Trump’s threat of semiconductor tariffs may have spooked the chipmaker.
Striking a four-year deal with President Donald Trump, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) plans to invest $100 billion in chip manufacturing plants in the US, sources told The Wall Street Journal.
According to “people familiar with the matter,” Trump will officially announce the deal later today. While still unconfirmed, TSMC’s supposed investment comes after OpenAI and Apple announced similarly vague plans to each invest $500 billion into the US in apparent efforts to get on Trump’s good side. It’s hard to tell if these plans are actually new or if companies had already planned to invest heavily without outside pressure, WSJ noted.
It’s undeniable that expanding TSMC’s US presence has long been a goal for the US. TSMC announced its first fab in 2020, initially committing $12 billion over 10 years. Since then, TSMC’s investments over time have expanded, reaching $40 billion by 2022. Last year, its investments notched up again when TSMC was awarded $6.6 billion in direct funding under the CHIPS Act to “support the company’s planned investment of more than $65 billion in three greenfield leading-edge fabs in Phoenix, Arizona,” the Commerce Department press release said. At that time, Joe Biden had promised those fabs would “manufacture the most advanced chips in the world,” putting the US “on track to produce 20 percent of the world’s leading-edge semiconductors by 2030.”