TSMC-Arizona Chipwerk hat vor dem Einstieg noch 50% taiwanische Arbeitnehmer.

The first TSMC-Arizona chip plant has been filled with half of the created jobs by workers from Taiwan, despite the company receiving up to $11.6 billion in grants mainly aimed at creating US jobs.

The original news about manufacturing Apple chips in the USA by American workers is becoming increasingly less impressive.

Background Information on TSMC Chip Plants in Arizona

TSMC's announcement that it was building a chip plant in Arizona was hailed as a major success for the US CHIPS Act – its intention was to free the USA from China's dependency on advanced chip supplies and create jobs for American workers. Apple proudly announced that it would buy American-made chips for some of its devices.

The shine, however, was short-lived. The first company can only produce larger process chips suitable only for older Apple devices, and it didn't take long before TSMC asked for more subsidies and fewer regulations.

The project was already agreed upon and started over budget, with production moved to 2025 instead of 2024. There are rumors of American chips being cheaper than those made in Taiwan, which means Apple would buy less of them than originally expected.

There were complaints that the first factory would become a ruin because the output had to be shipped to Taiwan to perform the so-called 'packaging process' where various circuits are combined into a single chip. Later, Apple announced it would set up another American plant to process the chips.

A recent delay in producing 2-nanometer chips was reported due to an anti-trust lawsuit against the company for being "subjected to American discrimination."

Half of the Employees are from Taiwan

TSMC originally claimed that the preference for Taiwanese employees was only a temporary measure during the construction phase. This argument was seen as unlikely, given that the situation had not changed in the last year.

The US labor market development was first questioned when TSMC decided to bring about 500 Taiwanese workers in to speed up the construction measures. The debate quickly escalated.

However, while it was described as a time-limited measure for the construction process, a new report today paints a different picture. The Financial Times reports that with almost half of the production workforce already employed, around 50% of them actually come from Taiwan.

A New York Times report states that by the end of 2024, the same claim is still being made until today, just a few months before the planned start of production.

About half of the approximately 2,200 employees are from Taiwan. Some other Taiwanese workers have come to Arizona on temporary contracts to build the factories. The company realizes that the shares of American workers are rising as they build their works [...]

TSMC said that its first plant in Phoenix will begin commercial production in the first half of 2025.

Image: Bravo Prince on Unsplash.