U.S. President Trump recently criticized TSMC and other companies again, saying that they have seized the business of American companies for more than 30 years. These words mean that TSMC and other Taiwanese manufacturers are facing greater pressure and have to invest additional money in the United States.
In the past few years, TSMC has increased its investment from US$65 billion to US$165 billion under pressure from the United States. The advanced processes transferred to the United States have also been upgraded from 5nm to 3nm and 2nm. In the future, there will be new generation nodes such as A16 and A14. R&D centers and advanced packaging factories have also been transferred and constructed.
Even so, TSMC has not yet been fully recognized by the United States, and is still being forced to make additional investments in the future.The entire Taiwanese manufacturers will need to invest an additional US$250 billion, of which TSMC will need an additional US$100 billion.
The additional US$100 billion is expected to build four chip factories. Although the specific process details have not been disclosed, TSMC is bound to transfer more advanced processes to US factories for production.
The goal previously mentioned by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce is that TSMC needs to transfer 40% of its production capacity to the United States., but this goal is considered unlikely by the industry. Although TSMC itself has not expressed its position and does not dare to cause dissatisfaction with US government departments on this issue, it has not made a commitment to transfer 40%.
Because transferring 40% of production capacity not only means hollowing out TSMC's home base, but more importantly, the more it produces in the United States, the more the company's competitiveness will decline, because the construction and operating costs of U.S. factories are too high to maintain the previous gross profit margin.
