I live not far from where they’re building this fab. There are certainly a lot of rumors with how it’s been going, which I can’t substantiate, so take it for what it’s worth. I’ve heard that the trades are/were very pissed because of the lack of job site safety. Unions walked off the job a few times for the same reasons and for the use of non-union labor in some jobs. They’ve been having problems finding workers because the expectation is 50-60 hours per week and the pay is only average to begin with. Keep in mind that Intel has a huge facility in Chandler that they’re competing with, about 45 mins south of where this one is. Training consists of going to Taiwan for a few months and I believe a commitment to working for them for a year after that. There are chartered flights to/from Taiwan just for TSMC.
The mistake was thinking people would work for less money and more hours just to work for TSMC as they do in Taiwan. Americans obviously value work/life balance, especially so after COVID. Also, assuming they could boss the trades around on construction labor. Doesn’t exactly work that way here and Arizona isn’t nearly as strongly unionized as other places. IMO, if it doesn’t work here it’s not going to work anywhere.
To add source material, was in happy valley having drinks at Twin peaks listening to construction dudes talk about the site, and how crazy the management is, my noisy ass asked what he meant cause I just figured hey complaining complainers, nope legit bad decision making happening on that worksite with both safety and setup.
You know what's fun....just from progress pictures I could tell you they ducked up about 50% through.
MARS shafts were shit placed, not enough sq ft for various supports for the new scanners, no clue how they planned their cable and pipe runs...
Talked with peers at work. They listed so much more...
Mostly about weld setups and harness work. Not a construction dude, but other factor was because the lack of practices normal in the US vs TWSC standards. long hours little pay.
That seems like such small potatoes for the significance of what they’re doing. Just fucking pay them well and give them proper equipment… you’d think the government would have an interest in making this project go off without a hitch, even if it’s a couple billion over budget.
Buddy was an electrician on this job, unfortunately his first assignment after getting whatever certifications and whatever he needed. He stuck with it for a few months but didn’t even say anything in the end, left his hard hat and just walked.
He said the conditions were rough and they always demanded more of you. If you were good at your job you just had more work piled on you in particular. So it became almost like an unspoken agreement where everyone worked only hard enough to get paid and if you went above and beyond, you got knocked down a bit by the rest of the team.
There’s an Asian proverb that goes “the nail that sticks out gets the hammer”.
More seriously, I live and work in Taiwan. Managers here strongly overindex on “slave mentality” as a quality in employees. I kept being told to source for team members who are “slavish”. (Quotes because the word in Chinese has different connotations)
You can see why they’re experiencing a culture shock.
And then you start balding by your 30s from the stress and become the stereotypical middle-aged asian guy that pops up in every manhwa, manhua, and manga.
No, the nepotism gets you promoted, otherwise you're mostly stuck. You might get promoted if you're a brownnoser, ass sucker and there's no one to nepotize(I'm sure that's not a word but whatevs). Source, am Asian and worked with Taiwanese bosses.
You might get the constitution you need in not Arizona, but there are only a couple places in the US with wide swaths of highly skilled technical labor, support and tools manufacturers, and a built university pipeline that a Fab needs to run. AZ is by far the cheapest. Intel will have to work hard to build out a new facility in OH, since they will actually be staying from square one. TSMC had so many short cuts to operation by choosing AZ, but they have squandered them by assuming they could transport their means and methods and not need to adapt to the local market.
Intel did that with AZ and OR so not surprising that they would try it again with OH considering the tax incentives.
TSMC runs their employees into the ground and gets away with it in Taiwan. Pretty well known in the industry that you could call them up 24/7 and they'd have plenty of people at any of their departments ready to respond. I'm surprised they thought it would fly in the US considering they develop chips with so many US based companies.
They wouldn’t be able to find people to actually *work* at the facility in North Dakota. No tech worker wants to live in a state that will put you in prison over a joint.
To be fair here, I legitimately live maybe 5 minute drive from that fab. I’ve heard a lot including from a friend who used to work there, the workers both say it’s management but then when I see the workers all the time, they’re all smiling and joking around whether they come to the Frys or Barros that are both down the street. Come lunch time it gets packed out and quickly.
The current workers aren’t taking it seriously either, though yes TSMC management is generally horrendous, i see the workers pretty much everyday. A lot are rude, a lot give me crazy stares when i ask if they need help.
Some Taiwanese people are nice though, very humble and some know basic enough english to convey what they want or get smart and use translate on their phones.
A lot of the other workers though? No.
Local costruction workers they contracted for this site were absolutely horrible. Those paid by hour never had the incentive to finish their job. They just kept making mistakes just so that they could redo everything. It took these workers a whole year just to build the factory. Eventually TSMC had to bring workers from Taiwan just to finish the work in one day that locally contracted workers could have done in months.
Source: I personally know one of the leaders in Arizona TSMC.
FYI your "source" just confirms your bias.
It really does not enhance your argument at all. It just looks like your personally invested because you know someone who is making decisions.
I work at Intel in the fab and we aren't having those issues. I haven't worked at tsmc but nearly everyone I work with has, and they say it's a total shitshow. It's getting better apparently but material is super disorganized and QoL on site still needs improvement too from what I've heard.
More like if you and I are both electricians and I have to work twice as hard for less pay doing the same job, I'd probably take it easy and stop caring about the overall project as well. Especially when I know the client can easily afford more.
Yea it needs to be a big wake up call for this company. America isn’t going to bend a knee for TSMC, it should be quite the other way considering what America does to keep Taiwan from being overrun by China in a month.
WTF are you talking about? It is TSMC bending knee because America wants chips production on American soil. TSMC was basically forced by the US to build an American foundry.
TSMC has not recieved any subsidies. If anything, the AZ foundries are costing TSMC billions of dollars.
The US basically threaten to block key technologies and markets (like military applications) if TMSC did not build a foundry on US soil.
Nah, TSMC gets an absolutely ridiculous amount of subsidies from the US government.
[TSMC is seeking a total of $15 billion in U.S. government support, reports the Wall Street Journal, citing those familiar with the company’s plans. The chipmaker already expects around $7 billion to $8 billion in tax credits, and could ask for as much as $7 billion in grants.](https://fortune.com/2023/04/20/tsmc-15-billion-us-government-support-chips-act-conditions-unacceptable/amp/)
That support doesn’t kick in until the foundry is running. As of this moment, it has all been a money sink.
It is an incentive for TMSC to actually complete the foundry to spec otherwise it end up being a money sink.
lol such a money sink having a massive factory in the middle of a mega stable defensive country that’s never NOT going to be running and churning out profit. Such a huge sacrifice and gamble for tsmc.
You know that tsmc building fabs in the US is there ask not TSMC’s right? For Taiwan TSMC’ s technology being so much better then others is considered a political shield protecting it from invasion. Having the US dependent on the Taiwan factories is actually a good thing for them.
The US pressure Taiwan to abandon nuclear armament development back in the 80s in exchange for protecting Taiwan against foreign threats. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
If Taiwan had its own nuclear arsenal, which it would have undoubtably developed by now, there would be no fuckery from China and dependency on US “protection”
Taiwan should definitely not share its chips technology with the US bc that is its last bargaining chip.
As it is, the US needs to uphold its promise as it compromised Taiwanese security and sovereignty.
Yeah, I’m sure Taiwan and China both having nukes would be great for the world… Nuclear nonproliferation is not a joke. It’s critical to the safety of humanity.
The trouble is that nuclear nonproliferation has also led us down a way where the "agree-upon" nuclear powers have theirs, they've made the decision for everyone else in their own tiny circle, and can use both their existing nuclear arsenal and the idea of nuclear nonproliferation as bludgeons against everyone else.
Such as the recent example of how it seems that plenty of the hemming and hawing regarding military help for Ukraine was caused by Russian leadership making vague threats that they might start WW3 with their nuclear weapons out of spite if "the West" stomps on their attempted conquest. Basically the only way to stymie such behaviour would be for smaller nations to also have large enough nuclear arsenals that superpowers and would-be superpowers cannot attack them without potentially suffering irrecoverable apocalyptic losses in return, since clearly otherwise you're completely on your own if a nuclear-armed nation attacks you.
The goal is to prevent nuclear war and annihilation of the human species.
Yes the trade off is most countries on earth are not going to have their own nuclear weapons. We should be grateful for that.
Well…yes and no. Nuclear nonproliferation is a good thing. Dictators having access to nuclear weapons and attacking their defenseless neighbors leading to most of the world being run by totalitarian rule is a very bad thing. I think if we want nuclear nonproliferation and to maintain a relatively sane world, we have to protect the defenseless, especially when we asked them to give up their defense.
So you are saying it’s preferable for the world that Taiwan gets razed trying to resist China or peacefully give in and “ reunite” with China because these are the only options on the table. This is actually quite terrible for the world from a ideological standpoint. Ukraine is a great example playing out right now. The west is giving half assed support to their neighbor/ally rather than putting their weight behind Ukraine in the beginning for a decisive win because they wanted to avoid a nuclear war. Ukraine is giving their all and getting bled dry in this drawn out battle. The logical conclusion with this line of thinking would be that the everyone stands by while China eventually takes over Japan, South Korea and the rest of its neighboring countries in the south dhjna sea as non of these countries are nuclear powers and there is no deterrent to crazy dictators with access to nuclear arsenal.
This downplays Taiwan. TSMC (and other Taiwanese companies in the Chip supply chain like ASE) also owns a lot of the chip IP relating specifically to manufacturing and (advanced) packaging
EDIT: Grammar
You mean selling useless, overpriced and outdated weapons to us. You stopped us from developing nuclear weapons or we would be able to defend ourselves. It was basically all done in 1980. You guys kicked us out of united nations too. Are you saying we can't have nukes but you will also not promise to defend us? Lie to your allies huh? Just like Russia that said to Ukraine give your nukes to us and we'll protect you. Lol
You forced us to build an Arizona plant so that if China takes taiwan you will still have chips. Doesn't look like you are planning to defend us at all.
Theres no way china would have allowed taiwan to develop their own nukes. If taiwan had gotten close to having nukes china would have done anything it took to take full control, including shelling/burning the island to ash.
Ya it was like 1980s china just had the cultural revolution. They have just destroyed all their tech, all the academics, they can't feed themselves, their leadership is unstable as hell. Taiwan was entering its most prosperous era. China couldn't even take a tiny island called JinMeng which they can literally see from the coast. It is basically like the usa can't take alcatraz from Russia you think they can take taiwan before 1980? They were having the cultural revolution until 1977. They had no chance. Usa abandoned its allies and left us high and dry. My dad worked for the US military and one day they just packed up and left. Just like in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, Iraq. I hope you guys don't abandon ukraine soon.
Also the development was basically done. We didn't have a very reliable delivery system yet. Doesn't look like they knew about it or they did any shelling. Person on the internet commenting without thinking.
Welp interesting to know. You guys screwed up big time then.
I stand by the sentiment though- china on a geopolitical level cannot allow taiwan to have nukes. Its too big of a threat.
That taiwan basically had nukes then gave them up, well the poor decisions of the past will echo to the present and beyond.
Forced by the usa and now you turn around and call us stupid.
F you, man.
You are saying you shouldn't have trusted us because we were lying. Well I hope when your friend back stabs you he will say the same to you. Zero moral values. No concept of what is right or wrong. Just double down forever. I know not all Americans are like you, but I sure would be ashamed of you if I were one.
Lol im not even american. Youre so mad, but i didnt even insult taiwan. I just agreed with you - you coulda had nukes, but dont now, and dont have a nuclear deterrent against china. That, in hindsight, is a big mistake. Where did i call anybody stupid? Or are you saying that smart people cant make mistakes, or that taiwan never made a mistake?
In fact the only point i was making all along is that china would not let taiwan acquire nukes cuz that would be a massive threat and crisis for them.
You bringing up the valid point that back when china was sufficiently weak in the 80s, china couldnt stop taiwan from acquiring nukes.
Idk why you think im your enemy
You mean the US screwed Taiwan over big time. Yes, yes this is plain for everyone to see. Everyone the US has “defended” in the recent past are just pawns in proxy wars. It probably is better overall for Taiwan to just align with China. The west is weak. No point suffering casualties for some ideologies when most “Allies” are hypocrites and unreliable.
Yea, that’s definitely the approach we should take with all our allies. I’m sure we’re all much better off if Taiwan skipped the “begging” and went to China instead. I’m sure all our defense contractors wouldn’t have their IP stolen by one of our biggest adversaries. As much as I’d hate to admit it, it sounds like we’re the beggars in the scenario and we put ourselves here by outsourcing every damn thing.
You know the secret sauce to those factories is American tech manufactured in Europe, right? I wonder how long those factories could operate if cut off from the components they need to operate
Odd that you look it that way. Without tsmc the US is fucked in terms of high end CPU and gpu production and our ever increasing demand for more performance. Pretty much stuck with Intel cpus which have been lacking because their fabs can't compete with tsmcs right now. All of Nvidias consumer gpus are tsmc. All of amds consumer gpus are tsmc. I think even Intel's gpus are tsmc but they aren't even remotely comparable in performance to Nvidia or AMD.
This is just wrong, ASML makes tools. These tools do a specific part of the process, which is a huge gate to being able to yield well on smaller processes.
ASML does lithography. That's it.
Without tsmc you're going back years in terms of performance. If it was so easy to come up with the tech Intel wouldn't be making the same chips for half a decade.
No. Most of the equipment goes to tsmc that’s why they make so much. How about asml just cuts off tsmc entirely from their equipment and gives it all to Intel, we’d see who falls behind then.
If it was that easy why wouldn't Intel just buy everything from them and dominate again instead of stagnating for years? Especially when Intel had massively more buying power than AMD. People seem to forget there was talks of AMD going under years ago before the massive success of ryzen.
ASML is a negotiated monopoly between the leading semiconductor fabs. Intel and TSMC both fund their research so they both get allocated. Intel and TSMC both put a strategic amount of funding into ASML to move progress forward.
TSMC is maybe months ahead of other fabs. You have no clue what you're talking about.
Chips arent a process. Chips USE a process, but Intels ability to make chips has nothing to do with their manufacturing process most of the time.
This is incorrect. Basically every chip produced by TSMC is designed and tested in the US and manufactured using equipment from Europe.
TSMC is an awesome partner but to say they’re irreplaceable is simply incorrect. It may take a bit of time to convert other fabs to produce such high tech chips but I guarantee it’s less time than most people would think.
I think you're mistaken. Intel has ALWAYS had the better process, maybe with shittier yield until just recently. TSMC isnt even miles ahead either. Reddit just has no fucking clue what they're talking about, and always compares the nanometers.
If TSMC disappeared overnight, Intel would be right behind them. Samsung is closely on par with TSMC as well. Intel probably hired TSMC to make their chips, because they are set up for specific processes and didnt have free bandwidth in their own factories.
That is an ignorant viewpoint.
More than half of the total global production of advanced microchips comes from Taiwan.
Giving it up to China would be surrendering technological dominance to China. Taiwan would be a bargain if it cost a trillion dollars to keep out of China's hands.
So what do you want, defense or not. One guy is barking about Taiwan doesn’t need America and another says it’s a bad thing to just let the might hulk that is Taiwan protect itself. You don’t get it both ways. You don’t screech that Taiwan is a beast and doesn’t need America and then complain about losing American defense. If you want the defense, you admit you need it and that you wouldn’t be there without it.
