---

TSMC’s debacle in the American desert

TSMC 在美國沙漠中的困境

Missed deadlines and tension among Taiwanese and American coworkers are
plaguing the chip giant’s Phoenix expansion.

錯過期限以及台灣和美國同事間的緊張局勢

正在困擾晶片巨頭在鳳凰城擴建計畫

By VIOLA ZHOU  23 APRIL 2024‧PHOENIX, UNITED STATES

Bruce thought he’d landed his dream job. The young American engineer had been
 eager for a stable, high-paying job in the semiconductor industry. Then, in
late 2020, he received a LinkedIn message from a recruiter for Taiwan
Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Bruce read up on TSMC — the leading
global manufacturer of advanced chips — and got excited. The job sounded like
 he’d be “pushing the boundaries of human technology,” he recalled to Rest
of World.

TSMC was undergoing a transformation at just about the same time Bruce heard
from the recruiter. The coronavirus pandemic was exposing deep faults in
supply chains, and a global chip shortage had slowed production of cars,
smartphones, and refrigerators around the world. Meanwhile, American
policymakers were rallying around what would eventually become the CHIPS and
Science Act, a sweeping piece of legislation designed to boost semiconductor
manufacturing in the U.S. TSMC, which makes most of its chips in Taiwan, was
under pressure to expand its global manufacturing capacities.


問題，全球晶片短缺減緩汽車、智慧手機和冰箱的生產速度。與此同時，美國政策制定者
正團結支持最終將成為晶片和科學法案的倡議，這是一項旨在促進美國半導體製造的全

that he would first spend more than a year in Taiwan learning the ins and outs
 of the complex chipmaking process. Then, he’d return to Arizona. There, in a
 cactus-dotted suburb of Phoenix, TSMC was building a sprawling new factory to
 make the kind of chips that power iPhones and U.S. fighter jets. He’d be
helping bring America’s newest chip factory online. Bruce was in.

But over the next two years, Bruce came to realize that the reality of working
 at TSMC wasn’t exactly what he had envisioned. While working on nanometer-
level processes to make state-of-the-art chips, he struggled with language
barriers, long hours, and a strict hierarchy. Bruce soon began second-guessing
 what he had signed up for. The plant, which was originally set to begin
operating in 2024, fell woefully behind schedule; production at the facility
is now set to start in 2025. Bruce, who said he signed a confidentiality
agreement with TSMC, requested anonymity for this story.

He wasn’t the only one disappointed with TSMC’s progress in Arizona — other
 U.S. workers who spoke to Rest of World echoed Bruce’s concerns. In the past
 two years, the company has relocated hundreds of Taiwanese workers and their
families to Arizona. Instead of a gleaming new facility, these workers found
an active construction site, and a company struggling to bridge Taiwanese and
American professional and cultural norms.

Bruce 將成為一名半導體工程師。招聘人員解釋說，他將首先在台灣度過一年多的時間，
學習複雜的晶片製造過程的各方面。然後，他將返回亞利桑那州。在那裡，位於鳳凰城





Over the past four months, Rest of World spoke with more than 20 current and
former TSMC employees — from the U.S. and Taiwan — at the Arizona plant. All
 of them requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the
media or because they feared retaliation from the company. In February, Rest
of World traveled to Phoenix to visit the growing TSMC complex and spend time
with the nascent community of transplanted Taiwanese engineers.

The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at
the company; Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as
lacking the kind of dedication and obedience they believe to be the foundation
 of their company’s world-leading success.

Some 2,200 employees now work at TSMC’s Arizona plant, with about half of
them deployed from Taiwan. While tension at the plant simmers, TSMC has been
ramping up its investments, recently securing billions of dollars in grants
and loans from the U.S. government. Whether or not the plant succeeds in
making cutting-edge chips with the same speed, efficiency, and profitability
as facilities in Asia remains to be seen, with many skeptical about a U.S.
workforce under TSMC’s army-like command system. “[The company] tried to
make Arizona Taiwanese,” G. Dan Hutcheson, a semiconductor industry analyst
at the research firm TechInsights, told Rest of World. “And it’s just not
going to work.”







