Source: Wall Street News
The report said that although TSMC plans to introduce some packaging processes at its new plant in the US, it has not shown any intention to establish an advanced packaging factory in the US due to limited production capacity and other reasons.
$Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM.US)$Recently, it was announced that 65 billion US dollars will be spent to build two fabs in Arizona, USA to meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence chips from Nvidia and other customers.
The US government paid a high price for this, providing TSMC with 6.6 billion US dollars in subsidies and up to 5 billion US dollars in low-interest loans. However, this is still not enough to entice TSMC to completely transfer its most advanced chip production technology to the US.
According to TSMC's plan, the new Arizona plant will begin producing 2 nm chips in 2028, and this technology is expected to become the most advanced mass production technology in the world at that time. TSMC also revealed that it will set up a third local fab to produce 2 nm chips.
However, the advanced packaging process required for AI chip production will still be carried out mainly in Asia, and there is still uncertainty about whether the US can actually achieve autonomous chip manufacturing.
The so-called “packaging” refers to the process of assembling various logic and memory components into complex chip devices. Currently, this key process is mainly completed by TSMC in Taiwan, China.
According to recent media reports, although TSMC plans to introduce some packaging processes at its new plant in the US, it has not shown any intention to establish an advanced packaging factory in the US due to limited production capacity and other reasons.
By contrast, TSMC's Korean competitor is more aggressive.
This month, SK Hynix announced that it will establish an advanced packaging factory in Indiana, USA to produce high-bandwidth memory chips (HBM), and Samsung is also planning to establish an advanced packaging factory in Texas.
US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raymond previously stated that with the deepening investment of TSMC and other companies in the US, the US is expected to produce 20% of the world's cutting-edge chips by 2030. However, industry insiders pointed out that without the support of key processes such as advanced packaging, this goal may be difficult to achieve.
In response, a senior US government official said that Amkor, a local semiconductor assembly and testing company in the US, is expected to fill this gap to a certain extent, and that its US factory project will be completed one year later than TSMC. However, there is still uncertainty about whether the company can fully meet the needs of customers such as Nvidia, and it lacks the ability to manufacture key packaging components for connecting logic and memory components.
editor/tolk