TSMC’s headquarters in Hsinchu, Taiwan
TSMC’s under-construction Arizona chip plant will help further US chip production interests for Apple, and is a great talking point — but it’s not going to break the company’s reliance on overseas silicon manufacturing.
But while the chips will be made on U.S. soil, they won’t be finished there. According to TSMC engineers and former Apple employees speaking to The Information
Rather than fully shifting chip production to the United States, some of the work is carried out in North America but they are still sent back to Taiwan to be packaged using advanced techniques not easily available elsewhere without sufficient supply chain throughput.
TSMC isn’t planning to construct a chip packaging facility in the United States at all, due to the high costs of the project, TSMC employees claimed. It is also reckoned that the Arizona facility won’t make enough chips to justify building an advanced packaging facility in the region.
According to SemiAnalysis chief analyst Dylan Patel, “The TSMC Arizona fab is effectively a paperweight in any geopolitical tension or war [with China over Taiwan] due to the fact that it still requires sending the chips back to Taiwan for packaging.”
It is possible that Apple will use the facility and not need to send chips to Taiwan, as the company hasn’t said what chips will actually be made in Arizona. For some low-importance chips, they could be packaged using processes available outside of Taiwan.
Apple relies on an Integrated Fan-out Package on Package method devised by TSMC, and it is the only customer using the process at high volumes. Apple receives a discount on the packaging process, as it is bundled as part of a processor die contract.