TSMC’s facilities are located on the outskirts of northern Phoenix,
surrounded by miles of desert hills and wide roads. A glass-walled office
building sits next to a massive parking lot, with a fountain in the shape of a
 round silicon wafer just in front of the facility gates.

Next to the office building are the incomplete manufacturing facilities.
Originally slated to open in 2024, the facilities resemble giant stadiums.
Once complete, the entire complex will cover 1,100 acres, or the equivalent of
 625 football fields.

At lunch hour on a Monday in February, Taiwanese and American engineers walked
 in and out of the office building with badges, hard hats, and see-through
backpacks — which make it easier and faster for workers to pass through
security checks.

TSMC got its start thousands of miles away from Arizona’s arid desert — on
the northern coast of Taiwan. Morris Chang, a U.S.-educated chip engineer who
spent 25 years at Texas Instruments, founded the company in 1987. He did so at
 the invitation of the Taiwanese government, which was eager to boost the
island’s economy at the time.

In the 1980s, companies like Intel and Texas Instruments designed and made
their own chips. TSMC set out to do something different. Chang’s company
would focus solely on contract manufacturing: Customers would send designs,
and engineers in the company’s fabrication plants (also called “fabs”)
worked to perfect production methods, minimize the number of defective chips,
and reduce costs.

The model proved a success. “All of a sudden it’s really efficient,”
Hutcheson, of TechInsights, told Rest of World. “You can learn to become a
plumber. But at the end of the day, it’s more efficient for you to focus on
what you make money doing and then pay someone else to come do [the plumbing].
”


在辦公樓旁邊是尚未完工的製造設施。原計劃於2024年開業，這些設施看起來像是巨型的
體育場。一旦完工，整個綜合體將占地1,100英畝，相當於625個足球場的面積。

在二月的一個星期一的午餐時間，台灣和美國的工程師們穿梭在辦公樓內外，身上帶著證
件、安全帽和透明背包——這讓工人們更容易、更快速地通過安全檢查。

台積電起源於遙遠的亞利桑那州乾旱的沙漠之外——位於台灣北部海岸。張忠謀是一位在
美國接受教育並在德州儀器公司工作了25年的晶片工程師，他於1987年創立這家公司。
當時，台灣政府邀請他創立這家公司，當時急於振興該島的經濟。



這種模式被證明是成功的。“突然之間變得非常高效，”TechInsights的Hutcheson告訴
Rest of World說，“你可以學會成為一名水管工。但歸根究柢，專注於自己能賺錢的工作
，然後支付其他人來做（水管工作）是更有效的。”

Meanwhile, chip manufacturing collapsed in the U.S. and Europe, and migrated
to East Asia, drawn by government incentives. Hutcheson said the high costs of
 building new facilities prevented new companies from joining the competition
and eventually solidified TSMC’s dominance.

TSMC has since grown into a $660 billion giant that has allowed “fabless”
chip designers such as Nvidia and Apple to flourish. The company is now able
to cram more computing power into less space than almost any other chip
manufacturer. Samsung and Intel are still trailing behind the Taiwanese
company.

TSMC is also considered Taiwan’s most important company, with Taiwanese
people dubbing it a “divine mountain that guards the nation.” The world’s
dependence on TSMC, locals reason, could even incentivize the West to defend
Taiwan from a potential invasion from China. The loss of Taiwan and with it
TSMC — the thinking goes — would result in a global tech meltdown.

TSMC insiders told Rest of World the key to the company’s success is an
intense, military-style work environment. Engineers work 12-hour days, and
sometimes weekends too. Taiwanese commentators joke that the company runs on
engineers with “slave mentalities” who “sell their livers” — local slang
that underscores the intensity of the work.

Up until the pandemic, it made sense for TSMC to concentrate its operations in
 Taiwan, where it enjoyed unwavering government support, low operating costs,
and access to the island’s top talents. Outside a small plant in Washington
and two plants in mainland China that made chips with older technologies, the
company had little interest in international expansion.

與此同時，晶片製造在美國和歐洲崩潰，並遷移到東亞，受到政府激勵的吸引。
建造新設施的高成本阻礙了新公司加入競爭，最終鞏固了台積電的主導地位。






定支持，營運成本低廉，可以接觸到島上的頂尖人才。除了華盛頓州的一家小工廠和中國
大陸的兩家使用較老技術製造晶片的工廠外，該公司對國際擴張並不感興趣。

"The world has changed."

That changed in the late 2010s, as governments came to realize the
geopolitical importance of the semiconductor industry and launched a race to
attract chip manufacturing giants. Around 2019, the Trump administration
started courting TSMC to build a larger and more advanced plant in the U.S.
The pandemic further underscored supply-chain weak points. “The world has
changed,” Sujai Shivakumar, director of the Renewing American Innovation
Project at the think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, told
 Rest of World. Depending on chips from a faraway country on China’s doorstep
 suddenly felt precarious. “What was purely — from an economics point of
view — an efficient solution is no longer an efficient solution because of
the geopolitics,” Shivakumar said.

In May 2020, then U.S. Under-Secretary of State Keith Krach announced that
TSMC had agreed to open a $12 billion facility in Arizona. The site would
create thousands of jobs, spur cutting-edge research, and attract more
companies on the semiconductor supply chain to move to the U.S. Chips coming
out of the plant were expected to power smartphones, 5G base stations, and
advanced F-35 fighter jets. “This means that chips critical to our lives and
national security will once again be made in America,” Krach said.

TSMC’s investment, Krach later told U.S. media, inspired policymakers to
extend incentives to the entire chip industry. In the summer of 2022, the
Biden administration passed the CHIPS Act, which designated $53 billion to
developing the domestic semiconductor industry. Later that year, TSMC said it
would build a second fab at the same site in Phoenix, increasing its total
investment to $40 billion.

Despite the commitment from both TSMC and Washington, issues related to
exporting a Taiwanese-style work culture to the U.S. swirled from the outset.
Morris Chang, who retired in 2018 but remains the public face of the company
and the godfather of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, cast doubts on the
Phoenix initiative.

這一切在2010年代末發生了變化，因為各國政府開始意識到半導體行業的地緣政治重要性
，並展開了吸引晶片製造業巨頭的競爭。大約在2019年，川普政府開始拉攏台積電，在
美國建立一家更大、更先進的工廠。疫情進一步凸顯了供應鏈的脆弱點。戰略與國際研究
中心的《Renewing American Innovation Project》主任蘇賈伊· 希瓦庫馬爾告訴





400億美元。



When Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in 2022, Chang lectured the House speaker on
the challenges the U.S. would face in mastering the microscopic precision
required in chip production. Chang has since also warned against the lack of
manufacturing talent in the U.S., and how hard it would be for Taiwanese
managers to supervise Americans. Speaking to the Vying for Talent podcast in
April 2022, Chang concluded that the U.S.’ attempt to onshore semiconductor
manufacturing would be “a very expensive exercise in futility.”

In 2021, as construction kicked off in Arizona, TSMC flew Bruce and about 600
American new hires to the southern Taiwanese coastal city of Tainan. There,
they’d spend more than a year training at Fab 18, TSMC’s most advanced mass
production plant.



Upon arriving at the facility, Bruce handed in his smartphone and passed
through metal detectors. He was in awe of the semiconductor production line:
Overhead rails carried wafers from one station to another while workers in
white protective suits kept the machinery running. “It really just felt like
I was touring some kind of living thing that was greater than humans; that was
 bigger than us,” Bruce recalled.

