Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, has promised that Americans would be prioritized in its hiring process for jobs to build the company’s cutting-edge wafer fabs in Arizona.
In a statement released on Tuesday, TSMC said the company has no intention of replacing US workers with foreigners, and would continue to hire locally for the construction of the wafer fabs and equipment installation.
The company is investing US$40 billion to build two mega wafer fabs in Phoenix to cater to the demand of its US customers.
Photo: Caitlin O’Hara, Bloomberg
The statement comes after a major construction worker union fired back at TSMC’s “offensive” claims of a lack of skilled workers for the construction of its facility in Phoenix during an investors’ conference in Taipei on July 20.
TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) said at the meeting that the start of mass production in one fab — which is to use advanced 4-nanometer process technology — would be delayed from late next year to 2025, because the facility was facing “some challenges.”
Liu attributed the delay to a lack of workers with the required expertise for equipment installation in the Arizona fab.
Another fab under construction in Arizona, which is to deploy 3-nanometer process technology, is scheduled to begin mass production in 2026. Liu did not mention any change to the timeframe of that fab.
In an article published in the Phoenix Business Journal on Wednesday last week, Aaron Butler, head of the Arizona Building and Construction Trades Council, said that TSMC should not blame US workers for the construction delays.
“Blaming American workers for problems with this project is as offensive to American workers as it is inaccurate,” Butler said. “This leaves just one alternative conclusion: that TSMC is blaming its construction delays on American workers and using that as an excuse to bring in foreign workers who they can pay less.”
Butler said workers in Arizona have been building fabs and installing production equipment for 40 years while working for Intel Corp, adding that the state boasts a highly skilled workforce well prepared for this type of work.
Butler added that the unions have fulfilled all the working hours required by TSMC, in response to claims that there was a shortage of skilled US workers.
However, in its statement, TSMC did say that because the company requires specific skills for the construction of the Arizona fab and equipment installation, it would need to send a limited number of workers to the US state on a temporary basis.
TSMC said the number of workers traveling to Arizona had not been finalized and that their presence would not affect the 12,000 workers currently working on-site and its general US-based hiring process.
The chipmaker said the presence of skilled workers for a short amount of time would facilitate the training of their counterparts in Arizona, and that this arrangement would allow the company to accelerate its push for investments in the state, which would in turn lead to significant economic benefits through the creation of thousands of high-paying jobs, and the innovation drive in Arizona and across the nation.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS