> No American, or any Western media outlet for that matter, bothered to cover this speech. Only Nikkei and a handful of Taiwanese outlets wrote about it. Not even C-Span carried footage of the speech. (And C-Span carries everything!)
I find this news to be extremely surprising: everyone talked about the success of having the TSMC fab open, but nobody cared to listen to what the founder and former CEO of the company had to say. The fab might as well not be owned by TSMC.
Something similar happened with FoxConn in Wisconsin around 2018. Lots of talk about on-shoring factories, but that one was built and sits idle (last I heard it was partially converted to office space).
TSMC didn’t build US You fabs before. They are doing it now because the US government is throwing some money at a few current generation fabs to mitigate the geopolitical risk of Taiwan. The fact that TSMC owns it is almost incident for them.
But this is a mistake. We should be fixing the upstream reasons why TSMC didn’t want to build these fabs in the US prior to recent large government subsidies. Making sure local governments and NIMBYs have only a small amount of veto power, making sure there is a safe disposal system for the byproducts (the original reason chip fabs left the SF Bay Area), and making sure we are training the specialties required to build and run the current and next generation fabs. And in the case of the Arizona TSMC and Intel fabs, making sure there is sufficient fresh water for the region, which is needed to supply the fans and the local economy.
No factory was built at all for foxconn in Racine county. A weird globe building was built that contains some kind of data center, although nobody knows for sure what goes on there. The whole thing was a complete boondoggle, although I don't know if anyone gained anything, it didn't even get Scott Walker re-elected.
Hopefully this TSMC thing is real and not just a game around tax credits. Kind of bonkers to me to build it in the desert as the colorado river is drying up if water is so important, though.
>We should be fixing the upstream reasons why TSMC didn’t want to build these fabs in the US
Good luck with that.
>Making sure local governments and NIMBYs have only a small amount of veto power
This isn't really possible politically in the US. The US is all about corrupt little local governments having lots of power; it's the whole way the country is structured. Americans have historically hated centralized government. It's also a big part of why the police in America are so awful: there's almost no centralization or standardization, so no power of the national government to fix the problems.
I find this news to be extremely surprising: everyone talked about the success of having the TSMC fab open, but nobody cared to listen to what the founder and former CEO of the company had to say. The fab might as well not be owned by TSMC.
update:
1 . former CEO. Thank you `astroalex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Chang .