But the challenges were immediately apparent, too. At Fab 18, nearly all
communication took place in Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese, the two most
widely spoken languages in Taiwan. The Americans found it difficult to
understand meetings, production guidelines, and chatter among local engineers.
 In theory, every American was supposed to have a Taiwanese buddy — a future
Arizona worker who would help them navigate the workplace. But the Americans
said their buddies were often too busy to help with translations, or else not
familiar enough with the technical processes because they were freshly
transferred from other production lines.

Many trainees, including Bruce, relied on Google Translate to get through the
day, with mixed results. Technical terms and images were hard to decipher. One
 American engineer said that because staff were not allowed to upload work
materials to Google, he tried to translate documents by copying Chinese text
into a handwriting recognition program. It didn’t work very well.

One former American TSMC engineer who trained in Taiwan said his manager
instructed him to follow along with daily handover meetings, which were
conducted in Mandarin, just by looking at the associated PowerPoint
presentations. “I was mind-blown at his expectations,” he told Rest of World
. “I love challenges and pushing myself, but this was lunatic-level
leadership.”






們將幫助他們在工作場所中導航。但美國人表示，他們的夥伴通常太忙，無法幫助翻譯，
或者對技術流程不夠熟悉，因為他們剛從其他生產線調職過來。



一位曾在台灣接受培訓的美國台積電工程師表示，他的經理要求他只需查看相關的
PowerPoint演示文稿就可以參加每日的交接會議，這些會議都是用中文進行的。他告訴
《Rest of World》說：“我對他的期望感到震驚。”
“我喜歡挑戰和自我激勵，但這真的是瘋狂的領導方式。”

TSMC’s work culture is notoriously rigorous, even by Taiwanese standards.
Former executives have hailed the Confucian culture, which promotes diligence
and respect for authority, as well as Taiwan’s strict work ethic as key to
the company’s success. Chang, speaking last year about Taiwan’s
competitiveness compared to the U.S., said that “if [a machine] breaks down
at one in the morning, in the U.S. it will be fixed in the next morning. But
in Taiwan, it will be fixed at 2 a.m.” And, he added, the wife of a Taiwanese
 engineer would “go back to sleep without saying another word.”

During their visit, the Americans got a taste of the company’s intense work
culture. To avoid intellectual property leaks, staff were banned from using
personal devices inside the factory. Instead, they were given company phones,
dubbed “T phones,” that couldn’t be connected to most messaging apps or
social media. In one department, managers sometimes applied what they called
“stress tests” by announcing assignments due the same day or week, to make
sure the Americans were able to meet tight deadlines and sacrifice personal
time like Taiwanese workers, two engineers told Rest of World. Managers shamed
 American workers in front of their peers, sometimes by suggesting they quit
engineering, one employee said.

TSMC made attempts to bridge some of the cultural differences. After the
American trainees asked to contact families and to listen to music at work,
TSMC loosened the firewall on T phones to allow all staff access to Instagram,
 YouTube, and Spotify. Some Taiwanese workers attended a class on U.S. culture
, where they learned that Americans responded better to encouragement rather
than criticism, according to an engineer who attended the session.

But both American and Taiwanese engineers said that the training for new hires
 was largely insufficient. Managers excluded Americans from higher-level
meetings conducted in Mandarin, according to one ex-TSMC engineer. Some of the
 Americans said that they rarely had a chance to handle problems themselves,
and were mostly tasked with observing. “It’s like math in school,” Bruce
said. “You can watch your teacher do 500 practice problems on the chalkboard,
 but if you don’t do some problems on your own, you are going to fail the
test.”








