President Trump said on Monday that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest chip maker, will spend $ 100 billion in the United States over the next four years to expand its productive capacity and bring the most advanced semiautic processes to its activities.
The investment will allow TSMC to start making artificial intelligence and smartphone chips in Arizona, Mr Trump said.
With the commitment, TSMC brings the planned total costs to the United States to $ 165 billion. The money will extend the company’s footprint in Arizona from three production plants to six, add 25,000 jobs and create a research and development center for the development of future production processes.
The TSMC expansion comes after years of work to upgrade domestic semiconductor construction. For more than five years, Washington officials have been worried that TsMC’s sovereignty in the chip industry had created a risk of national security. He was afraid that the United States could lose access to these advanced chips, which are produced in Taiwan because Beijing wants to recover the island as part of China.
Trump’s previous administration began to put pressure on the TSMC to build plants in the United States. Biden’s administration made its efforts, passing the law on brands, a bilateral bill that provided $ 39 billion to federal funding for the construction of new and expanded production facilities to make the tiny electronics that are powered by IPads.
During a White House event, Mr Trump said the TSMC investment would reduce the risk of America’s national security and encourage other companies to make more of their products in the United States.
“Semiconductors are the backbone of the 21st century economy and really without semiconductors, there is no economy,” Mr Trump said, adding that “we must be able to build the chips and semiconductors we need here in US factories and American skills.”
Despite Mr Trump, TSMC’s chief executive, he said the company would start making chips and smartphone chips in the United States. He added that the factory expansion had been supported by US customers such as Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm and Broadcom.
Mr Trump said the investment would help TSMC avoid tariffs 25 % or more in chips made in Taiwan. From taking over his duties in January, he had threatened tariffs 100 percent in Taiwan chips and criticized the act of chips to avoid companies such as TSMC making more tokens in the domestic market.
Since Mr Trump assumed duties in January, TSMC and Taiwan officials have been trying to respond to the threats of his invoice. In January, Mr Wei met with Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, on the investments that TsMC could make. They explored the possibility of investing TSMC in the US chipmaker, Intel, in an agreement that would see it take over Silicon Valley Icon’s production companies. Taiwan officials also traveled to Washington and brought bids to invest in the United States.
The investment exceeds TSMC’s commitment to the United States and increases the capabilities of the chips it produces in Arizona.
According to brands law, TSMC was committed to investing $ 65 billion to build three factories in Arizona. The production process that was committed to bringing to the United States is a legacy technology that makes less sophisticated chips than it produces in Taiwan. It received $ 6.6 billion in federal funding to support the project.
With its appearance on Monday, the TSMC will become the last one in a series of companies to visit the White House and make investment commitments. In January, Openai, Oracle and Softbank promised to spend $ 500 billion on data centers over the next four years. Last month, Tim Cook, Managing Director of Apple, met with Mr Trump before the company to spend $ 500 billion for four years, with some of this support going to a new factory in Houston to create artificial intelligence servers.
“They come here in huge size because they want to be in the world’s largest market and want to avoid invoices,” Mr Lutnick told the event on Monday. “If they are not here, they should suffer.”
