Trump’s bully tactics against Chinese companies may have been a little crazy, but it seems to have possibly scared two of the world’s biggest semiconductor producers, Samsung and TSMC into wanting to increase their manufacturing presence in the US. Bloomberg is reporting that Samsung is currently looking into spending over $10 billion to build an advanced new logic chipmaking plant in Austin, Texas. Samsung though is reportedly not messing around with the capabilities of this planned plant as the report reveals it will be capable of making processors as advanced as 3nm and become the company’s third worldwide to use extreme ultraviolet lithography technology in its chip production.
With many US tech companies encouraged to rathe produce their chips locally, this move makes a lot of sense for the company and in giving it the ability to produce 3nm processors, means it will be well geared up for future technologies across the fast-moving industry. Samsung is reportedly hoping that the plant will become operational by 2023 if all plans work out.
This comes off the news that TSMC is also investing $12 billion in a new US-based plant in Arizona with the expectation for the plant to become fully operational by 2024. For TSMC, who produces chips for Apple, it would allow them to be closer to one of their biggest clients in developing their powerful M1 processors.
However, with many US tech companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon also designing their own chips before outsourcing manufacturing to the likes of TSMC and Samsung these plant moves are going to make good business sense as the Us companies loo to promote their own local manufacturing. These changes might not have much impact on us, but US manufacturing does run the risk of increasing the costs of these chipsets a fair amount and I will be interesting to see how these companies will look to introduce price competitiveness into the mix.
Last Updated: January 26, 2021
HvR
January 27, 2021 at 01:55
The Trump bans does not really have anything to do with this since they were never the target.
This has way more to the with the pandemic, shipping and shutdowns in China caused huge headaches and shortages costing billions, this is also the reason for the current console shortage.
As for costs, looking at the Intel pricepoints who have always done their CPU silicone fabrication in the US and Israel it has always been competitive. Reason I suspect for this is that silicone fabrication is not really labour intensive.