但是美國和台灣工程師都表示，新員工的培訓大多是不足的。一位前台積電工程師表示，
管理人員在中文進行的高級會議中排除了美國人。一些美國人表示，他們很少有機會自
己解決問題，大多數任務都是觀察。Bruce說：“這就像在學校學數學一樣。你可以看你
的老師在黑板上做500道練習題，但如果你自己不做一些題目，你就會考試不及格。”

As training went on, tensions mounted. U.S. engineers told Rest of World that
some Taiwanese male engineers had calendars with bikini models on their desks
and occasionally shared sexual memes in group chats. A female American
colleague, according to an American trainee who witnessed the conversation,
asked a Taiwanese engineer to remove his computer wallpaper depicting a bikini
 model. One former American engineer said some local co-workers referred to
him as a “white breeding pig,” implying he was only in Taiwan to sleep with
local women. At a meeting, a manager said Americans were less desirable than
Taiwanese and Indian workers, according to people who saw leaked notes, which
circulated among trainees.

“They really are trying to push this narrative that Americans are slower
because of lower technical ability, but I really don’t believe that’s the
truth,” an American engineer who recently left TSMC told Rest of World. “The
 Taiwanese create this false sense of urgency with every single task, and they
 really push ‘you need to finish everything immediately.’ But it’s just not
 realistic for people that want to have some normal work-life balance.”

Several former American employees said they were not against working longer
hours, but only if the tasks were meaningful. “I’d ask my manager ‘What’s
your top priority,’ he’d always say ‘Everything is a priority,’” said
another ex-TSMC engineer. “So, so, so, many times I would work overtime
getting stuff done only to find out it wasn’t needed.”







Training in Taiwan, which typically lasted one to two years, wasn’t all
miserable, the Americans said. On the weekends, the trainees traveled across
the island, marveling at the country’s highly efficient public transport
network. Bruce spent his weekends hiking and frequenting nightclubs. He
chatted with the families that run night-market food stalls, and entertained
strangers who requested selfies with foreigners.

Still, at least dozens of trainees quit before the end of training, according
to the American employees. TSMC announced a recurring retention bonus in 2022.
 The remaining American workers began speculating that the company only hired
them to secure CHIPS Act funding, Bruce said. But he stayed on: He wanted to
see TSMC come to life in Arizona.

In late 2022, the employees began migrating from humid southern Taiwan to the
desert of northern Phoenix. The group included the Americans, as well as
hundreds of Taiwanese employees who would help install tools, manage suppliers
, and prepare the Arizona plant for mass production.

For the Taiwanese, many of whom planned for extended stays in Phoenix, that
meant relocating entire families — toddlers and dogs included — to a foreign
 country. Many regarded it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore the
world, practice English, and send their children to American schools. Younger
families planned pregnancies so they could give birth to American citizens. “
If we are going to have children, of course we will have them here,” a
Taiwanese engineer told Rest of World. “As an American citizen, they will
have more options than others.”

To cover the high living costs, TSMC provided the Taiwanese workers with
stipend for cars and housing. Some families moved into apartment complexes
reserved for employees, dubbed “TSMC villages.” Local schools introduced
Mandarin visual aids in classrooms for Taiwanese pupils. A Chinese Baptist
church in Phoenix organized English-language classes, taught by earlier
generations of Taiwanese immigrants, to help the newcomers settle in.











Many experienced a culture shock. The bustling cities of Taiwan are densely
packed and offer extensive public transport, ubiquitous street food, and 24-
hour convenience stores every few blocks. In northern Phoenix, everyday life
is impossible without a car, and East Asian faces are scarce. “Everything is
so big in America,” said one engineer, recalling his first impression. He
recounted his wife summarizing her impression of the U.S.: “Great mountains,
great rivers, and great boredom.”

The Taiwanese engineers brought with them the intense TSMC work culture.
Having spent years under the company’s grueling management, they were used to
 long days, out-of-hours calls, and harsh treatment from their managers. In
Taiwan, the pay and prestige were worth it, they told Rest of World — despite
 the challenges, many felt proud working for the island’s most prominent firm
. It was the best job they could hope for.

But the American workers didn’t have the same sense of loyalty. In the U.S.,
engineers had a plethora of job options that provided competitive pay and
abundant personal time. The Taiwanese workers described their Phoenix
colleagues as arrogant, carefree, and more willing to challenge orders. “It’
s hard to get them to do things,” a Taiwanese engineer in Phoenix told Rest
of World.

