The chief executive of the world’s largest chipmaker has succeeded in getting President Donald Trump off his back this year but has yet to win over investors to his strategy for riding out the current trade storm.
CC Wei of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced on March 3 a further $100bn investment in the US, silencing for now Trump’s accusations that Taiwan is “stealing” the US’s semiconductor business.
Instead, the US president now says TSMC’s additional investment will bring “a big percentage” of chip manufacturing on to US territory.
Investors are a lot less enthusiastic, with TSMC shares now down more than 17 per cent from the record high hit just after the Trump inauguration in January.
Their concerns are twofold: Trump could turn on TSMC again if it does not deliver on his high expectations, while a rapid, large-scale expansion of US manufacturing could drag down the company’s stellar profit margins.
The contract chipmaker has said little about how quickly it intends to spend the extra $100bn and on what exactly. That is in contrast to when it first committed to invest in production capacity in Arizona five years ago during Trump’s first term.
At that time, it gave a start date for construction, named the process technology generation that would be used and said when commercial production was scheduled to start and how many chips it would churn out.
It gave a similar level of detail when it upped its investment plans to $40bn in late 2022 and then to $65bn in April 2024.
This time, the company only says it will build three more fabrication plants, or fabs, on top of the three previously announced ones, plus two facilities for packaging several chips together on one substrate — a process crucial for advanced artificial intelligence chips but not fully available in the US.
“They were already planning to build a bunch of fabs here, and it’s more about: did they accelerate those plans? I would be a bit sceptical,” said Peter Hanbury, a partner at Bain focused on technology manufacturing and semiconductors. “You could say the advanced packaging fabs weren’t on the road map, so that could be considered incremental new manufacturing.”
There is no step change in the company’s research footprint, either. TSMC has said the “research and development team unit” it has pledged to set up in Arizona will just be for incremental tweaks to processes already in mass production, rather than developing cutting-edge new technology.
“That R&D will stay in Taiwan is one of the big challenges,” Hanbury said. He added that no matter whether it was TSMC or one of its rivals Intel and Samsung, “people are not moving their semiconductor R&D to a new geography under almost any scenario”.
“Unless you’re designing the next-generation transistor technology in the US, you do not have leadership in the US,” former Intel chief Pat Gelsinger told the Financial Times last week, referring to TSMC keeping its main R&D at home.
People close to TSMC suggested the additional $100bn was merely an estimated price tag for plans that had been on the books for the long term anyway, adding that the White House announcement reflected an intention rather than a promise.
The company acquired enough land in 2020 to build six fabs. “We always said that would be for future expansion,” said one person familiar with the plans. “Now that our first fab is in commercial production and the yield is good, we can continue looking ahead.”
TSMC declined to comment.
The extent of TSMC’s reprieve from the US administration’s pressure and threats is unclear.
Trump has repeatedly stated he wants to impose tariffs on imported semiconductors — a move that would drive up costs for TSMC customers such as Apple and Nvidia and probably lead them to demand that the manufacturer share the burden.
Now, Washington is expected to push back such chip tariffs until after it announces “reciprocal” tariffs on April 2, a delay industry experts said was most likely because of the challenge of in effect taxing subcomponents.
Trump’s “chip narrative has been overcome by events”, said one US official.
Some see the relief as only temporary. “Trump has to keep the pressure on with tariffs to force TSMC and everybody else to follow through,” said a senior executive at one of TSMC’s customers. “He clearly liked the $100bn figure — but don’t count on that being enough.”
TSMC’s US expansion still pales in comparison with its investments in its home base of Taiwan, where it has said it intends to build 10 or 11 additional fabs. Analysts at Bernstein estimate that even when complete, TSMC’s Arizona plants will account for output worth one-third of its total revenue at most by the early 2030s.
“If those $165bn are all spent, we may reach a capacity . . . that equals around 23 to 28 per cent of what TSMC will have by the end of 2026 for leading-edge [chips],” said Brad Lin, director of greater China semiconductor research at Bank of America. He added that since the buildout would take much longer than late 2026, the proportion “should be smaller than that”.
“I don’t think any company in the world can expand six fabs at the same time, especially in the US,” Lin said, pointing to potential bottlenecks in equipment and labour.
TSMC also has to pace its US expansion so as not to hurt profitability too much. Bernstein analysts calculate that the Arizona fabs — currently lossmaking — would need to achieve a 40 per cent gross margin in the early 2030s to keep company-wide gross margins at more than 53 per cent as forecast.
In the longer term, the picture is much brighter. TSMC executives said the company needed to expand overseas because Taiwan’s pool of engineers and land, power and water resources put a limit to how much bigger it could grow at home.
Experts said the scale of the Arizona operation, which will equal that of TSMC’s “gigafabs” back home, should allow it to reach similar efficiency levels once all capacity is in commercial production.
But that would be long after Trump leaves office. Current concerns are over whether TSMC’s big pledge has put an end to the administration’s push for it to help fix the manufacturing operations of its struggling rival Intel.
Such a plan is “impossible”, according to industry experts, with the two chipmakers’ tools and processes so different that it could cost more to transform an Intel fab than to build a completely new one.
But the executive at a TSMC customer believes Washington has a bigger plan to capture TSMC. “They make you resurrect Intel and invest big. After you build everything, [they can] say you are a monopoly now and you have to divest, we will find a buyer,” he said. “I think that’s the end game.”
