Due to shortage of technical personnel, TSMC's first plant in the United States will be delayed by one year.
CTOnews.com, July 25 (Xinhua)-- chipmaker TSMC announced that its first plant in Arizona will be delayed by one year to 2025. The company said the progress of plant construction was hampered by a lack of local technical personnel.
Liu Deyin, chairman of TSMC, said: "although we are working hard to improve the situation, including sending experienced technicians from Taiwan to train local technicians for a short period of time, we expect the production schedule of N4 technology to be postponed to 2025."
TSMC, the world's largest contract semiconductor manufacturer, first announced plans to build a plant in the United States in 2020. In 2022, the company announced that it would invest $40 billion (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 287.6 billion yuan) to build two plants in Arizona. At that time, the first plant was expected to start production in 2024 and the second plant was expected to start production in 2026. As many as six more factories may be built at the site in the future. In 2022, under pressure from Apple, TSMC also moved its first fab from 5nm to a more advanced 4nm process, and a second fab will support the 3nm process.
When the two new plants are fully operational, they are expected to produce about 600000 wafers a year. However, TSMC will still produce most of the state-of-the-art processors in Taiwan and will continue to do so even after the US plant is fully completed.
This month, TSMC reported a 23% year-on-year drop in net profit for the second quarter, the first quarterly decline since 2019. "We think TSMC has strong growth prospects in 2024," Goldman Sachs said in a research report. we believe that the delay in US expansion is also expected by investors. "
As for another factory in Japan, Liu Deyin said that its progress has not changed and will continue to mass production by the end of 2024 as planned. The plant will be used to produce 16nm, 22nm and 28nm process semiconductors.