Bruce said that working conditions didn’t improve for the Americans once they
 relocated to Arizona. The American workers did not get more say in how the
company was run, and they found the obsequiousness of their Taiwanese
colleagues irritating. TSMC workers were asked to draw up reports and keep
other documents in a PowerPoint format so that they could regularly make
presentations to upper management. The Taiwanese employees were used to it,
while the Americans became impatient with typing up weekly work reports. The
Americans also resented that Taiwanese colleagues stayed late at the office
for no good reason. “That pisses me off,” Bruce said. “They were just doing
 it for show.”



台灣工程師帶來了激烈的台積電工作文化。在公司的嚴格管理下度過了多年，他們已經習
慣了長時間的工作、非工作時間的電話以及來自主管的嚴厲對待。他們告訴《Rest of
World》，在台灣，薪水和聲望是值得的——儘管面臨著挑戰，許多人為能在該島上最知
名的公司工作感到自豪。這是他們所能期望的最好的工作。





Five former employees from the U.S. told Rest of World that TSMC engineers
sometimes falsified or cherry-picked data for customers and managers.
Sometimes, the engineers said, staff would manipulate data from testing tools
or wafers to please managers who had seemingly impossible expectations. Other
times, one engineer said, “because the workers were spread so thin, anything
they could do to get work off their plate they would do.” Four American
employees described TSMC culture as “save face”: Workers would strive to
make a team, a department, or the company look good at the expense of
efficiency and employee wellbeing.

In mid-2023, TSMC announced delays in the construction of its first facility
in Arizona, dubbed Fab 21 — production at the facility would start in 2025
instead of 2024 as planned. TSMC blamed a shortage of skilled workers.
Construction unions, however, complained of safety hazards and questioned if
TSMC was using this as an excuse to bring in cheap labor from Taiwan.

Engineers who were supposed to run production lines were reassigned to work
remotely for Fab 18 back in Tainan, and asked to join late-night meetings.
Some Americans and Taiwanese engineers were reassigned to help speed up the
building of the facility, and asked to oversee construction workers. Clad in
their clean-room suits and hard hats, engineers would sometimes collect trash
at the unfinished sites. One ex-employee recalled colleagues collecting
bottles of urine left by construction crews.







Just like in Taiwan, language barriers contributed to tension in Phoenix.
Bruce said his department manager, who had come from Taiwan, spoke poor
English. So instead of communicating with Bruce directly, he’d channel
feedback or instructions through a Taiwanese colleague. One U.S. engineer said
 managers trusted Taiwanese workers with important tasks, starving the
Americans of hands-on experience. One ex-employee later joked that the biggest
 skill he learned at TSMC was making PowerPoint slides.

Disgruntled Americans flocked to post complaints to workplace review website
Glassdoor, reporting long hours, high stress, unrealistic deadlines, and “
Asian culture.” TSMC currently has a rating of 3.2 out of 5 stars on the site
. American chipmakers Intel and Texas Instruments, by comparison, have a 4.1
rating. The poor Glassdoor rating made it more difficult for TSMC to hire
experienced American workers, a former TSMC manager told Rest of World.
Another former employee said he convinced six engineer friends to turn down
offers from TSMC.

The company made further attempts to adapt to American work culture. In early
2023, TSMC held weekly English-language and cultural classes for Taiwanese
managers. A former TSMC staffer who worked on the education program said
managers were instructed not to yell at employees in public, or threaten to
fire them without consulting human resources. “They would say, ‘Okay, okay,
I get it. I’m not going to do that,’” the employee recalled to Rest of
World. “But I think in the heat of the moment, they forgot, and they did do
it.”




