At an industry event this week, TSMC CEO CC Wei denounced the trend of decoupling between China and the United States, which is hampering the development of the semiconductor industry and driving up costs. Along the way, he explained that the company’s businesses in the United States and Japan appear to serve the needs of a large customer and not to please the political juncture.
Image source: Caitlin O’Hara, Bloomberg
TSMC’s largest customer is unmistakably Apple, which is interested in obtaining chips from both TSMC’s Arizona facilities and Japan, where it will be jointly operated by Sony and Denso. The first of the Japanese companies, as Apple’s management recently explained, is the largest supplier of image sensors for the brand’s mobile devices. As a result, the emergence of TSMC in Japan indirectly helps meet Apple’s demand for Sony components.
“We will never build factories overseas due to government subsidies or at the request of US or Japanese authorities,” – quotes the words of the head of the TSMC edition Nikkei Asian Review. The only reason, according to CC Wei, that can force TSMC to establish a presence in these countries is the presence of demand from the company’s customers. This is the top priority for TSMC, as summarized by the CEO.
He did not hide his skepticism about the initiative of the Japanese authorities, which implies the development of a 2nm process technology with the support of IBM by 2027. Even if the Japanese consortium Rapidus manages to achieve this goal, the intermediate stages of the lithographic progress will require a huge effort, according to the head of TSMC. In general, as CC Wei explained, he does not like the attempts of many countries to acquire their own enterprises for the production of semiconductor components. If it were that simple, such enterprises would have existed all over the world for a long time. Relocating manufacturing within Taiwan also requires enormous effort, not to mention migrating technology out of the island. Proper infrastructure development in Taiwan required the consolidated efforts of many companies over 30 years, the TSMC chief added.
He did not bypass the latest geopolitical processes. According to him, the pandemic and military conflicts do not damage global supply chains as much as the geopolitical confrontation in general. He interrupts the functioning of the world market, increases costs and slows down scientific and technological progress, undoing the achievements of globalization in previous years. Worse, trust and the desire for cooperation are weakening between countries. It is these qualities that have enabled humanity to make progress in the past, as stated by CC Wei.
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