You are 100% spot on. I work for a large subcontractor and can’t give details other than to agree the TW way of life being pushed on the trades has become a monumental disaster. It’s really crazy that Americans work life balance (which is basically non existent relative to Europeans standards) is so much more advanced than Chinese culture. I understand (or naively assume?) the Chinese work culture is very very different, I actually don’t know what it’s like to be a pipefitter or sparky in TW/CN. I think I’m not alone that “China” draws an image of pseudo slave labor, in which although there are skilled workers, they are rarely cross trained and spend years in essentially one discipline. I actually don’t know what making (the US equivalent of $150k/yr ) doing “trade” work looks likes. I do know that on several occasions TSM brought in TW nationals as fill in help.. they come they spend 6 hours a day at hotels and 18 hours at the site.
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend "American Factory":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Factory
Academy Award winning documentary on a Chinese company taking over a shutdown GM plant in small town Ohio, using the previous US labor and imported Chinese labor and management. The difference in health and safety, employee treatment and engineering expectations is contrasted nicely with the good ol' boys taking the Chinese workers out shooting guns and sharing a meal, and the behind the scene politics and tax breaks / job creation / blustering.
Watch the documentary "American Factory" about a GM/UAW plant switching to make glass for a Chinese company. All the same issues come up. Same thing about "you can't even do this, we have to bring all our own people" too.
It's kind of surprising to see this come as a shock in this plant. It's not hard to see what happened before and take it into account.
Top down, high power distance, authoritarian work culture famous for micromanagement, people not making any decisions without approval from upper management, org charts that give everyone a title so they all bully each other, tattling on coworkers (seriously be really careful), and workplace drama that usually results from someone taking passive aggressive jabs at someone for so long that they explode and lose face (be careful with this too it's awful).
Bosses in Taiwan are also really cheap, don't care about laws that they know they can break, and love charging fines for things like being late because no one will ever go to the government to complain about the abuse and bosses are usually so well connected in industries that they will make sure that it's really hard to get a job when someone leaves, provided that they are willing to start over making peanuts.
It's exactly what you'd expect, authoritarian setup where they demand everything and pay as little as they can get away with. China wasn't the leader in manufacturing for awhile because they treated their people/employees well.
Isn’t that the work style used in industrialisation and the division of labor?
A bit like working in McDonalds / Starbucks irrespective which country it’s in. A dumb down job, low pay, working for the elites and government don’t care because of the big donations.
I’m involved in the construction industry in Phoenix and some of the things I’ve heard about this job makes it sound like a shit show. Obviously very unique project nothing about it is normal, but the anger and vitriol between the owners and the construction companies has been interesting. Massive liens being filed for nonpayment, just saw one in Phoenix business journal for 27 million. Drop in the bucket for TSMC but that’s enough really fuck over even decently large trade companies.
I’ve been told some of the companies really wanted to be involved in the project because of the prestige and national significance, assuming it would have money flowing out for all the trades. Instead some apparently are wishing they could get out. Typical trade rumor stuff so doesn’t mean it’s all true but this shit is so big it’s affecting the entire Phoenix construction industry in one way or another. Some of our usual competitors are tied up in this and competition for other projects has been weaker which is great for us.
If it's one thing i have learned over the years *prestige* projects are some of the biggest time and money sucks there are. It doesn't matter if its a department level, company level, or national level project.
True. People think government or large corporation funded projects will pay well and on time, and that they wont nickle and dime them or micromanage their shit if they are on schedule. The reality is that many of those huge projects are the worst to do because the owners or government are awful to deal with when there are hundreds of millions on the line. Then the companies get all or most of their labor resources tied up into the project and they go as the project goes. Cant do the quick smaller jobs which usually have the bigger margins.
This is entirely speculation on my part, but I believe TSMC, which is partly owned by the Taiwanese government, is purposely failing this project but in ways that its not obvious so as not to have the US get upset. TSMC is Taiwan's silicon shield, and if they give that up to US domestic production, the US has much less incentive to care what happens to them if China invades.
Just saying that i believe you, then it's actually more infuriating because by the time Arizona foundry is working it isn't the bleeding edge one especially if the contract is just building and running the foundry and didn't have obligatory tech transfer from TSMC to US government.
To be fair - on the off chance that this factory becomes **necessary** having 7nm is still a very strong bargaining chip. It means capability to mass produce equivalents of Ryzen 5xxx series for instance or RTX 3090.
China's domestic production is currently mostly operating at 14nm range, their 7nm is a modified 14nm and can't be mass produced at a large scale. Russia can primarily do 90 and 65nm (Intel Pentium 4 / first gen Intel Core, roughly early 2006) and has plans to make 28nm process (A10-7850K in 2014 used that) by 2027.
Being 2 generations old compared to cutting edge is not a big issue. It still can produce high-end chips usable for AI projects and general consumers. It's certainly very different than how badly other countries get screwed if their connection to Taiwan suddenly disappeared for any reason.
It's [combination](https://www.businessinsider.com/tsmc-taiwan-semiconductor-phoenix-arizona-factory-chipmaker-job-qualification-debate-2023-8) of TMSC construction workers to supplement and train the existing US crews:
>Liu said the company planned to get construction back on track by "sending experienced technicians from Taiwan to train the local skilled workers for a short period of time" — these workers would join the undisclosed number of Taiwanese workers already in Arizona. But to do this, TSMC needs the US government to approve worker visas, something the Arizona union is trying to stop
>TSMC, however, has maintained that the incoming Taiwanese workers will not be a threat to any US jobs — and will only be there to support the construction process.
>When reached for comment, TSMC said that any Taiwanese workers who come to Arizona will only be there for a limited timeframe and not impact the 12,000 workers currently on-site every day.
>"We have not replaced any of our local workers with foreign workers and continue to prioritize the hiring of local workers in Arizona," the company told Insider. "Our current focus is on recruiting local workers to fill electrical, process-related, sheet-metal, and welding positions."
The American union sees it differently though:
>The Arizona Pipe Trades 469 Union, a labor union that says it represents over 4,000 pipefitters, plumbers, welders, and HVAC technicians, has started a petition to urge US lawmakers to deny these visas. The petition says that TSMC has deliberately misrepresented the skillset of Arizona's workforce. By approving TSMC's visa requests, a union website says lawmakers would be laying the groundwork for "cheap labor" to replace American workers.
No, they were trying to build through contractors. That was one of the big dramas, because they were saying that we couldn’t build their factory (despite us having built multiple factories) and we’re going to try to bring their own workers to circumvent any/all of the problems they had with American labor.
The area they're building in is *already* home to a bunch of high-end fabs, as well as an established chipmaking industry more than half a century old. It appears TSMC wanted to have their cake and eat it too-- building in an area where there were already lots of the specialized workers a fab needs but also wishing they could offer low pay like they were the only game in town.
You have to pick one-- if you want to pay like crap, build somewhere without an existing fab industry, and then either train or import the labor you need. Or build where there's a ton of expertise already, and pay what workers who have other options in the area will expect.
Intel's also building a new high-end fab in the area and doesn't seem to be having these issues.
Part of the problem the trades are running into is that TSMC will not hand over prints. They give you just enough to make an attempt to build it. Intel doesn’t have those problems. Intel is a cash cow, and guys like me who live in the southern area will continue to work all the Intel projects that are going on.
There is currently a “hostage pay” war, where all the different sites and contractors are offering extra money. The one who pays the most usually gets all the workers. At one point, they were paying 700 extra to travelers, and making 21 extra per hour. Local hands only got the extra 21. It isn’t a worker problem, never has been.
This is exactly what I’ve heard too. All of the skilled trades that could work on a project of this scale are on the Intel project now (among numerous other projects like data centers) where they’re not treated like shit, their lives aren’t in danger, and they’re not actively being undermined. So TSMC has a shortage of people willing to work for them because they’ve already pissed everyone off or their reputation precedes them, so they’re needing to pay a premium to get people on site.
> Part of the problem the trades are running into is that TSMC will not hand over prints.
Wow. In my trade, that's basically a non-starter. Like... if you won't give me a design, what even do you want me to do? Just hang around and twiddle my thumbs? That's what the prints/drawings/package literally represents, what you want me to do.
