A piece of the great international game around semiconductors is being played in the Arizona desert. North of Phoenix, the state capital, an industrial juggernaut is emerging from the ground, emanating from the world’s leading manufacturer of electronic chips, the Taiwanese TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).
The microprocessor giant was attracted to this distant territory in the American West by a set of local and, above all, federal subsidies. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States has made restarting semiconductor production a national security priority. Like Donald Trump before him, President Joe Biden wants to reduce the dependence of American industry on Asia. And especially “counter China”, according to the objective of the White House, in a sector so essential for the economy.
2,000 kilometers from California’s Silicon Valley, Phoenix is beginning to deserve the nickname “Silicon Desert” put forward by its communicators. Since the health crisis and the reindustrialization advocated by Joe Biden, the city has become a hotspot for the development of advanced technologies; the setting of one of the episodes of the Chip Warthe chip war between Washington and Beijing for control of an essential component for smartphones, connected cars, video games, medical devices, etc. While 80% of the world’s semiconductors are manufactured in Asia (and 90% of the most advanced in Taiwan), and the island is threatened by China, the Pentagon is in a hurry to end its dependence on TSMC for its missiles and combat aircraft.
Alongside Interstate 17, a highway that runs north through the red dust, TSMC is building two “fabs” (manufacturing plants, in industry jargon), over 5 square kilometers, a gigantic site that occupies 12,000 workers. Fab 21 will produce chips with an engraving fineness of 4 or 5 nanometers (billionths of a meter), a technological feat that TSMC is the only one, with the Korean Samsung, to currently master. Planned production capacity: 20,000 silicon wafers per month.
Halting Chinese technological advances
Twenty-eight of its subcontractors have already taken up positions around Phoenix. Taiwanese Sunlit Chemical is building a hydrofluoric acid production plant nearby, at a cost of $100 million (€93 million). The American Amkor is building a factory in Peoria, 35 kilometers from the TSMC site, for the packaging of Apple chips which will leave the Taiwanese foundry.
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