The chips Act’s sweeteners notwithstanding, Taiwanese chip-giant TSMC will continue to make most of its high-end chips at home, not in the USA.
Building fabs in America takes longer and costs more than in Asia, though subsidies cover some of that difference. Finding workers to operate them is harder. And the factories will be smaller, which makes them more expensive to run. tsmc’s four “gigafabs” in Taiwan can each churn out more than 100,000 wafers a month, compared with 25,000 at its American “megafabs”. The company has not disclosed the capacity of its third plant in Arizona. But analysts expect that by 2030 it will produce around 80,000 wafers a month, all told. Bloomberg, a data provider, forecasts that tsmc’s Taiwan operation will make almost four times as many in 2024, much of it for American customers such as Apple and Nvidia. The company also plans to build “multiple fabs” in Taiwan. Morris Chang, tsmc’s retired founder, has called America’s chipmaking ambitions a “very expensive exercise in futility”. That is harsh—but probably true
Source: Economist