Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) recently announced the opening of a second chip plant in Arizona and increased its U.S. investment from $12 billion to $40 billion.
President Joe Biden traveled to Phoenix, Arizona, on Dec. 6 to join the TSMC event.
“American manufacturing is back, folks,” Biden said at the ceremony. “These are the most advanced semiconductor chips on the planet, chips that will power iPhones and MacBooks, as Tim Cook can attest. Apple had to buy all the advanced chips from overseas. Now we’re going to do more of their supply chain here at home. ... It could be a game changer.”
Taiwan dominates the world’s supply of semiconductor chips, and TSMC is the country’s biggest chipmaker.
TSMC
In May 2020, then-U.S. President Donald Trump said he hoped to remove global industrial supply chains from China and bring manufacturing back from overseas. At the time, the Trump administration talked with TSMC about building chip factories in the United States.TSMC accounts for more than half of the global semiconductor market, and in advanced processors, its market share is as high as 90 percent. The chipmaker produces the majority of Apple’s approximately 1.4 billion smartphone processors and about 60 percent of the auto chips used by carmakers.
TSMC’s high-end products are also used in a range of defense and military systems, including military drones and missiles.
Industry watchers say if TSMC goes offline, the production of everything from cars to iPhones could screech to a halt, according to an Oct. 22 report by Business Insider.
Strategic Importance of Taiwan
Carl Schuster, former director of operations at U.S. Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center, told The Epoch Times on Dec. 9 that Taiwan plays an important role in the U.S.-China strategic competition.“Taiwan is a free country. Its status as a free entity, a free state, is important to American national security. Also, geographically, Taiwan is the gateway to the central Pacific. So a freedom-loving country that is a gateway to the entrepreneurial to the entire U.S. national security,” he said.
“It’s also important to regional Asian strategy and the regional Asian stability. If Taiwan were to fall to China and cease to be a free country, China [then] has direct access to the central Pacific and from the central Pacific. It can threaten Japan’s trade, Philippines’ trade, and it unravels the U.S. security arrangements for East Asia.”
According to Schuster, TSMC is a major producer of chips that are critical to the automobile, aviation, and defense industries, and the threat of the CCP’s invasion of Taiwan is one of the main reasons why the United States wants TSMC to build factories in the United States.
“China’s aggression means it could apply any leverage in that area against any free country, including the United States and Taiwan. So by moving production to the United States, by strengthening its position in the chip market, TSMC is providing alternatives to China, which reduces China’s leverage. And by doing that, [it] strengthens [the] American economy, strengthens American security, and Taiwan security.”
Martijn Rasser, a former senior intelligence officer and analyst at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, told Reuters last year: “The big concern in Washington is the possibility of Beijing gaining control of Taiwan’s semiconductor capacity. It would be a devastating blow for the American economy and the ability of the U.S. military to field its [weapon] platforms.”
