Posted on 01/04/2025 7:20:13 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Atop a newly completed, 3.5-million-square-foot building that stands on 1,100 acres in the Arizona desert north of Phoenix is a giant logo of a microchip wafer and the letters TSMC.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's first Arizona chip fabrication plant, or fab, is making history because it's the most advanced chip fab on U.S. soil, and Apple has committed to being the site's largest customer.
CNBC first visited the fab in 2021, not long after TSMC broke ground. The company initially announced the plant would cost $12 billion and pump out 5-nanometer chips by the end of 2024. Three years later, that price tag has soared to $20 billion and full production is delayed until 2025.
Instead, the fab is in pilot production, making sample wafers and sending them to customers for verification. TSMC has committed to building two more fabs on the site by the end of the decade, for a total investment of $65 billion...
TSMC Arizona Chairman Rick Cassidy shows CNBC's Katie Tarasov around the company's newly completed fabrication plant, where it will make advanced chips on U.S. soil for the first time, Nov. 7, 2024.
With the help of some 2,000 employees, the fab is set to make more-advanced chips than originally planned. It will produce 4-nanometer chips, at a rate of 20,000 wafers per month, TSMC said...
In the event of aggression between China and Taiwan, an earthquake or some other event that impacts Taiwan for a period of time, "the entire market, the entire world could suffer from lack of availability of leading edge nodes," Newman said.
A deadly 7.4 magnitude earthquake in April briefly halted production in Taiwan and led to a $92 million loss for TSMC. The Arizona buildings are "well prepared" for earthquakes, Cassidy said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
They bet wrong.
Bfl
Arizona is quickly being Californicated. For success, TSMC Arizona needs the freedom to operate on war time rules, or at least Taiwan employment rules, and be able to hire engineers based on merit again, which in practice means 90% German White, German Jew, and East Asian men. They might need to set up a 2 year accelerated engineering school so they don't end up with Intel's laid off H1B staff.
Two nanometer etchings is as small as it gets. You can get huge content on a chip with two mµ (2/1,000,000,000 metres). The air has to be perfectly filtered in the fabrication room. Fabrication takes lots of electricity and water.
The fabrication process, with those dangerous chemicals, is totally isolated from the technicians running it.
Pharmaceuticals and Rare Earth mining and processing.
Odd environment - nose bled from ultra-low humidity first few weeks. And eerily quiet, mainly just the hushed sound of the air handlers.
Did not like it at all, but would do almost anything for a paycheck....
And have nose rings.
The US military doesn't eat more hamburgers than the rest of the United States either. There are more iPhones than tanks, aircraft, and missiles combined.
It’s inland. Arizona has no coast.
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