TSMC chairman confirms Arizona plant will begin chip production in 2024

Comments

• Reply 1 of 12

  melgross Posts: 33,510member

  July 15, 2021 2:52PM

  Unless it would build older chips for Apple, a 5nm plant in 2024 won’t be used for cutting edge designs for them. But it’s over three years off, plans can change.

  
• Reply 2 of 12

  rob53 Posts: 3,248member

  July 15, 2021 3:02PM

  I would hope this would benefit chip production in the US but why Arizona? Cheap land and taxes? TSMC is not an American company and all profits (after taxes) will not stay in the US. Will the citizens of Arizona accept a Taiwanese company or will they boycott them as being non-American? I guess money talks more than anything else but how much is Phoenix paying them to build there? Are they selling out the citizens like Wisconsin did with the failed Foxconn major installation?

  
• Reply 3 of 12

  doggone Posts: 377member

  July 15, 2021 3:46PM

  rob53 said:

  I would hope this would benefit chip production in the US but why Arizona? Cheap land and taxes? TSMC is not an American company and all profits (after taxes) will not stay in the US. Will the citizens of Arizona accept a Taiwanese company or will they boycott them as being non-American? I guess money talks more than anything else but how much is Phoenix paying them to build there? Are they selling out the citizens like Wisconsin did with the failed Foxconn major installation?

  You could say the same for car companies.  There are plenty of foreign manufacturers for cars in the US.  There are no complaints about that anymore.  Maybe in the beginning but now it just means jobs for locals and revenue for the city. 
  
  It would be great to see that site successful and pave the way for more high end manufacturing in the US.  

  
• Reply 4 of 12

  rob53 Posts: 3,248member

  July 15, 2021 3:54PM

  doggone said:

  rob53 said:

  I would hope this would benefit chip production in the US but why Arizona? Cheap land and taxes? TSMC is not an American company and all profits (after taxes) will not stay in the US. Will the citizens of Arizona accept a Taiwanese company or will they boycott them as being non-American? I guess money talks more than anything else but how much is Phoenix paying them to build there? Are they selling out the citizens like Wisconsin did with the failed Foxconn major installation?

  You could say the same for car companies.  There are plenty of foreign manufacturers for cars in the US.  There are no complaints about that anymore.  Maybe in the beginning but now it just means jobs for locals and revenue for the city. 
  
  It would be great to see that site successful and pave the way for more high end manufacturing in the US.  

  It's interesting that foreign automotive companies are building cars in the US because it's cheaper while American automotive companies continue to outsource to Mexico and Canada for the majority of their car production. Tesla is the leading American company using the majority of American made parts and construction. 

  
• Reply 5 of 12

  Beats Posts: 3,073member

  July 15, 2021 4:08PM

  rob53 said:

  I would hope this would benefit chip production in the US but why Arizona? Cheap land and taxes? TSMC is not an American company and all profits (after taxes) will not stay in the US. Will the citizens of Arizona accept a Taiwanese company or will they boycott them as being non-American? I guess money talks more than anything else but how much is Phoenix paying them to build there? Are they selling out the citizens like Wisconsin did with the failed Foxconn major installation?

  
  Americans hate local companies and praise foreign companies. TSMC will be alright in this regard just don’t mention that they build chips for Apple!

  
• Reply 6 of 12

  zimmie Posts: 651member

  July 15, 2021 4:37PM

  rob53 said:

  I would hope this would benefit chip production in the US but why Arizona? Cheap land and taxes? TSMC is not an American company and all profits (after taxes) will not stay in the US. Will the citizens of Arizona accept a Taiwanese company or will they boycott them as being non-American? I guess money talks more than anything else but how much is Phoenix paying them to build there? Are they selling out the citizens like Wisconsin did with the failed Foxconn major installation?

  As I mentioned last time this was discussed, they're building in Arizona because that's where the skilled workers are. Intel has a bunch of fabs in Chandler, AZ. It's only beaten by Hillsboro, OR.
  
  If you have existing fabs in a region, you can ask a bunch of people who are already employees to move to a new facility, and train new people as you backfill. If you don't already have fabs, you need to go where the workers already are and attract them from a competitor, or spend potentially years training people in your industry before the site can start producing.

  
• Reply 7 of 12

  dewme Posts: 5,356member

  July 15, 2021 5:05PM

  zimmie said:

  rob53 said:

  I would hope this would benefit chip production in the US but why Arizona? Cheap land and taxes? TSMC is not an American company and all profits (after taxes) will not stay in the US. Will the citizens of Arizona accept a Taiwanese company or will they boycott them as being non-American? I guess money talks more than anything else but how much is Phoenix paying them to build there? Are they selling out the citizens like Wisconsin did with the failed Foxconn major installation?

  As I mentioned last time this was discussed, they're building in Arizona because that's where the skilled workers are. Intel has a bunch of fabs in Chandler, AZ. It's only beaten by Hillsboro, OR.
  
  If you have existing fabs in a region, you can ask a bunch of people who are already employees to move to a new facility, and train new people as you backfill. If you don't already have fabs, you need to go where the workers already are and attract them from a competitor, or spend potentially years training people in your industry before the site can start producing.