《Rest of World》，這種差評使得台積電更難以聘請經驗豐富的美國工人。
另一位前員工表示，他說服了六位工程師朋友拒絕了台積電的工作邀請。



Taiwanese managers were reminded not to ask employees why they were taking
sick leave, or ask female job applicants about their plans to have children —
 an illegal yet common question in Taiwan. An ex-TSMC engineer said the
company once sent an email reminding staff that the commonly used Mandarin
term “nei ge” — which means “that” — could sound like the N-word.

In December 2023, following months of negotiations, TSMC made a deal with
Arizona construction labor unions, agreeing to develop a workforce training
program, maintain transparency on site safety, and focus on hiring locally.

Meanwhile, some American engineers started seeking out opportunities at
companies with less strenuous expectations and better career prospects.
Workers started joking that joining TSMC was a stepping stone to Intel, which
was also expanding in Arizona at the time. An engineer, who has worked at both
 Intel and TSMC, said Taiwanese colleagues had also asked him about vacancies
at Intel, where they expected a better work-and-life balance.

Several American former employees said they felt relief after quitting. In
group chats, engineers celebrated the departure of their friends. “TSMC was
the worst possible place to work on Earth,” one American ex-TSMC engineer
told Rest of World. Another, who recently left the company, described TSMC as
having “a purely authoritarian work structure.”



在經過數月的談判後，2023 年 12 月，台積電與亞利桑那州建築勞工工會達成協議，同
意制定工作人員培訓計劃，保持工地安全的透明度，並專注於本地招聘。





Bruce resigned in 2023. He is still friends with his Taiwanese former
colleagues, and kept his TSMC badge, water bottle, and TSMC T-shirt as
mementos. He said he felt triumphant walking out. The American workers had
voiced their concerns in meetings with management, but he didn’t see changes
happening. “All of us gave them every chance to listen, but they never did,”
 he told Rest of World.

Three years after construction began, the first planned Phoenix plant is still
 incomplete. During an earnings call in April, TSMC chief executive C.C. Wei
said the facility had entered “engineering wafer production,” meaning it’s
making prototype wafers to prepare for commercial operation next year. In
January, TSMC announced further delays at its second facility, too. Originally
 set to begin operations in 2026, it won’t open until 2027 or 2028.

Chang-Tai Hsieh, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, told
Rest of World that TSMC had found the U.S. a challenging environment to
operate in because of the complicated regulatory process, strong construction
unions, and a workforce less used to the long hours that are commonplace at
TSMC in Taiwan. “TSMC’s profits from their U.S. fabs will be lower, unless
their clients are willing to pay more to source from the U.S. fabs,” Hsieh
said. “The only thing they need Phoenix for is to make sure that the U.S.
government doesn’t turn against them.” In 2023, TSMC made more than 65% of
its revenue from customers in the U.S. In the April earnings call, chief
executive Wei said customers needed to share the high costs of producing
outside Taiwan.



建設開始三年後，首座計劃中的鳳凰城工廠仍然尚未完工。在 4 月的一次電話會議上，
台積電執行長魏哲家表示，該工廠已進入“工程晶圓生產”階段，這意味著正在製造
原型晶圓，以準備明年投入商業運營。今年 1 月，台積電宣布第二工廠的進一步延遲。
原計劃於 2026 年開始運營，但直到 2027 年或 2028 年才會開放。



That same month, following years of negotiations, the U.S. government
announced plans to award TSMC $6.6 billion in grants and about $5 billion in
loans, with TSMC agreeing to construct a third factory on its Phoenix site
that will start operating by the end of the decade. (Meanwhile, Intel was
awarded $8.5 billion in grants in March, and Samsung was provided $6.4 billion
 in direct funding in April.)

Despite the flood of investments, the U.S. has a long way to go before chip
self-reliance, experts told Rest of World. TSMC Arizona’s first two
facilities are expected to make 600,000 wafers a year — a fraction of the
company’s current annual capacity of 16 million wafers. Many of the chips
made in the U.S. still need to be shipped back to Asia for assembly, testing,
and packaging. Chip packaging company Amkor, which has most of its factories
in Asia, will build a plant in Arizona to package Apple chips made at TSMC.

