Apple Inc is to be the biggest customer of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) new Arizona factories, Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote on Twitter yesterday.
“Apple silicon unlocks a new level of performance for our users. And soon, many of these chips can be stamped ‘Made in America.’ The opening of TSMC’s plant in Arizona marks a new era of advanced manufacturing in the US — and we are proud to become the site’s largest customer,” he wrote.
Cook’s tweet came as TSMC held a “tool-in” ceremony for its US$12 billion wafer fab in Arizona on Tuesday, which marked the beginning of equipment installation at the facility near Phoenix. The fab is expected to start production in 2024, using the chipmaker’s advanced 4-nanometer process.
Photo: Bloomberg
Prior to the ceremony, TSMC announced it would increase its investment in Arizona to US$40 billion and build a second fab that would use the more advanced 3-nanometer process, with production scheduled to start in 2026.
Apple is the biggest customer of TSMC, accounting for about 26 percent of the chipmaker’s revenue last year. TSMC is the sole supplier of chips used in iPhones.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) and Qualcomm Inc are also to source chips from the new Arizona factories.
Photo: Bloomberg
AMD CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) said TSMC’s presence in Arizona is “extremely” critical to the global semiconductor industry, as well as AMD’s expanded ecosystem of partners and clients.
“TSMC enables us to focus on what we do best: designing innovative chips that change the world,” Su said at the ceremony. “AMD expects to be a significant user of the TSMC Arizona fabs and we look forward to building our highest performance chips in the United States.”
Qualcomm said that TSMC bringing its advanced technologies to the country would benefit the US semiconductor industry and the overall economy.
Photo: CNA
“As a longtime customer of TSMC, we are pleased to start leveraging the Arizona facility to manufacture our leading-edge products when production begins in 2024,” Qualcomm senior vice president and chief supply chain and operations officer Roawen Chen (陳若文) said.
TSMC’s most advanced processes are usually first adopted by suppliers of smartphone chips and high-performance computing chips.
Intel Corp CEO Pat Gelsinger, who visited Taiwan yesterday, wrote on Twitter that “Arizona is a great place to make semiconductors, with excellent engineering talent. Intel has led the building of the local ecosystem and talent base since we started manufacturing here in 1980.”
“As Intel and TSMC and others continue to invest here, Arizonans are a critical part of the future of the industry,” he wrote.
Gelsinger visited Taiwanese partners and attended Intel’s first Sustainability Taiwan Day in Taipei, which featured speeches, discussions and other high-tech related activities.
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness