexeyV

davidmalcolm said:

For people saying, “oh these chips are made in the US then shipped somewhere else” you don’t seem to get it. Right now Apple is so incredibly dependent on operations in China. If war broke out between the US and China. (Realistically right now a China would be much smarter to look north and absorb large chunks of Russia. Winning a land war with Russia would seem to be much easier than picking a fight with its many heavily populated south Asian countries. Though China clearly would like to reabsorb Taiwan.)

Right now if America went to war with China or Taiwan that would mean no access to the best fabs in the world (also the fabs would be destroyed and the kinda behind them lost.)

by ensuring Apple and other companies can build advanced chips off the Island it gives China less leverage and motivation. One of the benefits for taking Taiwan would be disrupting the west. Because without Taiwan we as a society would be falling back on much older less efficient fabs in the US and Europe they can’t make power efficient chips that are perfect for mobile devices.

also Apple has manufacturing operations in China, India and Brazil. I suspect those plants in Brazil are in part there because Apple is hedging their bets not just because the labour is cheap. 

It’s also pretty obvious that as soon as it’s practical Apple will move device assembly to robots. Even if it costs more they’ll have at least some products being made in part by robots so that as climate change destabilizes the warmer/poorer parts of the world, they’re still able to pump out devices. (Also let’s be honest, COVID  put a huge wrench into things. So the sooner they can move to a system where they don’t have to rely on large groups of humans breathing the same air, the sooner they will.)

USA can’t fight with China. China also can’t fight Russia. It’s about deterrence theory. 

BROOKLYN81

Xed said:

9secondkox2 said:

the labors started all those years ago finally bearing fruit. 

It’s just early days, but it’s a great thing. 

Thanks to the Biden economy, unlike that Foxconn scam in Wisconsin under the previous administration.

Biden economy is killing us

BROOKLYN81

You have a bad case of TDS

jellybelly

tht said:

NYC362 said:

ssfe11 said:

These chips would be shipped to China AND India for assembly? 

Yup.. that's exactly how it would work.  It might sounds nuts, but the costs of everything are figured out to the penny and if it was cheaper to do it elsewhere, they would. 

I think the silicon dies might go back to Taiwan, Japan or South Korea for chip packaging, then to where ever for assembly into the final product. Could be China, Vietnam, India, Brazil, who knows. It's global supply chain. A lot of people moan about Apple products being assembled in China, but that is akin to complaining about wanting to do landscaping or grass cutting jobs.    …

 AMKOR, based in nearby City of Tempe, is building a $2 billion chip packaging factory next door to the north Phoenix TSMC Fab in neighboring Peoria.

From ABC News: “… Amkor is set to package and test chips for industry heavyweights Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Apple Inc. …” [ at the new 500,000 sq ft plant just west of the TSMC plant.]

tht

jellybelly said:

tht said:

NYC362 said:

ssfe11 said:

These chips would be shipped to China AND India for assembly? 

Yup.. that's exactly how it would work.  It might sounds nuts, but the costs of everything are figured out to the penny and if it was cheaper to do it elsewhere, they would. 

I think the silicon dies might go back to Taiwan, Japan or South Korea for chip packaging, then to where ever for assembly into the final product. Could be China, Vietnam, India, Brazil, who knows. It's global supply chain. A lot of people moan about Apple products being assembled in China, but that is akin to complaining about wanting to do landscaping or grass cutting jobs.    …

 AMKOR, based in nearby City of Tempe, is building a $2 billion chip packaging factory next door to the north Phoenix TSMC Fab in neighboring Peoria.

From ABC News: “… Amkor is set to package and test chips for industry heavyweights Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Apple Inc. …” [ at the new 500,000 sq ft plant just west of the TSMC plant.]

The packaging facility running behind the chip fab facility by about 2 years? 3 years?

StrangeDays

BROOKLYN81 said:

Xed said:

9secondkox2 said:

the labors started all those years ago finally bearing fruit. 

It’s just early days, but it’s a great thing. 

Thanks to the Biden economy, unlike that Foxconn scam in Wisconsin under the previous administration.

Biden economy is killing us

It's not. The economy was a total bomb under the prior administration, and is far better now. Typical for what happens under the two parties, the policies of one benefit the wealthy at the cost of the rest of us. Then it gets cleaned up. Repeat.

NotSoMuch

...and soon there will be a strike because TSMC want people to work.