President Trump said on Monday that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's largest chip manufacturer, will spend $ 100 billion in the United States in the coming four years to expand production capacity and bring his most advanced semiconductor processes to his activities in Arizona.
The investment will enable TSMC to make artificial intelligence and smartphon chips in Arizona, Mr Trump said.
With the commitment, TSMC brings its planned total expenditure in the United States to $ 165 billion. The money will expand the footprint of the company in Arizona from three factories to six, 25,000 jobs and create a research and development center to develop future production processes.
The expansion of TSMC comes after years of work to generate the domestic production of semiconductors. For more than five years, the Washington officials have been delivered that the Dominance of the Chip industry had created a national security risk. They feared that the United States could lose access to those advanced chips, which were produced in Taiwan, because Beijing wants to recover the island as part of China.
The previous Trump government started lobbying TSMC to build plants in the United States. The BIDEN administration has presented that efforts by adopting the Chips Act, a dual bill that yielded $ 39 billion in federal financing for the construction of new and extensive production facilities to make the small electronics that flows from cars to iPads.
During an event of the White House, Mr Trump said that TSMC investment would reduce the national security risk of America and encourage other companies to make more of their products in the United States.
“Half -conductors are the backbone of the 21st -century economy, and really without the semiconductors there is no economy,” said Mr. Trump, adding that “we must be able to build the chips and semiconductors that we need here in American factories, with American skills and American labor.”
Together with Mr. Trump, CC Wei, CEO of TSMC, said that the company would start making AI chips and smartphonchips in the United States. He added that the factory expansion was supported by American customers, including Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm and Broadcom.
Mr. Trump said that the investment would help TSMC to avoid the rates of 25 percent or more on chips made in Taiwan. Since he was in the office in January, he had threatened 100 percent rates at Taiwanese chips and criticized the chips act because he has not made any companies like TSMC to make more chips in his own country.
Since Mr Trump took office in January, TSMC and Taiwanese officials went looking to respond to his tariff threats. In January, Mr Wei Weiard Lutnick, the Trade Secretary, met about investments that TSMC could make. They investigated the possibility that TSMC's investment in the American chip maker, Intel, in a deal that would take over the production activities of the Silicon Valley icon. Taiwanese officials also traveled to Washington and drove deals to invest in the United States.
The investment doubles more than the dedication of TSMC to the United States and increases the possibilities of the chips it produces in Arizona.
According to the Chips Act, TSMC had promised to invest $ 65 billion to build three factories in Arizona. The production process that it had promised to bring the United States is a Legacy technology that makes less advanced chips than the person producing it in Taiwan. It received $ 6.6 billion in federal financing to support the project.
With its appearance on Monday, TSMC becomes the last in a series of companies to visit the White House and to enter into investment obligations. In January, OpenAi, Oracle and Softbank promised to spend $ 500 billion in data centers for the next four years. Last month, Tim Cook, the Chief Executive of Apple, met Mr Trump before the company worked to spend $ 500 billion in four years, with part of that support to a new factory in Houston to make artificial intelligence servers.
“They are huge here because they want to be in the largest market in the world, and they want to avoid the rates,” Mr Lutnick said at the event on Monday. “If they are not here, they should suffer.”