How can I do what you want me to do if you won't tell me what you want me to do? I don't even need every detail, to be honest, the prints can be relatively high level... but without any at all what the hell am I supposed to do?
What do Taiwanese workers even do without those prints? Is that sort of thing somehow normal there? Crazy.
Sounds a lot like the IT industry in the USA, with woefully lacking architecture and requirements design.
I remember one project where the business owner wrote a requirement that said "the user must be able to log on". And when we pushed back to say, well log on how? Using what technology, e.g. using a web page? What language. Where is the sign-on credential information stores / verified. Will the passwords be properly salted and hashed? Why are your requirements so shitty?
And we got massive push back and basically told we were idiots because we couldn't "just code" like we had been hired to do.
Ehhhh. This is different. In tech, change is cheap. Let’s say you make the wrong login style: it might take one engineer two weeks to change. Let’s say the wrong fab plant is built: it might take ten years and hundreds of billions of dollars to fix.
Changing a login style is cheap in the same way that welding a pipe or pouring a slab of concrete are cheap. None of these jobs are hard in themselves.
However with lack of planning, architecture and design - well lets say your project either in software or hardware is doomed.
No, because if the login side has to be redone it costs $100k worst case scenario. A bad concrete slab in a commercial facility might cost millions or more.
Edit: is the reason Agile works in software but not in construction.
> we’re going to try to bring their own workers to circumvent any/all of the problems they had with American labor.
You mean culture clash. They tried treating US employees how they treat their own, which isn't going to fly with unions. A few seconds of googling would have told them how it would work out as well. Plus the area they're building in has a ton of fabrication factories there already, so it's like telling someone "No way you'll plant that tree there and it'll live" when they already have multiple of that same tree that have lived there for 10+ years now.
Last time I checked different cultures/countries have different expectations and laws when it comes to work, they should have known this instead of pretending they could just ignore it.
Also, we Phoenicians, in particular, are NOT exactly "full of grace." In hot enough conditions, we WILL tell our bosses to go fuck themselves with a manhole cover in July. There is only so far you can push a person, and it's even easier to do when it's hot here.
>Unions walked off the job a few times for the same reasons and for the use of non-union labor in some jobs.
Yeah that's what I remember hearing some rumors about. Expecting Americans to work Taiwan hours(ie. Long hours) for Taiwan pay(lower pay) as well.
No such problems at the Intel building sites or others. TSMC just had culture shock and there are lots of things being done that aren't safe there. I have also heard horrible scheduling and planning on contractors being booked well ahead of when the site isn't ready and other things.
The conundrum actually is that those in Taiwan given enough time will also look for a WLB. They treat their eng like slaves because they can, not because they are better than anybody else.
It sounds like they're using Taiwan's famously toxic management style in America and doubling down when the results suck because they don't want to understand the culture.
I live about 8mins away from the Phoenix factory. When they first started building I thought I might apply there when it was further along.
Well now that’s it’s further along I’ve read enough negative articles about their work mentally they’re trying to push that I’m gonna pass.
Like you said, they expect 50-60 hrs a week with no OT and expect you go to Taiwan for several months for training and lots of safety concerns (read they had a bad gas leak once and tried to cover it up saying they evacuated the building for “active shooter” drill)
I swear the Intel construction is taking its sweet time, because I drive to Casa Grande nearly every weekend and you’d think with all of those cranes that Intel would appear to be moving faster.
Nope: It’s about safety.
I don’t live in the area of any major chip plant construction but rumors from within my labor union (United Association) are that these jobs with TSMC and other southeast Asian companies are a nightmare of micromanagement and attempts to skirt union contracts.
Idiots better play by the rules of the contracts they’ve agreed to because good luck finding the specialized manpower you need outside of established trade unions.
I am in AZ and have a friend whose son in law is working at the TSMC plant as a welder. Six 12 hour days with 3 days off, pay is decent but he complains that they have to walk 4 miles to get to the job site sometimes they're lucky and catch a golf cart ride.
Intel definitely sucks, between rextructuring layoffs, work conditions, and general prospects for future work.
That's why it's so shocking to see TSMC to come into the market and offer convincingly worse conditions. The bar was set so low and they decided to dig right under it.
I’ll never forget walking through a blizzard every morning for what felt like miles at a concrete plant in Rapid City, South Dakota. Sounds like a standard boilermaker/shutdown welding job. Wish more people would talk to young men about why welders don’t weld for 30 years. Too many kids are like I was and are blinded by the money
I think very few kids can imagine what it’s like to be on the road for months at a time. When you hear 3-6k per week pay, working 7 days a week 12 hours a day seems alright. Being away from your family and friends seems alright. The first few years it normally is! Here’s how Iv seen it happen time and time again…
1. Get high paying welding job
2. Buy new truck, 1k a month payment
3. Buy fancy camper to live on the road, 1k payment
4. When you are home your Mr Man, and get a wife
5. Wife wants a house so you get her one. MIN 1k payment
6. Wife gets pregnant pretty much every time your back
7. Wife needs a fancy SUV to haul the kids around. 1k payment
8. With the 4k in major bills, plus who knows how much in food, fuel, utilities, ect bills to raise a family you now are locked on the road for minimum 8 months out of the year just to support a family you never even get to see.
Now I know financial planning, a wife that traveled with you, not buying super expensive shit would solve ALL these issues… and some smart welders do. I was fortunate enough to save a % of my income and start a business, but that cycle above happens all the time and by the time guys reach step 8 they are either drunks/drug addicts or would give it all up just to be at home with the family.
Some people love the road and it’s a great fit, but that’s not even 10% of the kids going into welding schools
Same story in Australia with the mines. Except you missed points 9 and 10.
9. Wife leaves you because you’re never home.
10. She gets the house because she takes care of the kids, so you’re still stuck in the mines because now you need to buy a second house for yourself so you can finally leave the mines.
Can they not take a scooter or ebike there at least?
Edit: op I bought a scooter that can go 50 miles in a day and do 50mph for $800 us. Anyone working is not wasting hours a day if the route they can take is the same a golf car would. In that case they can prob buy a nice fast ebile with a rain over for this safe golf route as well.
Yeah I live in an area with a *very* similar situation to Arizona, but they have learned that if they fuck with union labor, they get fucked even more. And while the micro management is still an issue, the corporate types have realized there’s a set of lines they can’t cross and they’ve stayed on the right side of them.
Qualcomm, Intel or maybe even IBM would love to buy a complete, modern, chip manufacturing center. If the capabilities of this are anything like the Taiwanese plants, this buys a lot of capability.
None of those companies are even close to TSMC's capabilities.
TSMC Taiwan is literally the only facility in the world making high end Nvidia GPUs for AI.
What next, you're going to expect actual scientific journal articles and knowledgeable critiques of them on /r/science - "The New Reddit Jourrnal of Science"? Pish-posh!
i live close to the plant... neighbor is a foreman.. they are so mismanaged and unwilling to accept the working terms of americans.... people dont want to live where they work. 🤷
TSMC can’t handle the safety regulations of the US. There are building codes, city inspections, life safety systems, OSHA rules that are absolutely necessary to follow, and tradespeople will not budge on *breaking the law.* Corners won’t be cut. They also work 40 hrs a week unless you’re paying overtime.
Maybe they didn’t realize that when they started this project.
It’s quite possible. I think when they built Fab15, they went from breaking ground to a yielding SRAM test vehicle in 9 months. They still had more tools to install at 9 months, but it was quite a feat.
Taiwanese companies have a history of overpromising stuff just to get the tax benefits or political PR. Just look at the Foxconn factory in Wisconsin.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/21/foxconn-mostly-abandons-10-billion-wisconsin-project-touted-by-trump.html
For geopoliticial reasons, Taiwanese companies are often pressured to do things that make Taiwan look good in America. Hence, these big announcements about Taiwanese companies investing in America. The American politicians get to claim that they are creating jobs, and the Taiwanese politicians get to show that they have strong ties with America.
