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TSMC was heavily sponsored by the Taiwanese government with the goal of making Taiwan so valuable that other countries would feel required to defend them agains
by hajile 2y ago
TSMC was heavily sponsored by the Taiwanese government with the goal of making Taiwan so valuable that other countries would feel required to defend them against China.
It is against their interests to outsource too much or outsource cutting-edge nodes. This is exactly what we see.
The recent Arizona fab is N4 which is just N5 with some refinements. N5 was sampling iPhone chips in 2019 and N4P has been available since 2020-2021. That's a half-decade ago.
N3 started up in 2022, but won't be in the US until 2028 some 6 years later. By 2028, TSMC plans their Taiwanese factories to have produced 2nm, 1.6nm, 1.4nm, and 1nm.
If the US wants cutting edge chip manufacturing, it 100% is NOT coming from TSMC.
- greedo 2y agoThere's also a strategic imperative for chip production in the US that isn't cutting edge; lots of stuff depends on basic ICs that were in short supply during COVID and having more production of stuff that doesn't need to be 2nm is a good thing for the US.
- hajile 2y agoThere's generally a strong preference for those basic chips to use planar nodes. This limits them to 28nm for TSMC and 22nm for GlobalFoundries (22FDX+ fab is actually in Dresden, but they announced plans to add a second 22FDX+ fab in New York). I do agree that more fabs in the US is better than fewer though.