Adding to the company’s ongoing $65 billion chip manufacturing plants in Phoenix, Arizona, TSMC unveiled plans to launch three new fabrication plants, two advanced packaging facilities and a “major” R&D team centre in what it claimed was the largest single foreign direct investment in US history.
President Trump, who previously claimed Taiwan “stole” chip businesses from the US, said the proposed investment would create hundreds of billions of dollars in economic activity and “boost America’s dominance in AI and beyond”.
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Trump recently suggested he intends to introduce hefty tariffs on semiconductors made in Taiwan in a bid to entice production to the US.
In the wake of the news, TSMC reportedly scrambled over fears that tariffs, potentially as high as 100%, would severely impact its business.
At a ceremony with President Trump announcing the investment, Dr C.C. Wei, chair and CEO of TSMC, said that with the new fabs, the company is going to “produce many chips to support AI’s progress and to support the smartphone’s progress”.
TSMC previously took advantage of support from the previous US government, securing billions of dollars in federal subsidies to build new fabs in Arizona, the first of which has been in volume production since late 2024.
Howard Lutnick, the recently appointed US Secretary of Commerce, said companies like TSMC are bringing production stateside in response to the proposed export taxes.
“[Businesses] are coming here in huge size because they want to be in the greatest market in the world, and they want to avoid the tariffs that, if they’re not here, they’d have to suffer,” Secretary Lutnick said.
Days prior to TSMC’s announcement, news broke that Apple intends to bring some of its operations to the US in response to proposed tariffs.
“The US has been taken advantage of for 40 years,” the President said. “The US has been a laughing stock for years and years. That’s why [Dr Wei] has built in Taiwan, instead of building here. It would have been better if he built here.
“We are setting records right now — records like nobody has ever seen before. When you have companies like this coming in and almost 40 percent of their company, in one signature, is going to be devoted to what he does, which is one of the most important — important businesses in the world, that’s an unbelievable thing.”
In addition to bringing operations to the US, earlier reports suggest President Trump was lining up TSMC to potentially take over part of the embattled semiconductor firm Intel.
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