Does anyone have any insight on how they make it economically viable?
US salaries are astronomically high compared to the rest of the world. In the tech sector that's doubly so. Everything is incredibly expensive there. Is this basically a small facility to keep some politicians happy?
Or is it used to provide some supply military gear at 50x the price?
Will it get shut down in a few years once everyone forgets about it?
Intel has a fab a few miles away, and setting aside Intel's challenges, they're producing chips just fine. Semiconductor production is massively automated and the wafers are ludicrously high revenue/margin products. This isn't like using US labor to stitch t-shirts.
> the wafers are ludicrously high revenue/margin products.
Agree except this point, as at least for MCUs which are of US origin and yet cost ~$1 per chip which also includes reel packaging and distribution margins etc.
Modern high-end fabs have extremely expensive equipment and are highly automated... like they are so automated that people don't actually handle wafers... it is almost all robotic.
Thus, salaries and cost of services do not factor in as heavily as you might think to fab economics.
Data suggests that TSMC's per wafer costs in Arizona are 10-30% higher than Taiwan and that Arizona fab is relatively new. It's economics will probably improve over time, narrowing the margin to 5-15%.
Looking towards the future, power costs and other global supply chain factors could very easily make TSMC's Arizona fab less expensive and more reliable to operate over time. For one, the US is completely energy independent... Taiwan is not.
They are majority Taiwanese employees for now, but I’m sure they’re hiring Americans to grow and backfill. They just wanted to bootstrap the knowledge and wisdom, but over enough time that can be shared and spread among Americans as well
US Workers while costing more do seem are still competitive at expensive high value tasks. There was some reports a year back where the TSMC labs in Arizona while employee costs were higher also had 4% higher yield [1].
I'd wager combining that with US defense contracts for US made chips would be lucrative for NVidia.
is it high value? I know a guy working at a fab in Taiwan and he makes peanuts ($2-3K a month?). It's basically a factory job. From what he said it sounded braindead. TSMC is known for overpaying and having PhDs stare at assembly lines though - so I dunno.
It's high value but low margins work. It played a major role into why Intel began offshoring a large portion of it's fab work abroad back in the 1990s-2000s, and also why TSMC became a player in the space undercutting Japanese, Korean, Singapore, and Malaysian/American (Intel) vendors.
In Taiwan they are by far the highest paying employer (maybe Google/Microsoft branches here are comparable). The base pay is usually not impressive, but they come with insane bonus packages. They basically hoover up all the top graduates that haven't left abroad.
They're kind of notorious for have overqualified workers. PhDs left monitoring assembly lines or writing accounting software
My bad - didn't see the qualifier for Taiwan there.
Yea, TSMC pay is decent by Taiwan standards, but imo that's largely because Taiwan salaries are fairly low even compared to other East Asian nations when factoring CoL.
Googling TSMC margin and it looks to be 53%-59% gross margin. That is after they became the leading global fab of course.
No doubt keeping costs low helped them get to that stage. Still that's a crazy margin. I imagine much of it's re-invested.
IMHO, Intel could've kept up but dropped the ball pretty hard. The volume of ARM / cell phone cpus caught them off guard and huge amounts of revunue let TSMC drive forward.
sorry, I should have thought about it a bit more. It's likely closer to 2K than 3K. A professor at Taiwan University makes ~3K. My only other point of reference is another friend's husband who works as an electric engineer at a LED manufacturer - making 2K a month. Minimum wage is $1K. Point being.. they're miserable jobs and the salaries are low low low. I get fabs sound fancy, but I'm not super sure anyone should be stoked these kinds of jobs are "coming back" to the US.
While I am more of the belief that these people are wanting a time with less income equality and conflating that with factory work.
There's going to be a bunch of people wanting any job [1] and more in the coming years. So they'd probably cheer a local walmart as much as a local tsmc.
I've had a number of friends who worked at Micron in Boise at their semi-fabs. Yes boring work, but the pay was decent. Especially for guys just graduating. I think it was like a 4-10 schedule.
Salaries aren't a huge part of manufacturing like people think. Once the factory is built, accounting for logistics of shipping and remote management, it's not a huge difference financially.
Getting the factory built, however, takes significantly more time and costs more in both actual dollars but, more importantly, the opportunity cost lost to not producing products in that extra build time.
Some hardware any superpower should be able to produce on home soil almost no matter the cost. That's why even Russia keeps domestic fabs making chips at some ancient process node - not to sell them for profit, but to maintain an ability to produce chips for the military and their own economy should things go down as they say.
In terms of Labour, the number one cost of a node is R&D. And that is happening in Taiwan not in US.
And if US could somehow provide lower electricity cost to Fabs, which is the number one cost in production, it will offset a lot of expensive items on the list. The actual labour cost for running the Fab is comparatively small.
What I find weird is that a year ago there were reports in the NYT and elsewhere that TSMC was unable to make the AZ plant work because of lazy / dumb Americans. And then 6 months later, poof, 180, the reports were that they were right on track???
Just print more money, it's a matter of national security. If the US is in a distrustful state, it's a good investment for the government, military or non-military (e.g. global trade getting more expensive for various reasons).
US salaries are astronomically high compared to the rest of the world. In the tech sector that's doubly so. Everything is incredibly expensive there. Is this basically a small facility to keep some politicians happy?
Or is it used to provide some supply military gear at 50x the price?
Will it get shut down in a few years once everyone forgets about it?