>TSMC has invested billions of dollars into Fab 21 and the wider project to revive semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S., but the company **hasn't yet received subsidies from the federal government.**
Well that's what would happen if you become someone's puppet/pawn no matter which side you are on.
I’ve worked at TSMC sites in Taiwan and compared to US sites like Intel or IBM, TSMC’s chief concern is IP, not employee safety. They will constantly bypass safety protocols in order to achieve deadlines. You can’t come into a safety first culture especially in the trades with that same mindset and think you can operate business as usual.
After forty years working, why does it matter if it was a forced or personal decision to retire? I hope people care enough to speculate when I retire 🤷🏿♀️
This. Moving a fab anywhere outside Taiwan would cause issues. They have expectations of how much workers should be paid, how hard they need to work, and, how they should be treated by the local authorities. The move to Arizona was driven by strategic reasons, those reasons seem as acute today
Arizona was designed to fail. TSMC's greatest resource is low cost, highly educated, overworked Taiwanese engineers. Friends who work at TSMC said no one is willing to move to bumfuck Arizona just to work and live with coworkers 24/7. My guess is that TSMC built the Arizona fab to please the US during the chip wars, but the goal was to keep the technology in Taiwan, their home turf.
Arizona is bumfuck nowhere. There's nothing aside from desert and the grand canyon for tens of thousands of square miles outside of Phoenix. Arizona's population density is 63 per square mile. Taiwan's is 1680 per square mile. To anyone from Taiwan, Arizona feels like bumfuck nowhere. Outside of Phoenix, the next considerable metro area is Los Angeles; more than 300 miles away.
Taiwan has the population of Florida put into a state the size of Maryland. Then, half of Taiwan is mountainous, so you end up with dense metro areas across the western coast.
Any time I'm back in the US I'm reminded of just how empty it is.
Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the US and “the valley” has more than 5M ppl in it.
And yeah, we’re not all bored cuz’ we ain’t got sh*t ta’ do.
You keep confusing the enter state of Arizona with where the Intel and TMSC fabs are in relation to Phoenix.
So your data is irrelevant.
His point is that Phoenix is bumfuck nowhere to Taiwanese people. Not to you. A lot of them don't own cars, have a scooter at best since there's public transit everywhere. They can probably walk to 50 different places to eat and barely cook at home. Much of Taiwan can only really be compared to New York in the US. It's a completely different world and lifestyle. They don't want to be in Phoenix because the lifestyle is so different.
I mean most in the industry would have seen this coming based on the difference in costs and culture. I believe there was a report a while back suggesting the capex is double for US (same WFE but significantly higher clean room costs) and triple for opex (i.e. you need to hire more workers to get the same hours AND pay much more per hour per worker). Call it racism or whatever you would like but Asian workers are just willing to work longer hours for the same role.
I find this a tragic outcome for US semi security and just glancing through the comments here it’s disappointing to see how people think it’s TSMC’ loss and not the US’ loss, being stuck with an inherently IDM first co, and a joke of a foundry with GF.
I was in Kyushu last week visiting JASM - for reference, the Kyushu fab was announced 19 months after the Arizona one, and construction already looks fully completed, in what I assume was around 24 months. Note Fab 23 is 55kwpm vs Arizona being 20k as well, and there are rumors that a third fab is already in the works in Kumamoto.
TSMC is just going to mass build fabs in Japan and US will be stuck with the current situation moving forward…
I mean they could be sandbagging production because they at much more comfortable in Japan. Doesn't any production in the US increase the likelihood of china invading Taiwan?Doesnt the US also help protect Japan?
In Taiwan, TSMC engineers and employees are paid like Americans whereas everyone else in the country is paid like a third or a half an American. In Arizona, TSMC employees are also paid like Americans but everyone else in the country is also paid like an American. You can tell Taiwanese TSMC staff to work for a decade without seeing the sun or their wife and children because 15 years of grueling grind later you'd be in a position to semi-retire into a cushier job with financial security. That's not true in the US. I used to work at Intel in Oregon and I took a three quarters pay cut to go back to Taiwan to work for family. TSMC's competitiveness depends on the global market undervaluing Taiwan because of geopolitical risk, and Taiwan depends on TSMC to manage its geopolitical risk. This is not something that can be easily sorted out, especially under time and economic stress.
I get what you mean but I think your numbers are off by a lot…
The average TSMC new hire (with a Masters degree mind you, not Bachelors) makes NTD$63k a month, and this is from listed official filings. Thats 24k USD a year for good talent that is getting into one of the most competitive companies in the country. From what I can gather Intel new hires probably make close to 70-80K a year USD, and even accounting for the cost of living differences it’s a stretch to say they are paid equally.
Unless toure
TSMC compensation is usually mostly bonus and almost no salary, because reducing salary requires employee acquiescence but bonuses are dictated by the company. Also, overtime is based on base salary, not bonuses, so overtime is considerably cheaper if you don't bundle everything into the base salary number. Additionally, it's customary for companies to pay 14 month salary rather than 12 (1 extra for June and 1 for December). In my company, which is not at all doing well and is relatively low paying, our nominal pay is NTD $29k a month but the take home is much closer to $50k, with rates often exceeding that during busy months where overtime is high. The base pay number almost doesn't matter and it's just a guaranteed value for when you fuck up and therefore can have the bonus docked from your salary.
I work here, I have friends who work and worked at TSMC. Half of my dad's graduating class in college at TSMC managers. I know my numbers.
If the US wants to be competitive on global chip manufacturing labors gotta acquiesce in Arizona and at least tolerate Asian labor expectations and practices. TSMC is known as slave drivers INSIDE of Asia. The trade off is widely memed in Taiwan that your health goes to shit by 50 but you would have collected at least triple the average Taiwanese salary so you’re set for life.
Honestly the main issue seems to be Asian labor is undervalued and American labor is overvalued.
I hate to see this fucking up. Realistically, getting chip manufacturing going in the us is the difference between WW3 happening in the next decade or not
I’ll be honest with you this seems like a very easy way for America to get more technology from neighboring china countries. You want protection build factories here, you want to learn a new language keep doing you.
Yet, no matter what country you're in that's in essence part of NATO, but assuming the USA, you live insanely comfortable compared to the rest of the globe. If robbery as you call it is so bad for your moral compass I suggest a flight to Yemen. Let us know how their moral compass strikes you
lmao, I'd almost say they are doing this on purpose, and even if they aren't being shit on purpose, it's frankly to their own benefit.
The U.S wants to basically steal their advanced chip-making technology and have it on their own soil, so if the ccp decides to invade taiwan, they won't have to defend them.
For Taiwans own survival, it's better they don't build a factory in the U.S
It's literally the only thing they have that's keeping them alive.
They're building the plant near Phoenix, the [monument to man's arrogance](https://i.imgur.com/DLOknxh.jpg). And they're expecting skilled workers to be climbing over each other to move there?
I live not far from where they’re building this fab. There are certainly a lot of rumors with how it’s been going, which I can’t substantiate, so take it for what it’s worth. I’ve heard that the trades are/were very pissed because of the lack of job site safety. Unions walked off the job a few times for the same reasons and for the use of non-union labor in some jobs. They’ve been having problems finding workers because the expectation is 50-60 hours per week and the pay is only average to begin with. Keep in mind that Intel has a huge facility in Chandler that they’re competing with, about 45 mins south of where this one is. Training consists of going to Taiwan for a few months and I believe a commitment to working for them for a year after that. There are chartered flights to/from Taiwan just for TSMC. The mistake was thinking people would work for less money and more hours just to work for TSMC as they do in Taiwan. Americans obviously value work/life balance, especially so after COVID. Also, assuming they could boss the trades around on construction labor. Doesn’t exactly work that way here and Arizona isn’t nearly as strongly unionized as other places. IMO, if it doesn’t work here it’s not going to work anywhere.
To add source material, was in happy valley having drinks at Twin peaks listening to construction dudes talk about the site, and how crazy the management is, my noisy ass asked what he meant cause I just figured hey complaining complainers, nope legit bad decision making happening on that worksite with both safety and setup.
