Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC announces new $100B investment in US

Taiwanese chip giant TSMC announced at the White House Monday that it will invest an additional $100 billion in the U.S. for three new advanced semiconductor manufacturing plants, a new infusion on top of the manufacturer’s existing plans.

TSMC CEO C.C. Wei credited President Donald Trump for the projects, which will include a new Arizona R&D center — a critical part of the technology supply chain that the company has never moved outside of Taiwan.

“We have to thank President Trump’s vision and his support,” Wei said. “TSMC started the journey of establishing the advanced chip manufacturing in Arizona. And now, let me proudly say the vision becomes reality.”

The company — which makes some 90 percent of the world’s most cutting-edge chips for customers like Nvidia and Apple — previously committed over $65 billion to build three factories in Arizona under a CHIPS and Science Act contract with the Biden administration. TSMC agreed to build a factory in the U.S. to cut reliance on geopolitically risky Taiwan during Trump’s first term.

TSMC has already received at least $1.5 billion of its total $6.6 billion CHIPS Act award, and the first of its Arizona factories has been mass-producing chips since last month. Wei said Monday the plant is employing 3,000 workers.

Yet Taiwanese officials and chipmakers have been scrambling to stave off the possibility of disruption after Trump derided the CHIPS Act as a “ridiculous” Biden-era giveaway to wealthy corporations, and threatened to impose tariffs on foreign-made chips as an alternate method of reshoring the sector.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said at the Monday announcement that companies like TSMC are building in the U.S. because “they want to avoid the tariffs that if they’re not here, they’d have to suffer.”

Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te vowed last month to ramp up talks with the U.S. over Trump’s concerns, and to increase investment and spend more on defense in hopes of creating a “win-win scenario.” His officials traveled to Washington for meetings, including with the Trump administration. TSMC held its first-ever U.S. board meeting in company history and reportedly considered the Trump team’s pitch that it enter a joint venture with a U.S. chipmaker.

The chipmaker’s overseas expansion has also involved projects in Japan and Germany. But a key concession in TSMC’s deal with the Biden administration was agreeing to bring the next-generation chip — known as the 2-nanometer process — to the U.S., the same advanced technology that will be produced at its Taiwanese base.