A slow start. Apple uses N3* but TSMC won't be able to deploy that until 4 years from now when it's obsolete. It's possible they could make Samsung/Qualcomm SoCs on N4P, maybe.
This venture has an appearance of malicious compliance to take advantage of American taxpayers. It would've been better if an American company built things in America because then the interests of such a company would be aligned. Instead, it's still entirely dependent on TSMC in Taiwan where China is planning to invade this year or next given the rapid construction of landing craft and other preparation signals.
> A slow start.
Is it? I thought that starting production in a near SOTA fab ~3 years after breaking ground wan't bad at all.
Are there many examples of this happening faster in recent times?
Apple still uses and makes a lot of 4nm and AMD is also using 4nm for their latest ryzen CPUs which actually has shortages.
TSMC's big Gigafabs are 100,000 per month and none of them are going to be build outside Taiwan. Arizona fab is 20,000 wafers per month Megafab where the capacity might be doubled eventually.
It seems to me that these Megafabs in US, Germany elsewhere exist to provide minimal strategic security of supply in case there is a conflict between Taiwan and China. The economy will collapse, but you avoid the worst with 20% domestic manufacturing goal is enough in crisis to provide essentials.
Good for America, thanks to covid that made it possible