A major trade group urged Washington to make a US$52 billion grant for the semiconductor industry available to foreign companies as well as domestic ones.
To build a strong ecosystem at home, non-US chipmakers including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and Samsung Electronics Co should be eligible for the funding, SEMI chairman Bertrand Loy said.
TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung, the world’s largest foundries, are building new plants in the US.
Photo: AFP
“The semiconductor industry is a highly intricate ecosystem that relies on companies from Japan, Europe, North America, Taiwan, China,” Loy said in an interview on Tuesday. “If the objective of the US administration or any other administration is to foster the proper conditions for the semiconductor industry to flourish in their country, they have to make those aids available to all participants, irrespective of their country of origin.”
The administration of US President Joe Biden is seeking to offer US$52 billion for the industry through the draft “Creating Helpful Incentives for the Production of Semiconductors for America Act,” as part of efforts to bolster chip production at home.
The act was included in a large package of legislation aimed at countering China that was passed by the US Senate in June.
That legislation, called the “US Innovation and Competition Act,” has since stalled in the US House of Representatives.
Last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an agreement to craft a version of the bill that could pass in both chambers.
So far, that has not yielded any new proposals.
Even before the funding is formally approved, companies have been squabbling over which one qualifies for the incentives.
Intel Corp CEO Pat Gelsinger has repeatedly said that US taxpayers should subsidize only domestic companies, while TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) said that doing so would be “negative” for the US.
Loy, who is also the chief executive officer of US chip materials supplier Entegris Inc, said that it is also critical for the chips grant to be made available to equipment and materials vendors, which play an essential role in the supply chain.
“If those incentives are not available to materials and equipment companies, you’d create choke points in the supply chain,” he said. “It’s to everybody’s advantage for those incentives to be broad-based and across the ecosystem.”
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