Under the cacti in the desert of Arizona, just outside of Phoenix, there will be an extraordinary collection of buildings that will form the future of the world economy and the world.
The buzz of further construction is not just a factory for the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Ultimately, the masses will produce the most advanced chips in the world. This work is being done for the first time in the US, where the Taiwanese company promised to spend billions more in a movement aimed at distracting the threat of rates on imported chips.
In my opinion it is the most important factory in the world, and it is being built by a company that you may never have heard of: TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. It makes 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors. Until now they were all made in Taiwan, the island of the Chinese mainland. The Apple chip in your iPhone, the NVIDIA chips that feed your chatgpt -querys, the chips in your laptop or computer network, are all made by TSMC.
The “FAB 21” facility of Arizona is closely monitored. Blank paper or personal devices are not allowed if designs are leaked. It houses some of the most important intellectual property in the world, and the process of making these chips is one of the most complicated and intensive in global production.
The Arizona factory of TSMC is closely monitored (BBC)
They are enormously protective against the secrets that lie inside. Important customers, such as Apple and Nvidia, rely on this company to protect their designs for future products.
But after months of questions, TSMC let the BBC come in to look at the partial transfer of what some claim is the most critical, expensive, complex and important production in the world.
The Poster -cind for Trump’s policy
President Trump certainly seems to think that. He often calls the factory casually. “TSMC is the largest there is,” he said. “We gradually lost the chipbusiness, and now it is almost almost in Taiwan. They have stolen it from us.” This is one of the regular choruses of the US president.
The recent decision of TSMC to extend its investments in the US by another $ 100 billion (£ 75 billion) is something that Trump attributes to his threats of rates for Taiwan and about the global semiconductor activities.
According to him, the expansion of the facility of Arizona, which was announced in March, is the poster – child for his economic policy – in particular the encouragement of foreign companies to move factories to the US to prevent major rates.
Trump heralded TSMC’s decision to invest in the US as proof of success for his rate policy (Getty)
China also looks carefully. Taiwan’s chip who makes brave was part of what her government has called her “silicon shield” against a much -established invasion. Although the original strategy was to make Taiwan indispensable in this area of critical technology, the problems with Pandemic Supply Chain de Calculus changed because trusting a single country seemed a greater risk.
So, many movements of the world economy, boundary technology and geopolitics flow through this one site and within that are the essential contradiction of Trump’s economic and diplomatic policy.
He first sees this plant as the example of America, and the preservation of economic and military superiority about China. Yet the production of these modern geminiaturized miracles on the border of physics and chemistry is inherent inherent depending on a combination of the very best technologies from all over the world.
The most beautiful environment on earth
Greg Jackson, one of the facility managers, takes me in a golf buggy. The factories are almost a copy of the TSMC spaces in Taiwan, where he trained. “I would say that these facilities are probably one of the most advanced and complicated in the world,” he says.
“It is quite the dichotomy. You really have, very small chips with really small structures, and it takes this enormous facility with all the infrastructure to make them … Only the pure complexity, the amount of systems needed is amazing.”
Within the ‘Treingebouw’, employees dress in protective clothing before crossing a bridge that should create the most beautiful environment on earth, to protect the production of this extraordinary microscopic transistors that create the microchips that undertake everything.
Konstantinos Ninios, an engineer, shows me some of the very first productions of TSMC Arizona: a silicon waffle with what is known as ‘4 nanometer chips’.
“This is currently the most advanced waffle in the US,” he explains. “(IT) contains approximately 10 to 14 trillion transistors … The entire process is three to 4,000 steps.”
If you could somehow shrink your body on the same scale and get into the waffle, he says that the many different layers would look like very tall streets and skyscrapers.
Production manipulation of atoms
TSMC was founded on behalf of the Taiwanese government in 1987, when Chip Executive Morris Chang was dedicated to start the company. The model would become a dedicated foundry for Microchips – the production of the designs of other companies. It became enormously successful.
Stimulating the progress of technology is the miniaturization of the smallest function on chips. Their size is now measured in billionth a meter or nanometer. This progress has enabled mobile phones to become smartphones and now sets the pace for the massive use of artificial intelligence.
It requires incredible complexity and costs through the use of “Extreme Ultraviolet (UV) light”. This is used to etch the complex building blocks of our modern existence in a process called “lithography”.
More from Indepth
The dependence on the world of TSMC is built on very specialized machines in the bus, which in turn are almost entirely from a Dutch company called ASML, including in Arizona.
These machines shoot tens of thousands of times UV light through drops of melted pewter, which creates a plasma, and are then broken by a series of specialized mirrors.
The almost fully automated process for each waffle silicon is repeated thousands of times in layers in months in the course of the $ 1 million LP-sized wafer of 4nm silicon chips.
“Just set a particle or a dust particle that falls in this,” says Ninios unbelieving to me. “The transistors are not going to work. So this is cleaner than hospitalworking rooms.”
Caution in Taiwan
Taiwan has no special access to the raw materials – but it has the know -how to stay ahead of other companies in the complicated process of producing these atomic building blocks of modern life.
Some in the Taiwanese government are careful spreading the boundary of this island technology. Trump wasted little time to claim the company’s decision to bring the highest level of technology to the US, was due to his economic policy.
He said this would not have happened without the stick of his planned rates on Taiwan and semiconductors. Those with whom I speak on TSMC are diplomatic about that claim.
Much of this had already been planned and subsidized under the chips act of the former US President Biden Administration.
The supply chain for semiconductors is worldwide, because no country can do everything at the moment, says Rose Castanares, president of TSMC Arizona (BBC)
On the walkway to the building are photos that show Biden’s visit in 2022, draped with the construction site in the stars and stripes and a banner who says “a future made in America”.
“The Semiconductor Supply Chain is worldwide,” says Rose Castanares, the president of TSMC Arizona. “At the moment there is really no country that can do anything, from chemicals to delivery from production to packaging, and so it is very difficult to quickly settle that whole thing.”
‘Not -rode’ supply chains to combat China
Regarding the supply chain of the semiconductor, rates will not help. The supply chain extends all over the world. Whether they are the silicon waffles from Japan, the machines needed from the Netherlands or mirrors from Germany, all kinds of materials from all over the world are required. Now they can be confronted with import costs.
That said, the boss of TSMC was quickly of the goal of confirming the expansion of the American site at an event with Trump in the White House. In recent weeks, the American technical elite – from Apple’s Tim Cook to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang – is in line to tell the world that TSMC Arizona will now produce many of the chips in their American products.
The global chip industry is very sensitive to the economic cycle, but the advanced technology enjoys very healthy margins, which some of these planned rates can dampen.
The company was founded in Taiwan in 1987. In March of this year they announced an extension of their facility in Arizona. (BBC)
There are many geopolitical subtexts here. The factory is central to the American strategy to get technological, AI and economic supremacy over China.
Both the BIDEN and the Trump administrations have developed the policy to limit Chinese access to the Frontier Semiconductor technology -from an export ban to China from ASML’s machines to new legislation to ban the use of Huawei AI chips in American software or technology about the world.
The president of Taiwan Lai this week insisted on democracies such as Japan and the US to develop “non-red” supply chains to combat China.
However, not everyone is convinced that this strategy works. Chinese technologists have been effective in working around the ban to develop competing indigenous technology. And Bill Gates said this week that this policy “the Chinese forced in terms of chip production and everything to move forward at full speed”.
Trump wants TSMC Arizona to become a first stone for his American Golden Age. But the story of the company so far is perhaps the ultimate expression of the success of modern globalization.
So for now it is a struggle for global technical and economic supremacy, in which the factory technology of Taiwan, some of which are now moved to the desert of Arizona, is the critical asset.
BBC Indepth Is it at home on the website and app for the best analysis, with new perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest problems of the day. And we present to thinking content from over BBC sounds and also IPLayer. You can send us your feedback over the indepth section by clicking the button below.
