Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced Thursday that it plans to spend an additional $100 billion on its U.S. operations.
The chipmaker giant, which makes chips designed by Nvidia, Apple and others, had previously committed to investing $165 billion to expand its operations near Phoenix. That brings the company’s total commitment to its rapidly growing footprint in Arizona to $265 billion.
The announcement, made during TSMC’s quarterly earnings presentation, is partly a response to growing political pressure on foreign semiconductor companies to locate factories in the United States. TSMC broke ground on its first factory in Arizona in 2021, during the Biden administration.
But the Trump administration has threatened its trading partners with high tariffs if they do not establish manufacturing operations in the United States to generate money and jobs. Samsung Electronics has two chip manufacturing plants in Texas, while SK Hynix, another large South Korean memory chip maker, is building a facility in Indiana.
TSMC’s new $100 billion commitment would include building four new chip manufacturing factories, known as fabs, for the company’s contract manufacturing business. This would be in addition to six semiconductor factories, two advanced chip packaging facilities and a research and development center in Arizona. The factories announced Thursday would likely be located at a new chip manufacturing campus on 900 acres of land the company purchased earlier this year.
The investment would “return advanced semiconductor manufacturing to the United States,” Howard Lutnick, U.S. Commerce Secretary, said in a statement released after TSMC’s announcement.
CC Wei, chief executive of TSMC, said the pace of construction would depend on “the market situation.”
Asked about the construction schedule on the earnings conference call, Mr. Wei said: “We don’t have it today, but we do have a plan. And we will try to accelerate it as much as possible.”
Wei emphasized that TSMC was also expanding in Taiwan and Japan.
The construction of factories in the United States and elsewhere, Wei said, was mainly to address the growing demand for chips from the “AI megatrend,” as he put it.
The strong demand was reflected in the company’s performance in the second quarter. Its revenue grew to the equivalent of $40.2 billion, 36 percent more than the previous year. Profits rose nearly 80 percent in the quarter, to just over $22 billion.
TSMC expects strong revenue and profit growth this year and next. But during the call, TSMC executives repeatedly said their strategy was designed to meet long-term demand and advance its cutting-edge chip manufacturing technology. The company plans capital spending to reach up to $64 billion this year.
Xinyun Wu contributed reporting from Taipei.
