In November 2024 the US Department of Commerce finalized an award of up to $6.6 billion in direct CHIPS and Science Act funding to TSMC Arizona, supporting the company’s planned investment of more than $65 billion in three greenfield leading-edge fabrication plants in Phoenix, Arizona. According to the Commerce/NIST description, the Arizona site will eventually manufacture N3, N4 and N5 FinFET technologies plus N2 and A16 nanosheet process technologies - some of the most advanced chipmaking processes in the world.
TSMC is the contract manufacturer that fabricates the chips designed by NVIDIA, Apple, AMD and others, including the GPUs and accelerators that train and run modern AI. The vast majority of leading-edge logic is produced in Taiwan, which made TSMC the central node in any plan to relocate AI hardware capacity to the United States. The first Arizona fab was targeted to begin high-volume production in the first half of 2025, with two more fabs to follow later in the decade.
The award was the marquee deployment of the CHIPS Act’s manufacturing subsidies, and the project was projected to create roughly 6,000 direct manufacturing jobs and more than 20,000 construction jobs.
Why business readers should care: where AI chips are physically made is now a strategic question with billions in public money attached. The TSMC Arizona award is the clearest test of whether subsidies can move leading-edge fabrication - the chokepoint of the entire AI economy - onto American soil.