Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. are taking their U.S. fab operations in different directions, according to two new reports.
The Wall Street Journal today cited sources as saying that TSMC is accelerating investments in its Arizona fab complex. Samsung, meanwhile, is reportedly delaying the completion of a chip factory in Texas. The two companies’ construction projects are expected to cost more than $180 billion between them.
According to the Journal, TSMC is slowing a fab construction project in Japan to make more resources available for its accelerated investment program in Arizona. The latter initiative will see the company build a sprawling manufacturing hub near Phoenix that will host nine different facilities. The hub is expected to employ 6,000 professionals at full capacity.
TSMC’s first Arizona fab, which makes four-nanometer chips, came online in late 2024. The company’s most advanced fab is set to open towards the end of the decade and will produce processors based on a 1.6-nanometer node. It will make transistors from nanosheets, tiny sheets of semiconducting material up to a few hundred atoms thick.
The fab in Japan that TSMC is reportedly delaying will be built next to an existing factory that it opened last year. At full capacity, the two plants will produce up to 100,000 12-inch wafers’ worth of chips per month. TSMC envisions those chips finding use in data centers, industrial equipment, vehicles and consumer electronics.
Samsung, one of TSMC’s top rivals in the contract chip manufacturing market, is also expanding its stateside production infrastructure. In 2020, the company announced plans to spend $17 billion on a new fab in Taylor, Texas. The facility is located about 30 miles from Samsung’s two existing chip factories in Austin.
The company originally planned to start making chips in Taylor by the end of 2024. The opening date has since been pushed back to 2026. On Thursday, Nikkei Asia reported that Samsung is delaying the completion of the fab because it’s struggling to find customers.
According to regulatory filings cited by the paper, construction was more than 90% complete as of March. However, Samsung is reportedly “in no hurry” to move chipmaking equipment into the facility.
The company initially planned to make four-nanometer chips in Taylor. According to Nikkei Asia, executives later decided that deploying a more advanced 2-nanometer process would be preferable. It’s believed that Samsung is currently taking “a wait-and-see” approach to the upgrade, which would likely require significant investments.
Samsung said in a statement responding to the report that it still plans to open the fab by 2026. It’s unclear whether the facility will launch with all the production equipment that the company had originally planned to install.
Both Samsung and TSMC plan to launch their newest, most capable two-nanometer manufacturing processes later this year. The technologies will use a transistor architecture known as the gate-all-around design. It reduces the amount of electricity that transistors lose while processing data, which helps boost power efficiency and performance.
Photo: TSMC
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