The U.S. needs to offer timely, consistent support to companies like TSMC in
order to create the kind of chip ecosystem that took Taiwan three decades to
build, according to Jason Hsu, a former legislator in Taiwan and now a
research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School with a focus on semiconductors and
geopolitics. It would be easier to leave the job to its Asian allies. “You
don’t need to raise a cow to have the milk,” Hsu said. “You just have to
make sure that the milk can be delivered to your doorstep.”







On February 24, 2024, TSMC inaugurated its newest factory, located in Kumamoto
, Japan, where construction had begun about a year later than in Arizona.

At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, guests were served Taiwan’s signature
pineapple cakes and greeted by the beloved bear mascot Kumamon. Thanks to
strong government support, local partnerships, and a low-cost labor force that
 worked 24/7, the factory had been completed at dazzling speed.

“We committed to getting it ready in two years because that’s what TSMC
asked us,” Kumamoto Governor Ikuo Kabashima told Bloomberg. Chang hailed the
factory as the start of “a renaissance of semiconductor manufacturing” in
Japan.

Although the factory in Japan will make less-advanced chips than the American
one, the news out of Kumamoto prompted feelings of envy in Phoenix. There,
engineers felt that they were falling even further behind.

The same weekend as the opening of the Japanese plant, Taiwanese engineers
discussed the struggle of working with Americans at a gathering in Phoenix. “
The Japan factory opened first. I’m very frustrated,” a Taiwanese engineer
said.

在2024年2月24日，台積電在日本熊本縣正式啟用了位於熊本市的最新工廠，該工廠的建
設比亞利桑那州的工廠晚了大約一年左右開始。



熊本縣知事蒲島郁夫告訴彭博社：“我們承諾在兩年內準備好，因為這是台積電要求的。
” 張忠謀將這家工廠稱為日本半導體製造業“復興”的開端。

儘管日本工廠生產的晶片比美國的工廠落後，但熊本的消息引起了鳳凰城的嫉妒情緒。在
那裡，工程師們感到自己正在進一步落後。

就在日本工廠開幕的同一周末，台灣工程師在鳳凰城的一次聚會上討論了與美國人合作的
困難。“日本工廠首先開幕了。我感到非常沮喪，”一位台灣工程師說。

Sitting in a room together, the engineers admitted that although they had made
 some progress in acclimating to life in the U.S., TSMC had yet to find a
balance between the two work cultures. Some Taiwanese workers complained that
management was being too accommodating in giving Americans less work, paying
them high salaries, and letting them get off work early.

Another engineer said the company babied Americans. “If local hires are not
ready, this is our opportunity to apply for a green card,” he joked.

Another engineer said he sometimes shared the Americans’ frustration with the
 hierarchy, discipline, and long hours. But these things, he believed, had
enabled TSMC to surpass its competitors to become the chip leader.

“Everything comes from working hard. Without this culture, TSMC cannot be
number one in the world,” he said with passion. “I want to support TSMC to
be great. It’s my religion.”



另位工程師說公司嬌慣了美國人。“如果當地雇傭不夠合格，這是我們申請綠卡的機會”
他開玩笑說。

另一位工程師說他有時會和美國人一樣對階級制度、紀律和長時間工作感到沮喪。但他相
信，這些事情使得台積電能夠超越競爭對手成為晶片行業的領導者。

“一切都來自於努力工作。沒有這種文化，台積電就無法成為世界第一，”他充滿激情地
說道。“我想支持台積電變得更偉大。這是我的信仰。”

Source：https://reurl.cc/QR6eMo

--

若有需要修正的地方再告知，感謝。

--
--
※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc), 來自: 123.192.88.138 (臺灣)
※ 作者: rayisgreat 2024-04-24 23:02:13
※ 文章代碼(AID): #1cAHxtJN (Stock)
※ 文章網址: https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/Stock/M.1713970935.A.4D7.html