According to The Information report, TSMC’s plant in Arizona in the United States under the strong impetus of President Biden, the entire scale of the construction reached 40 billion U.S. dollars (currently about RMB 294.4 billion), but in fact, the plant is more like a face-saving project, the United States of America’s chip manufacturing industry is almost no help.
After interviewing a number of TSMC engineers and former Apple employees, they all said that although the Arizona factory for Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, Tesla and other customers produces many advanced chips, the packaging still needs to be transferred to Taiwan, China to complete.
The sources said TSMC has no plans to build a packaging plant in Arizona or elsewhere in the U.S., and the employees interviewed said such projects would be costly in the U.S.
Apple chip partner TSMC’s new plant in Arizona held its first machine-in ceremony last year, with Apple CEO Tim Cook on hand to help and Intel CEO Kissinger tweeting congratulations.
Image source: Cook’s tweet
Industry analyst Ben Thompson wrote on his Stratechery blog, “Simply put, even if TSMC’s new plant can start volume production in 2024, it will still be two years behind 4nm production. And if the plant plans to produce 5-nanometer processes, it will actually be four years behind.”
