Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) on Wednesday said that the chips her company gets from supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) would cost more when they are produced in TSMC’s Arizona facilities.
Compared with similar parts from factories in Taiwan, the US chips would be “more than 5 percent, but less than 20 percent” in terms of higher costs, she said at an artificial intelligence (AI) event in Washington.
AMD expects its first chips from TSMC’s Arizona facilities by the end of the year, Su said.
Photo: Reuters
The extra expense is worth it, because the company is diversifying the crucial supply of chips, Su said in an interview with Bloomberg Television following her onstage appearance.
That would make the industry less prone to the type of disruptions experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have to consider resiliency in the supply chain,” she said. “We learned that in the pandemic.”
TSMC’s new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield — the amount of good chips a production run produces per batch— Su told the audience at the forum.
The event was hosted by the All-In podcast team, and a consortium of tech leaders and lawmakers known as the Hill and Valley Forum. US President Donald Trump and other administration officials also appeared at the venue to discuss the rollout of their “AI action plan.”
AMD and Nvidia Corp recently gained a reprieve on restrictions imposed on shipments of some types of AI accelerators to China.
AMD is Nvidia’s nearest rival in the market for AI accelerators, chips that help develop and run AI models.
It is still not clear how many licenses would be granted — or how long the companies would be allowed to ship the chips to the country, the biggest market for semiconductors.
Successive administrations have imposed increasingly stringent regulations on exports to China of such chips, citing national security concerns. Those rules have cost US chipmakers billions in revenue.
Su said that the policy going forward needs to be balanced. Allowing shipments to US allies would help make sure the country’s technology remains foundational to AI systems everywhere.
“It’s a tricky dribble,” she said. “I think the administration has been doing a good job of working with us.”
At the event, US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick was asked about the administration’s policy on the export of AI chips.
“We are comfortable with allies buying a significant number of chips and having a large cluster,” he said.
How large those groupings of server computers are and how much access US companies have to them would be factors, he said.
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
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