TSMC to Build Advanced Semiconductor Factory in Arizona
I think this is a false rumour. The digital office of Taiwanese president is vehemently against letting fab tech out of the island. The woman running it is super sharp, can tell from knowing people who worked under her personally.It is one of their biggest insurance against mainland aggression. Any conflict with Taiwan is suicidal for the mainland economically. Plus, add the fact that 3/4 of China's own light industry is within 1000km radius of Taiwan.TSMC has already bough land and started construction for its 5nm fab, and laid first stone for 3nm fabs in Taiwan.Stopping 3nm fab construction now is completely out of the question unless they are ready to throw out few billion dollars cash out of the window, at the time when they took biggest debt obligations in their history.Only 2nm node is left on the roadmap, but there are big, big doubts of it materialising any time soon. We are talking about at least 8-10 years.With all my knowledge of the industry, such deliberations never result in decisions like "Hey, lets set aside 20-30 billion USD to lay still for 10 years, and hope for everything happen according to plan."Semiconductor fab companies are extremely, extremely risk averse, and snap judgements are completely uncharacteristic of the industry.They don't do anything without having top tier economists, and finance people have a go at the task for years on end. Financial planning of fab construction takes years.What is much more likely is them taking over a smaller fab in US, or building a limited scale project to make specialty chips for rad-hard, or US military hardware companies on US soil. This is what I myself been hearing for much longer than Trump been in office.