TSMC is reportedly planning on opening up a chip factory within the US, specifically in the state of Arizona. It’s relatively rapid development, considering that the Taiwanese foundry was supposedly still in talks with the US’ Trump administration for the same reason.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the semiconductor plant TSMC is planning to build will be focused on developing and producing 5nm chips. It is also likely the majority of chips produced by this factory will be made for the majority of TSMC’s major clients. That includes Apple, NVIDIA, and Huawei.
To recap, TSMC recently received a tall order from NVIDIA to provide it with a shipment of both 7nm and 5nm chips. The latter supposedly being the larger portion of the two, suggesting that NVIDIA could be both prepping and securing stock for the successor of its recently announced Ampere GPU architecture, codenamed Hopper.
On another note, it’s also being said that building the new factory from scratch isn’t going to come cheap and it’s expected that TSMC could end up spending billions of dollars to build the new plant. To that end, the chipmaker reportedly spent US$17 billion (~RM74 billion) building another foundry in Tainan, Taiwan.
It’s also important to note that TSMC’s decision to build a foundry on US soil hints at the possibility of the company getting some kind of financial incentive from the US government. Sadly, exactly how much or what kind of incentive that is remains a mystery.