  
  

  Absolutely. It makes sense to me that you'd want to build production near the source of required resources, which in this case and several others, are human resources. If you look at areas like Silicon Valley, Research Triangle Park in NC, the 128 corridor around Boston, the Washington DC beltway, and of course parts of big cities like LA, Chicago, and New York, you'll usually find strong ties between industry, universities, and pools of talent for specific business and problem domains. These areas attract not only similar companies to those already in place, but several layers of smaller companies who play supporting roles in the same lines of business.
  

  
  

  If it was all about cheap land and low taxes none of the aforementioned areas would be worthy of mention since they all have relatively outrageous land costs and high taxes. 
  

  
• Reply 8 of 12

  blastdoor Posts: 3,276member

  July 15, 2021 5:51PM

  zimmie said:

  rob53 said:

  I would hope this would benefit chip production in the US but why Arizona? Cheap land and taxes? TSMC is not an American company and all profits (after taxes) will not stay in the US. Will the citizens of Arizona accept a Taiwanese company or will they boycott them as being non-American? I guess money talks more than anything else but how much is Phoenix paying them to build there? Are they selling out the citizens like Wisconsin did with the failed Foxconn major installation?

  As I mentioned last time this was discussed, they're building in Arizona because that's where the skilled workers are. Intel has a bunch of fabs in Chandler, AZ. It's only beaten by Hillsboro, OR.
  
  If you have existing fabs in a region, you can ask a bunch of people who are already employees to move to a new facility, and train new people as you backfill. If you don't already have fabs, you need to go where the workers already are and attract them from a competitor, or spend potentially years training people in your industry before the site can start producing.

  I've also heard that AZ is appealing for reasons of consistent weather and geological stability.

  
• Reply 9 of 12

  blastdoor Posts: 3,276member

  July 15, 2021 5:54PM

  melgross said:

  Unless it would build older chips for Apple, a 5nm plant in 2024 won’t be used for cutting edge designs for them. But it’s over three years off, plans can change.

  I've been wondering if it's for US government, esp DOD, purposes. I could imagine that the Feds strongly prefer that defense contractors source semiconductors from geopolitically stable locations with good security. A small island 100 miles from China might not qualify. 
  

  
• Reply 10 of 12

  OutdoorAppDeveloper Posts: 1,293member

  July 15, 2021 8:30PM

  Whatever they make there, send it to the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin where they will turn it in to the stuff of dreams.
• Reply 11 of 12

  FileMakerFeller Posts: 1,546member

  July 18, 2021 12:30AM

  rob53 said:

  doggone said:

  rob53 said:

  I would hope this would benefit chip production in the US but why Arizona? Cheap land and taxes? TSMC is not an American company and all profits (after taxes) will not stay in the US. Will the citizens of Arizona accept a Taiwanese company or will they boycott them as being non-American? I guess money talks more than anything else but how much is Phoenix paying them to build there? Are they selling out the citizens like Wisconsin did with the failed Foxconn major installation?

  You could say the same for car companies.  There are plenty of foreign manufacturers for cars in the US.  There are no complaints about that anymore.  Maybe in the beginning but now it just means jobs for locals and revenue for the city. 
  
  It would be great to see that site successful and pave the way for more high end manufacturing in the US.  

  It's interesting that foreign automotive companies are building cars in the US because it's cheaper while American automotive companies continue to outsource to Mexico and Canada for the majority of their car production. Tesla is the leading American company using the majority of American made parts and construction. 

  If you're making cars in Germany for the American market and you're taxed on emissions including transport of vehicles to customers, it makes more sense to manufacture in the US. If you're in the US making cars for the American market and you're not taxed on the emissions...

  
• Reply 12 of 12

  melgross Posts: 33,510member

  July 18, 2021 4:21PM

  blastdoor said:

  melgross said:

  Unless it would build older chips for Apple, a 5nm plant in 2024 won’t be used for cutting edge designs for them. But it’s over three years off, plans can change.

  I've been wondering if it's for US government, esp DOD, purposes. I could imagine that the Feds strongly prefer that defense contractors source semiconductors from geopolitically stable locations with good security. A small island 100 miles from China might not qualify. 
  

  The government doesn’t use that many chips. It mostly buys commercial equipment. Even military equipment these days often uses commercial equipment. Apple is the worlds largest buyer of semiconductors. They’re over 25% of TSMC’s business, and rising. They pay for some of their research, and supply machinery. If this plant isn’t goi g to product something for Apple, then what’s the point? Automobile chips are a large market too. But less than q00 million vehicles worldwide were sold, maybe 90 million. But Apple buys over 300 million chips a year from tsmc. When they make their own modem in a couple of years, at first, likely, it will be a separate part. That would be another 250+ million chips. And that will come out of Qualcomm’s numbers. Will that be 5nm in 2023 or 2024? Maybe, maybe not.
  
   S then there are other chips tsmc makes for Apple, some of these are in the same number category.

  edited July 2021