TSMC gets $6.6 billion in chipmaking cash from Biden while pledging to build a third Arizona plant
The Biden administration said Monday it plans to send up to $6.6 billion in federal grants to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM) as the chipmaking giant promises a $25 billion Arizona expansion that will bring a third TSMC fabrication plant to that state.
The deal, the second major US chipmaking grant announcement of the last three weeks, is part of President Joe Biden’s effort to restart advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the US.
In March Biden said the US would provide up to $8.5 billion in grants in the years ahead to Intel (INTC) to support a range of new projects in Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico, and Oregon.
The money for both companies is coming from 2022’s CHIPs and Science law, a signature accomplishment of Biden’s current term.
TSMC will use the grants to fund the continued construction of two manufacturing plants already being built in the Phoenix area. The company also announced Monday it would build a third facility there in the years ahead.
The goal is for all three plants to be online by the end of the decade and producing TSMC’s most advanced chips. Some of the plants even hope to use a forthcoming 2 nanometer fabrication process and make even more advanced chips than are currently available.
“These are the chips that underpin all artificial intelligence and they are the chips that are necessary components for the technology that we need to underpin our economy,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters ahead of the announcement.
The $6.6 billion in grants to be doled out in the years ahead include an allotment of $50 million for workforce development as well as additional authorization for up to $5 billion in government loans. That inflow comes in addition to manufacturing tax credits in the 2022 law that could be worth additional billions.
The government money will pair with TSMC’s plans to invest over $65 billion in its Arizona operations. It had previously announced $40 billion and said today it would add an additional $25 billion largely to fund construction of the third fabrication facility.
Monday’s news underlines the central role that Arizona is playing in the effort to bring back semiconductor manufacturing to the US.
President Biden has made multiple semiconductor-themed trips to the state in recent years including a stop last month to announce the grants for Intel, which is also building in the state.
“It’s an exciting day for Arizona, where we are leading the way in bringing the most advanced microchip manufacturing back to America,” Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a negotiator of the 2022 law, told Yahoo Finance.
Monday’s announcement is the fifth manufacturing award from the law.
In addition to TSMC and Intel, three smaller manufacturing awards had been previously announced. There was roughly $35 million for BAE Systems (BAESY), $162 million for Microchip Technology, and $1.5 billion for GlobalFoundries (GFS) largely to fund the manufacturing of less advanced but still crucial chips.
The 20-month-old law allows the White House to spend a total of about $50 billion — $39 billion specifically earmarked for manufacturing — to try and help reignite the sector in the years ahead.
A focus on the labor market
Arizona’s path to semiconductor centrality began back in May 2020 when TSMC announced new plans for the state.
It’s an effort that has also been marked by struggles to ensure that enough Americans will be trained for the coming positions; TSMC recently announced a delay in their first US plant’s full-scale launch from 2024 to 2025 and cited worker shortages as a reason and brought in Taiwanese workers to help keep up.
“I do expect that immigration and bringing in expertise from Taiwan both on the facilities side and the construction side will continue to be really important,” a senior Biden administration official said ahead of the announcement. The official added that government and TSMC workforce development efforts will nevertheless mean “the overwhelming effects of this investment is going to be to create thousands and thousands of American jobs.”
TSMC has also said that they expect some of the worker shortages will lessen in each subsequent project with Chairman Dr. Mark Liu saying recently of the first two projects that “even though we encountered challenges in Arizona for our first fab construction…we believe the construction of our second fab will continue to be much smoother.”
Biden officials call TSMC’s overall project the largest foreign direct investment in a completely new project in US history and is expected to create at least 6,000 direct permanent jobs in addition to 20,000 temporary construction jobs.
The project is also expected to lead to “tens of thousands” of additional jobs as other companies work to supply the new massive facilities.
The increased investment is due to an ever increasing demand from US companies for chips as well as for chips that are made inside the United States, says Lael Brainard who is the director of Biden’s National Economic Council.
She notes that top officials like Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook and NVIDIA (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang attended a 2022 groundbreaking for TSMC’s second facility in Arizona. Both Apple and NVIDIA currently rely almost exclusively on chips from the company that are manufactured in Taiwan.
In a statement Monday, Chairman Liu said the government’s funding allowed for this increased investment adding “our U.S. operations allow us to better support our U.S. customers, which include several of the world’s leading technology companies.”
Monday’s announcement is part of the Biden administration’s ambitious overall goal of having the US produce 20% of the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips by the end of the decade.
Secretary Raimondo oversees a team implementing the law and often notes the high challenge ahead with America currently producing 0% of these advanced chips (and only 10% of chips overall).
This post has been updated with additional context.
Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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