After announcing a $100bn expansion of its US investment in co-operation with the Donald Trump administration, TSMC attracted intense attention when it emerged that it had proposed a joint venture with a number of tech giants to rescue Intel.
At the request of the Donald Trump administration, TSMC has made an offer to big US chip companies such as Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom and Qualcomm, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter, jointly form a joint venture to jointly manage Intel’s wafer manufacturing business.
According to the report, the joint venture will be run by TSMC with a stake of up to 50% , in line with the U.S. government’s desire that Intel or its foundry business not be controlled by foreign companies, it could also help revitalise the US company at the request of the Trump administration. Intel 2024 a net loss of $18.8 bn because of the huge impairment. On the 13th, the company announced that Malaysian Chinese Chen Liwu would take over the helm.British”Economist” said that overseas semiconductor companies to set up factories in the United States face a long time, high cost and talent shortages and other issues. TSMC’s latest fab in Arizona, for example, cost $20 billion, far more than US government subsidies, and took 38 months to open, nearly twice as long as Taiwan’s. Some foreign capital analyst bluntly said that the joint venture aid Intel, regarding Taiwan makes the electricity“Possibly is the bad script”.
There is also considerable concern on the island. On the 13th, Taipei City Councillor Hou Hanting of the new party said that TSMC’s plant expansion in the US was simply“Ximen Qing Pan Jinlian stealing Wu Dalang’s thunder while he was clapping his hands”. Donald Trump moved the mountain with a snap of his fingers. Former“Legislator” Tsai Cheng-yuan lambasted, originally thought that if TSMC invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the United States, it wouldn’t have to worry about Intel. Now it actually has to pay, and the United States will definitely impose tariffs on Taiwan. “How can we sell Taiwan Like This?”
“If TSMC is asked to take over Intel, it won’t be effective for a few years,” said Lin Weizhi, executive vice president of the think-tank Industry Trends Institute. For example, even within the same process, different fabs use different parameters and require at least one to two years of break-in, not to mention Intel, which uses different processes. Liu Pei-chen, director of the Taiwan Economic Research Institute’s Business Database, said that in the future, in addition to plans to expand investment in building factories, we will also have to make extra efforts to set up a joint venture company. “It will do no harm to TSMC, and the pressure will be very great.” If the news is true, that means there is still no guarantee that the US will not make other demands on TSMC in the next four years.
Some people in the semiconductor industry believe that US $100 billion is probably just a starter, and the joint venture is the most important thing, because the key process yield tuning parameters are still in the hands of TSMC, in order to fully grasp the joint venture factory TSMC mass production of important skills.
TSMC’s revenue in February was about NT $260bn, up 43.1 per cent year-on-year and a record high for the same month last year, according to results released on the 10th. Despite its record year-over-year revenue, TSMC has lost t $2,700 bn in market value since the start of the year because of continued interference from US policy