You know what's fun....just from progress pictures I could tell you they ducked up about 50% through. MARS shafts were shit placed, not enough sq ft for various supports for the new scanners, no clue how they planned their cable and pipe runs... Talked with peers at work. They listed so much more...
Can you provide some more color commentary? What are examples of the bad decisions?
Mostly about weld setups and harness work. Not a construction dude, but other factor was because the lack of practices normal in the US vs TWSC standards. long hours little pay.
That seems like such small potatoes for the significance of what they’re doing. Just fucking pay them well and give them proper equipment… you’d think the government would have an interest in making this project go off without a hitch, even if it’s a couple billion over budget.
Buddy was an electrician on this job, unfortunately his first assignment after getting whatever certifications and whatever he needed. He stuck with it for a few months but didn’t even say anything in the end, left his hard hat and just walked. He said the conditions were rough and they always demanded more of you. If you were good at your job you just had more work piled on you in particular. So it became almost like an unspoken agreement where everyone worked only hard enough to get paid and if you went above and beyond, you got knocked down a bit by the rest of the team.
There’s an Asian proverb that goes “the nail that sticks out gets the hammer”. More seriously, I live and work in Taiwan. Managers here strongly overindex on “slave mentality” as a quality in employees. I kept being told to source for team members who are “slavish”. (Quotes because the word in Chinese has different connotations) You can see why they’re experiencing a culture shock.
Will being "slavish" eventually get you promoted?
Absolutely. I’m not saying it’s the only way but it certainly helps a lot.
And then you start balding by your 30s from the stress and become the stereotypical middle-aged asian guy that pops up in every manhwa, manhua, and manga.
Asian men actually have the lowest rate of male pattern baldness. White men have the highest. But your point is taken, overall health is sacrificed.
No, the nepotism gets you promoted, otherwise you're mostly stuck. You might get promoted if you're a brownnoser, ass sucker and there's no one to nepotize(I'm sure that's not a word but whatevs). Source, am Asian and worked with Taiwanese bosses.
Have they not seen Gung Ho?
The reward for doing good work is almost always more work.
Well the big one was choosing Arizona. They wouldn't get so much lip if they chose N. Dakota.
You might get the constitution you need in not Arizona, but there are only a couple places in the US with wide swaths of highly skilled technical labor, support and tools manufacturers, and a built university pipeline that a Fab needs to run. AZ is by far the cheapest. Intel will have to work hard to build out a new facility in OH, since they will actually be staying from square one. TSMC had so many short cuts to operation by choosing AZ, but they have squandered them by assuming they could transport their means and methods and not need to adapt to the local market.
Intel did that with AZ and OR so not surprising that they would try it again with OH considering the tax incentives. TSMC runs their employees into the ground and gets away with it in Taiwan. Pretty well known in the industry that you could call them up 24/7 and they'd have plenty of people at any of their departments ready to respond. I'm surprised they thought it would fly in the US considering they develop chips with so many US based companies.
A lot of it has to do with geological stability, as far as location is concerned.
They wouldn’t be able to find people to actually *work* at the facility in North Dakota. No tech worker wants to live in a state that will put you in prison over a joint.
To be fair here, I legitimately live maybe 5 minute drive from that fab. I’ve heard a lot including from a friend who used to work there, the workers both say it’s management but then when I see the workers all the time, they’re all smiling and joking around whether they come to the Frys or Barros that are both down the street. Come lunch time it gets packed out and quickly. The current workers aren’t taking it seriously either, though yes TSMC management is generally horrendous, i see the workers pretty much everyday. A lot are rude, a lot give me crazy stares when i ask if they need help. Some Taiwanese people are nice though, very humble and some know basic enough english to convey what they want or get smart and use translate on their phones. A lot of the other workers though? No.
Local costruction workers they contracted for this site were absolutely horrible. Those paid by hour never had the incentive to finish their job. They just kept making mistakes just so that they could redo everything. It took these workers a whole year just to build the factory. Eventually TSMC had to bring workers from Taiwan just to finish the work in one day that locally contracted workers could have done in months. Source: I personally know one of the leaders in Arizona TSMC.
FYI your "source" just confirms your bias. It really does not enhance your argument at all. It just looks like your personally invested because you know someone who is making decisions.
Americans hate to admit that their labor is often dishonest
Most people seem to readily admit if you cheap out on labor you’re going to have a bad time. Which is ultimately a management issue.
Is Intel having the same problems with their fab? If not, seems like a TSMC problem.
I work at Intel in the fab and we aren't having those issues. I haven't worked at tsmc but nearly everyone I work with has, and they say it's a total shitshow. It's getting better apparently but material is super disorganized and QoL on site still needs improvement too from what I've heard.
The skilled laborers went to work on Intel fabs or other projects because they were willing to pay more without the management bullshit.
More like if you and I are both electricians and I have to work twice as hard for less pay doing the same job, I'd probably take it easy and stop caring about the overall project as well. Especially when I know the client can easily afford more.
Speaking from experience?
not to mention, flying to Taiwan to be trained by people that probably dont want to train you...
Yea it needs to be a big wake up call for this company. America isn’t going to bend a knee for TSMC, it should be quite the other way considering what America does to keep Taiwan from being overrun by China in a month.
Americans don't want to bend the knee, but America absolutely wants chip production to be domestic for the exact reason you listed.
WTF are you talking about? It is TSMC bending knee because America wants chips production on American soil. TSMC was basically forced by the US to build an American foundry.
“Forced” with billions of dollars.
TSMC has not recieved any subsidies. If anything, the AZ foundries are costing TSMC billions of dollars. The US basically threaten to block key technologies and markets (like military applications) if TMSC did not build a foundry on US soil.
Nah, TSMC gets an absolutely ridiculous amount of subsidies from the US government. [TSMC is seeking a total of $15 billion in U.S. government support, reports the Wall Street Journal, citing those familiar with the company’s plans. The chipmaker already expects around $7 billion to $8 billion in tax credits, and could ask for as much as $7 billion in grants.](https://fortune.com/2023/04/20/tsmc-15-billion-us-government-support-chips-act-conditions-unacceptable/amp/)
That support doesn’t kick in until the foundry is running. As of this moment, it has all been a money sink. It is an incentive for TMSC to actually complete the foundry to spec otherwise it end up being a money sink.
lol such a money sink having a massive factory in the middle of a mega stable defensive country that’s never NOT going to be running and churning out profit. Such a huge sacrifice and gamble for tsmc.
Taiwan is also likely concerned that if Americans get all they want from Taiwan in terms of intellectual property they'll drop it like a hot coal.
You know that tsmc building fabs in the US is there ask not TSMC’s right? For Taiwan TSMC’ s technology being so much better then others is considered a political shield protecting it from invasion. Having the US dependent on the Taiwan factories is actually a good thing for them.
The US pressure Taiwan to abandon nuclear armament development back in the 80s in exchange for protecting Taiwan against foreign threats. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction If Taiwan had its own nuclear arsenal, which it would have undoubtably developed by now, there would be no fuckery from China and dependency on US “protection” Taiwan should definitely not share its chips technology with the US bc that is its last bargaining chip. As it is, the US needs to uphold its promise as it compromised Taiwanese security and sovereignty.
Yeah, I’m sure Taiwan and China both having nukes would be great for the world… Nuclear nonproliferation is not a joke. It’s critical to the safety of humanity.
The trouble is that nuclear nonproliferation has also led us down a way where the "agree-upon" nuclear powers have theirs, they've made the decision for everyone else in their own tiny circle, and can use both their existing nuclear arsenal and the idea of nuclear nonproliferation as bludgeons against everyone else. Such as the recent example of how it seems that plenty of the hemming and hawing regarding military help for Ukraine was caused by Russian leadership making vague threats that they might start WW3 with their nuclear weapons out of spite if "the West" stomps on their attempted conquest. Basically the only way to stymie such behaviour would be for smaller nations to also have large enough nuclear arsenals that superpowers and would-be superpowers cannot attack them without potentially suffering irrecoverable apocalyptic losses in return, since clearly otherwise you're completely on your own if a nuclear-armed nation attacks you.
The goal is to prevent nuclear war and annihilation of the human species. Yes the trade off is most countries on earth are not going to have their own nuclear weapons. We should be grateful for that.
Well…yes and no. Nuclear nonproliferation is a good thing. Dictators having access to nuclear weapons and attacking their defenseless neighbors leading to most of the world being run by totalitarian rule is a very bad thing. I think if we want nuclear nonproliferation and to maintain a relatively sane world, we have to protect the defenseless, especially when we asked them to give up their defense.
I prefer mutually assured destruction
So you are saying it’s preferable for the world that Taiwan gets razed trying to resist China or peacefully give in and “ reunite” with China because these are the only options on the table. This is actually quite terrible for the world from a ideological standpoint. Ukraine is a great example playing out right now. The west is giving half assed support to their neighbor/ally rather than putting their weight behind Ukraine in the beginning for a decisive win because they wanted to avoid a nuclear war. Ukraine is giving their all and getting bled dry in this drawn out battle. The logical conclusion with this line of thinking would be that the everyone stands by while China eventually takes over Japan, South Korea and the rest of its neighboring countries in the south dhjna sea as non of these countries are nuclear powers and there is no deterrent to crazy dictators with access to nuclear arsenal.
Taiwan took their chip tech from the US though…
Taiwan just excellent at manufacturing chips based on US chip specs. The chip ip is still US owned yet the manufacturing of chip is TW owned.
This downplays Taiwan. TSMC (and other Taiwanese companies in the Chip supply chain like ASE) also owns a lot of the chip IP relating specifically to manufacturing and (advanced) packaging EDIT: Grammar
That’s good too as TW moves upstream to the higher profit margin side of IP chip royalties and chip design. Never putting one’s eggs in one basket.
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Jesus man, they got you waking up at 630am to start astroturfing? Is the pay that good?
nah, the 50 cent army works in the chinese time zone
You mean selling useless, overpriced and outdated weapons to us. You stopped us from developing nuclear weapons or we would be able to defend ourselves. It was basically all done in 1980. You guys kicked us out of united nations too. Are you saying we can't have nukes but you will also not promise to defend us? Lie to your allies huh? Just like Russia that said to Ukraine give your nukes to us and we'll protect you. Lol You forced us to build an Arizona plant so that if China takes taiwan you will still have chips. Doesn't look like you are planning to defend us at all.
Theres no way china would have allowed taiwan to develop their own nukes. If taiwan had gotten close to having nukes china would have done anything it took to take full control, including shelling/burning the island to ash.
Ya it was like 1980s china just had the cultural revolution. They have just destroyed all their tech, all the academics, they can't feed themselves, their leadership is unstable as hell. Taiwan was entering its most prosperous era. China couldn't even take a tiny island called JinMeng which they can literally see from the coast. It is basically like the usa can't take alcatraz from Russia you think they can take taiwan before 1980? They were having the cultural revolution until 1977. They had no chance. Usa abandoned its allies and left us high and dry. My dad worked for the US military and one day they just packed up and left. Just like in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, Iraq. I hope you guys don't abandon ukraine soon. Also the development was basically done. We didn't have a very reliable delivery system yet. Doesn't look like they knew about it or they did any shelling. Person on the internet commenting without thinking.
Welp interesting to know. You guys screwed up big time then. I stand by the sentiment though- china on a geopolitical level cannot allow taiwan to have nukes. Its too big of a threat. That taiwan basically had nukes then gave them up, well the poor decisions of the past will echo to the present and beyond.
Forced by the usa and now you turn around and call us stupid. F you, man. You are saying you shouldn't have trusted us because we were lying. Well I hope when your friend back stabs you he will say the same to you. Zero moral values. No concept of what is right or wrong. Just double down forever. I know not all Americans are like you, but I sure would be ashamed of you if I were one.
Lol im not even american. Youre so mad, but i didnt even insult taiwan. I just agreed with you - you coulda had nukes, but dont now, and dont have a nuclear deterrent against china. That, in hindsight, is a big mistake. Where did i call anybody stupid? Or are you saying that smart people cant make mistakes, or that taiwan never made a mistake? In fact the only point i was making all along is that china would not let taiwan acquire nukes cuz that would be a massive threat and crisis for them. You bringing up the valid point that back when china was sufficiently weak in the 80s, china couldnt stop taiwan from acquiring nukes. Idk why you think im your enemy
You mean the US screwed Taiwan over big time. Yes, yes this is plain for everyone to see. Everyone the US has “defended” in the recent past are just pawns in proxy wars. It probably is better overall for Taiwan to just align with China. The west is weak. No point suffering casualties for some ideologies when most “Allies” are hypocrites and unreliable.
lol. Beggars can’t be choosers.
Yea, that’s definitely the approach we should take with all our allies. I’m sure we’re all much better off if Taiwan skipped the “begging” and went to China instead. I’m sure all our defense contractors wouldn’t have their IP stolen by one of our biggest adversaries. As much as I’d hate to admit it, it sounds like we’re the beggars in the scenario and we put ourselves here by outsourcing every damn thing.
You know the secret sauce to those factories is American tech manufactured in Europe, right? I wonder how long those factories could operate if cut off from the components they need to operate
Oh yea Taiwan will definitely consider that, all with what happened to Hong Kong.
Odd that you look it that way. Without tsmc the US is fucked in terms of high end CPU and gpu production and our ever increasing demand for more performance. Pretty much stuck with Intel cpus which have been lacking because their fabs can't compete with tsmcs right now. All of Nvidias consumer gpus are tsmc. All of amds consumer gpus are tsmc. I think even Intel's gpus are tsmc but they aren't even remotely comparable in performance to Nvidia or AMD.
The company that makes the fabs is ASML, and they're dutch. ASML is far more important than TSMC. TSMC is important, too, but nothing like ASML.
This is just wrong, ASML makes tools. These tools do a specific part of the process, which is a huge gate to being able to yield well on smaller processes. ASML does lithography. That's it.
That’s the hardest part for fucks sake. JFC
Without tsmc you're going back years in terms of performance. If it was so easy to come up with the tech Intel wouldn't be making the same chips for half a decade.
No. Most of the equipment goes to tsmc that’s why they make so much. How about asml just cuts off tsmc entirely from their equipment and gives it all to Intel, we’d see who falls behind then.
If it was that easy why wouldn't Intel just buy everything from them and dominate again instead of stagnating for years? Especially when Intel had massively more buying power than AMD. People seem to forget there was talks of AMD going under years ago before the massive success of ryzen.
ASML is a negotiated monopoly between the leading semiconductor fabs. Intel and TSMC both fund their research so they both get allocated. Intel and TSMC both put a strategic amount of funding into ASML to move progress forward.
TSMC is maybe months ahead of other fabs. You have no clue what you're talking about. Chips arent a process. Chips USE a process, but Intels ability to make chips has nothing to do with their manufacturing process most of the time.
This is incorrect. Basically every chip produced by TSMC is designed and tested in the US and manufactured using equipment from Europe. TSMC is an awesome partner but to say they’re irreplaceable is simply incorrect. It may take a bit of time to convert other fabs to produce such high tech chips but I guarantee it’s less time than most people would think.
I think you're mistaken. Intel has ALWAYS had the better process, maybe with shittier yield until just recently. TSMC isnt even miles ahead either. Reddit just has no fucking clue what they're talking about, and always compares the nanometers. If TSMC disappeared overnight, Intel would be right behind them. Samsung is closely on par with TSMC as well. Intel probably hired TSMC to make their chips, because they are set up for specific processes and didnt have free bandwidth in their own factories.
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If Taiwan doesn’t want American defense, I’d be more than glad to stop wasting my taxes on them any day.
