Chip manufacturer TSMC announced that its first factory in Arizona, USA, will delay the start of production by one year to 2025. The company said that due to the lack of sufficient technical personnel in the local area, the progress of the factory construction has been hindered.
“While we are working hard to improve the situation, including sending experienced technicians from Taiwan to train local technicians for a short period of time, we expect the production schedule for N4 process technology to be delayed until 2025,” said Liu Deyin, chairman of TSMC.
TSMC, the world’s largest contract semiconductor manufacturer, first announced plans to build a factory in the United States in 2020. In 2022, the company announced that it will invest 40 billion U.S. dollars in Arizona to build two factories. At the time, the first plant was expected to start production in 2024 and the second in 2026. In the future, up to six more factories could be built on the site. In 2022, due to pressure from Apple, TSMC will also transfer its first fab from 5nm to the more advanced 4nm process, and the second fab will support the 3nm process.
When fully operational, the two new fabs are expected to be able to produce approximately 600,000 wafers per year. TSMC will still manufacture most of its state-of-the-art processors in Taiwan, though, and will continue to do so even after the U.S. factory is fully built.
This month, TSMC announced its second-quarter financial report, with net profit down 23% year-on-year, the company’s first quarterly profit decline since 2019. “We believe TSMC has strong growth prospects in 2024. We believe a delay in U.S. expansion is also expected by investors,” Goldman Sachs said in a research note.
As for the other factory in Japan, Liu Deyin said that its progress remains unchanged, and mass production will continue at the end of 2024 according to the established plan. The factory will be used to produce 16nm, 22nm, and 28nm process semiconductors.
