US government financing for projects to return critical supply chains to the US as part of COVID-19 response efforts could reach tens of billions of dollars and clients might include a projected US$12 billion Taiwanese semiconductor plant, the head of the agency managing the funds said.
The US International Development Finance Corp (DFC) is talking to companies about reshoring the manufacturing of personal protective equipment, generic drugs and pharmaceutical ingredients, chief executive Adam Boehler said in an interview on Monday.
Boehler said letters of understanding for some initial projects could be signed within the next month.
US President Donald Trump’s administration has been pushing for US companies and importers to move manufacturing out of China.
The agency, which opened its doors in January to boost US overseas development financing efforts to counter China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative, was drafted into domestic service last month, after Trump signed an executive order under the Defense Production Act.
DFC and the US Department of Defense on Monday agreed to jointly administer US$100 million in supply chain reshoring funds from the US$2.3 billion coronavirus legislation passed in March.
Company proposals to reshore are already pouring in, Boehler said.
“The areas that have come on hot right away are on the PPE [personal protective equipment] side and within the pharmaceutical value chains,” Boehler said, adding that there was interest in returning some generic drug production to the US.
The US$100 million can be leveraged into “tens of billions of dollars” in loans by using it as a pool of capital similar to the US Department of the Treasury’s backing of US Federal Reserve loan facilities, Boehler said.
At that scale, the agency could participate in the financing of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) planned factory in Arizona.
The project is a centerpiece of the push to wrestle global technology supply chains back from China.
TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is a major supplier to Apple Inc, Qualcomm Inc and other major US tech firms.
“We provide loan and investment financing, so could we be relevant there? Absolutely. We’re talking tens of billions of dollars in potential here, so that’s a possibility, I wouldn’t exclude that,” Boehler said.
A financing package for TSMC would likely include private capital from the state of Arizona. It is too soon to say whether the agency would be able to participate.
DFC was created under 2018 legislation that combined the former Overseas Private Investment Corp (OPIC) and part of the US Agency for International Development, more than doubling OPIC’s overall lending and investment capacity to US$60 billion.
Its planned launch in October last year was delayed until January by a budget fight in the US Congress that threatened a government shutdown.
Boehler said the DFC’s development mission would not be affected by Trump’s executive order and would keep its “foot on the nations.
The 337-employee DFC — small for a federal agency — is adding about 15 people to focus solely on the domestic reshoring projects, he said, and the funding for overseas development would be kept separate.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS