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.
INCOMING FIX: While a date for updates has not been given, Apple said that the latest overheating incidents might be the result of apps and account data transfers Apple Inc on Saturday said that recent claims of new iPhones getting too hot to the touch are due to software and app-related bugs, and that fixes are coming soon. The company said the device can get warm in the first few days as it works overtime to get set up and restore a user’s data, due to a bug in the latest iOS 17 software, and because of some third-party apps overloading the system. Apple told Bloomberg it is working with developers behind the apps causing the iPhone to overheat and that fixes are in the process of being released.
MODERATING: A Caixin Insight analyst said China’s macroeconomy is recovering, albeit at a slow pace, but private businesses and exporters are still under pressure A private gauge of China’s manufacturing activity slowed its pace of expansion last month, suggesting there is still room for caution as the nation charts its economic trajectory for the rest of the year. The Caixin manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) was 50.6 last month, Caixin and S&P Global said in a statement yesterday — dipping closer to the 50 line, below which indicates contraction from the month before. Caixin’s services index was 50.2 for the month, still in expansion but also suggesting that the pace of growth in activity is losing momentum. The figures show a slightly precarious recovery even
US-based tech giant Google said yesterday that its efforts to build four underseas cables to connect Taiwan with the world had created more than 64,000 jobs and generated about US$26 billion in GDP for Taiwan as of 2021. The US company has transformed Taiwan into a strategic cloud infrastructure hub in the world. The four undersea cables are part of the company’s investments in cloud infrastructure in Taiwan, and on the back of the undersea cables, a data center and a Google Cloud Region, which is a geographic area in which Google provides infrastructure and services for deploying applications, Google said in
Micron Technology Inc on Wednesday predicted a steeper loss than anticipated in the current quarter, indicating that an industry slump is still weighing on the largest US maker of memory chips. The company projected a fiscal first-quarter loss of as much as US$1.14 a share, excluding some items. Analysts had estimated a US$0.96 loss. On the bright side, revenue is expected to start recovering in the period. Micron predicted sales of US$4.2 billion to US$4.6 billion, compared with an estimate of US$4.21 billion. For Micron and competitors Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc, this year has been brutal. Customers in their
RSS