Among the cactuses in the desert of Arizona, just outside Phoenix, an extraordinary collection of buildings is emerging that will shape the future of the global economy and the world.
It is, in my view, the most important factory in the world, and it’s being built by a company you may not have heard of: TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. It makes 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors. Until now they were all made on the island of Taiwan, which is 100 miles east of the Chinese mainland. The Apple chip in your iPhone, the Nvidia chips powering your ChatGPT queries, the chips in your laptop or computer network, all are made by TSMC.
They’re hugely protective of the secrets that lie within. Important customers, such as Apple and Nvidia, trust this company to safeguard their designs for future products.
But after months of asking, TSMC let the BBC in to look at the partial transfer of what some argue is the most critical, expensive, complex and important manufacturing in the world.
We gradually lost the chip business, and now it’s almost exclusively in Taiwan. They stole it from us." This is one of the US president’s regular refrains.
This coming from the guy who canceled the CHIPS Act that saw investments going toward US chip manufacturing needed by companies like US based Intel Corp? What a maroon.
Also this author seems to think that this AZ fab is “the most important in the world” yet TSMC has already stated that they will not bring their bleeding edge processes to the US or any other fab outside of Taiwan. This fab will be producing older nodes not the latest and greatest. I don’t think it will go as badly as the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin, but it’s not going to be a state of the art R&D facility or anything.
weird how the media assumes trump has some kind of worldview other than “get money, fuck bitches”.