TSMC Won't Make Official Decision About Building U.S. Plant Until 2018

Apple supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company won't make a decision about moving some of its chip manufacturing into the United States until sometime in 2018, according to company spokesperson Michael Kramer (via Reuters).

Although recent reports have focused on Foxconn's potential move stateside for Apple-specific iPhone manufacturing, TSMC chairman Morris Chang in January mentioned that the supplier was not ruling out the U.S. as a location for one of its foundries.

Now TSMC is putting off an official decision until next year, with Kramer stating that the company would lose a lot of its "flexibility" if it moved production into the United States. Sources in Taiwan point towards a decision coming specifically in the "first half of 2018," with upwards of $16 billion potentially being invested in getting the American plant up and running.

"We won't make a decision until next year," TSMC spokesperson Michael Kramer said. The company currently gets about 65 percent of its total revenue from the United States.

"We would sacrifice some benefits if we move to the States. But we have flexibility in Taiwan. If an earthquake happened for instance (in Taiwan), we could send thousands of people here as support, whereas it's harder in the States," he told Reuters.

No Apple supplier has made an official decision about building a plant in the U.S as of yet. Last year, Foxconn looked to be in the preliminary stages of building an assembly plant in the U.S., but this month chairman Terry Gou raised uncertainties about such plans. Both TSMC and Foxconn have teamed up to bid on Toshiba's memory chip unit, although the latter company has reportedly lost ground in the bidding due to the Japanese government's fear of Foxconn's ties to China.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tag: TSMC

Top Rated Comments

(View all)

cableguy84

37 months ago

They must be saving money for a new logo.

Rating: 8 Votes

69Mustang

37 months ago

I love how this is a political blocked article because it mentions the US and manufacuting. You know someone is going to bring up President Trump and how somehow it will be bad to manufacture in the US.

Do you not see the irony in the fact that it was you?:)

Rating: 5 Votes

dominiongamma

37 months ago

Why? Will the chips work differently or the jobs differ in any discernible way?

to satisfy a American dream ego :)

Rating: 5 Votes

Gasu E.

37 months ago

I would prefer an American owned plant.

What is an "American owned plant"? A private company owned by some dude with a US passport?

Apple is not an "American owned" company, FYI. It's publicly traded, and owned by people of many nationalities. Dell, in contrast, is "American owned".

Rating: 4 Votes

Avieshek

37 months ago

The future is Robots, anyway. Should focus more on Education to bring out future engineers, scientists, mathematicians, scholars or things benefiting art & marketing or creativity that Robots wouldn't compete. Can't believe America is starting to think manual labour, now. That's an aim, for a country like Bangladesh. Direct the expenditure from defence & mindless surveillance to Education, not some just kindergarten education but College education.

Rating: 3 Votes

Kaibelf

37 months ago

I would prefer an American owned plant.

Why? Will the chips work differently or the jobs differ in any discernible way?

Rating: 2 Votes

GrumpyMom

37 months ago

The future is Robots, anyway. Should focus more on Education to bring out future engineers, scientists, mathematicians, scholars or things benefiting art & marketing that Robots wouldn't compete. Can't believe America is starting to think manual labour, now. That's an aim, for a country like Bangladesh.

That's the attitude that got us in the mess we are in and helped usher in the paradigms that have created so much income inequality in this country (I'm referring to the US). It's an elitist attitude that assumes all manual labor is mindless labor. In fact, much of it is very highly skilled and requires a significant amount of training and apprenticeship. I daresay my friends who are trademen have put in even more hours of study at their trades than I did getting my business degree.

Not everyone has the personality or the ability to sit still and be a scholar. What do they contribute to society anyway, in practical terms above and beyond the men and women who make and fix and build things? I've known more than a few that seemed educated beyond the degree to which their common sense is capable of functioning--because they do some pretty damn fool things with other aspects of their lives.

The fact is for my entire generation we have been focusing on creating engineers, scientists, mathematicians and scholars--and Wall Street denizens--and ignoring the trades. And you know what...there's not enough jobs for all of the intellectuals, either.

My husband has interviewed and hired at least three employees who were trained as scientists. One woman has advanced degrees and notable credentials in particle physics, if I remember correctly. She ended up being hired on as a project manager in a field completely unrelated to science and had to be retrained a bit to function at her new job. She said she could not make a living at science because the field is crowded, funding and opportunities are few and not guaranteed, and only the best of the best and most well connected can thrive at it, and they are still competing with scientists who are close to 60 years old with even more prestige than any "kid" with fresh degrees in hand can offer.

That's a big problem...no matter what field you go into now, many are overcrowded and our college grads end up having to do jobs entirely unrelated to their degrees and end up having to be retrained.

Oh and by the way, artificial intelligence and automation IS actually replacing white collar college educated workers, too. I read about the problems paralegals face as their tasks have become computerized.

There are opportunities to make a decent and non-soul sucking living are out there, but they're not what your teachers and professors will tell you they are...those people are trained to plow you back into academia or into offices and cubicles. That's not a life for everyone. In fact it's a death sentence for a lot of people who are temperamentally unsuited to it.

Which is why I'm enrolling my preteen in an experimental program that pairs middle schoolers with local artists, farmers, beekeepers, tradespeople, aquarists, carpenters and so forth. These are people who work with their hands AND their minds and are also successful at it and who know where the opportunities are and how to become an entrepreneur using these skills. These are successful people flying under the radar in our economy because for an entire generation we turned our noses up at anything that wasn't heralded by the intellectual elite who promoted the idea that to work at a trade was to consign yourself to a beer gut, dirty hands and ignorance.

We need more "stuff" going on in this country. Yes, robots will be doing a lot of manual stuff, but we still need stuff happening so that there will be opportunities somewhere in there for even a handful of humans. That's a handful out of unemployment. If that's my kid in that handful, I'm happy.

Rating: 1 Votes