A new report claims TSMC wants an Arizona “GigaFab” cluster that can rival what it produces in Taiwan.
DigiTimes says TSMC’s US plans have already “exceeded expectations” and the outfit is now eyeing a total of 12 fabs. The idea is to mirror the kind of fab network it runs in Hsinchu, Taiwan, only with more cactus and less typhoon risk.
The report reckons TSMC’s and Taiwan’s combined US investment could hit half a trillion dollars, with the spending framed as groundwork for something bigger than a couple of token plants. That is a lot of concrete for a country that still argues about potholes.
DigiTimes claims TSMC will add two more wafer fabs and two more advanced packaging fabs in Arizona, taking the state to 12 projects in total. The pitch is that this is not just TSMC shipping in kit and engineers, but a wider supply chain shift, so more production stays on US soil.
Of course, building chips in the US is not cheap. The report flags higher costs for facilities, labour and depreciation per wafer, but says the early phases are ploughing on regardless.
For some reason, the planners seem to be only interested in building data centres in the hottest places in the US, making issues like water and power really tricky.
“Supply chain sources say that the plan for these 12 factories is TSMC’s largest overseas investment in history. It has transformed from an initial risk diversification base into an important extension base for advanced processes and packaging, becoming a key to the reconstruction of semiconductor manufacturing in the United States.”
DigiTimes ties the fresh confidence to a recent US-Taiwan tariff agreement, with the US administration supposedly lining up incentives via economic and labour support. If that is the deal, Arizona is about to become an expensive negotiating chip.
Experts quoted in the report argue the scale was inevitable because 70 per cent of TSMC’s customers are US fabless firms. They want supply security without the political choke points that come with keeping everything in Taiwan.
That demand keeps dragging TSMC’s capex higher quarter after quarter, because it is stuck feeding both the front-end wafer crunch and the back-end packaging crunch. Every AI compute outfit wants a slot, and TSMC is the one holding the clipboard.
Someone even floated that TSMC could surpass the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple in market value by 2030, which is the sort of prediction that always sounds clever until the next cycle bites.