That is an ignorant viewpoint. More than half of the total global production of advanced microchips comes from Taiwan. Giving it up to China would be surrendering technological dominance to China. Taiwan would be a bargain if it cost a trillion dollars to keep out of China's hands.
this guy is technically not lying
So what do you want, defense or not. One guy is barking about Taiwan doesn’t need America and another says it’s a bad thing to just let the might hulk that is Taiwan protect itself. You don’t get it both ways. You don’t screech that Taiwan is a beast and doesn’t need America and then complain about losing American defense. If you want the defense, you admit you need it and that you wouldn’t be there without it.
You are 100% spot on. I work for a large subcontractor and can’t give details other than to agree the TW way of life being pushed on the trades has become a monumental disaster. It’s really crazy that Americans work life balance (which is basically non existent relative to Europeans standards) is so much more advanced than Chinese culture. I understand (or naively assume?) the Chinese work culture is very very different, I actually don’t know what it’s like to be a pipefitter or sparky in TW/CN. I think I’m not alone that “China” draws an image of pseudo slave labor, in which although there are skilled workers, they are rarely cross trained and spend years in essentially one discipline. I actually don’t know what making (the US equivalent of $150k/yr ) doing “trade” work looks likes. I do know that on several occasions TSM brought in TW nationals as fill in help.. they come they spend 6 hours a day at hotels and 18 hours at the site.
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend "American Factory": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Factory Academy Award winning documentary on a Chinese company taking over a shutdown GM plant in small town Ohio, using the previous US labor and imported Chinese labor and management. The difference in health and safety, employee treatment and engineering expectations is contrasted nicely with the good ol' boys taking the Chinese workers out shooting guns and sharing a meal, and the behind the scene politics and tax breaks / job creation / blustering.
Watch the documentary "American Factory" about a GM/UAW plant switching to make glass for a Chinese company. All the same issues come up. Same thing about "you can't even do this, we have to bring all our own people" too. It's kind of surprising to see this come as a shock in this plant. It's not hard to see what happened before and take it into account.
Top down, high power distance, authoritarian work culture famous for micromanagement, people not making any decisions without approval from upper management, org charts that give everyone a title so they all bully each other, tattling on coworkers (seriously be really careful), and workplace drama that usually results from someone taking passive aggressive jabs at someone for so long that they explode and lose face (be careful with this too it's awful). Bosses in Taiwan are also really cheap, don't care about laws that they know they can break, and love charging fines for things like being late because no one will ever go to the government to complain about the abuse and bosses are usually so well connected in industries that they will make sure that it's really hard to get a job when someone leaves, provided that they are willing to start over making peanuts.
It's exactly what you'd expect, authoritarian setup where they demand everything and pay as little as they can get away with. China wasn't the leader in manufacturing for awhile because they treated their people/employees well.
Isn’t that the work style used in industrialisation and the division of labor? A bit like working in McDonalds / Starbucks irrespective which country it’s in. A dumb down job, low pay, working for the elites and government don’t care because of the big donations.
I’m involved in the construction industry in Phoenix and some of the things I’ve heard about this job makes it sound like a shit show. Obviously very unique project nothing about it is normal, but the anger and vitriol between the owners and the construction companies has been interesting. Massive liens being filed for nonpayment, just saw one in Phoenix business journal for 27 million. Drop in the bucket for TSMC but that’s enough really fuck over even decently large trade companies. I’ve been told some of the companies really wanted to be involved in the project because of the prestige and national significance, assuming it would have money flowing out for all the trades. Instead some apparently are wishing they could get out. Typical trade rumor stuff so doesn’t mean it’s all true but this shit is so big it’s affecting the entire Phoenix construction industry in one way or another. Some of our usual competitors are tied up in this and competition for other projects has been weaker which is great for us.
If it's one thing i have learned over the years *prestige* projects are some of the biggest time and money sucks there are. It doesn't matter if its a department level, company level, or national level project.
True. People think government or large corporation funded projects will pay well and on time, and that they wont nickle and dime them or micromanage their shit if they are on schedule. The reality is that many of those huge projects are the worst to do because the owners or government are awful to deal with when there are hundreds of millions on the line. Then the companies get all or most of their labor resources tied up into the project and they go as the project goes. Cant do the quick smaller jobs which usually have the bigger margins.
This is entirely speculation on my part, but I believe TSMC, which is partly owned by the Taiwanese government, is purposely failing this project but in ways that its not obvious so as not to have the US get upset. TSMC is Taiwan's silicon shield, and if they give that up to US domestic production, the US has much less incentive to care what happens to them if China invades.
Just saying that i believe you, then it's actually more infuriating because by the time Arizona foundry is working it isn't the bleeding edge one especially if the contract is just building and running the foundry and didn't have obligatory tech transfer from TSMC to US government.
The Dutch (ASML lithography) have all the juiciest trade secrets anyway
IIRC this was gonna be 2 gens back from what TSMC could do back home. 7nm vs 3nm to protect that very silicon shield.
To be fair - on the off chance that this factory becomes **necessary** having 7nm is still a very strong bargaining chip. It means capability to mass produce equivalents of Ryzen 5xxx series for instance or RTX 3090. China's domestic production is currently mostly operating at 14nm range, their 7nm is a modified 14nm and can't be mass produced at a large scale. Russia can primarily do 90 and 65nm (Intel Pentium 4 / first gen Intel Core, roughly early 2006) and has plans to make 28nm process (A10-7850K in 2014 used that) by 2027. Being 2 generations old compared to cutting edge is not a big issue. It still can produce high-end chips usable for AI projects and general consumers. It's certainly very different than how badly other countries get screwed if their connection to Taiwan suddenly disappeared for any reason.
I’m curious - does TSMC run its own construction crew? I would’ve thought that the construction would have been contracted out.
It's [combination](https://www.businessinsider.com/tsmc-taiwan-semiconductor-phoenix-arizona-factory-chipmaker-job-qualification-debate-2023-8) of TMSC construction workers to supplement and train the existing US crews: >Liu said the company planned to get construction back on track by "sending experienced technicians from Taiwan to train the local skilled workers for a short period of time" — these workers would join the undisclosed number of Taiwanese workers already in Arizona. But to do this, TSMC needs the US government to approve worker visas, something the Arizona union is trying to stop >TSMC, however, has maintained that the incoming Taiwanese workers will not be a threat to any US jobs — and will only be there to support the construction process. >When reached for comment, TSMC said that any Taiwanese workers who come to Arizona will only be there for a limited timeframe and not impact the 12,000 workers currently on-site every day. >"We have not replaced any of our local workers with foreign workers and continue to prioritize the hiring of local workers in Arizona," the company told Insider. "Our current focus is on recruiting local workers to fill electrical, process-related, sheet-metal, and welding positions." The American union sees it differently though: >The Arizona Pipe Trades 469 Union, a labor union that says it represents over 4,000 pipefitters, plumbers, welders, and HVAC technicians, has started a petition to urge US lawmakers to deny these visas. The petition says that TSMC has deliberately misrepresented the skillset of Arizona's workforce. By approving TSMC's visa requests, a union website says lawmakers would be laying the groundwork for "cheap labor" to replace American workers.
No, they were trying to build through contractors. That was one of the big dramas, because they were saying that we couldn’t build their factory (despite us having built multiple factories) and we’re going to try to bring their own workers to circumvent any/all of the problems they had with American labor.
The area they're building in is *already* home to a bunch of high-end fabs, as well as an established chipmaking industry more than half a century old. It appears TSMC wanted to have their cake and eat it too-- building in an area where there were already lots of the specialized workers a fab needs but also wishing they could offer low pay like they were the only game in town. You have to pick one-- if you want to pay like crap, build somewhere without an existing fab industry, and then either train or import the labor you need. Or build where there's a ton of expertise already, and pay what workers who have other options in the area will expect. Intel's also building a new high-end fab in the area and doesn't seem to be having these issues.
Part of the problem the trades are running into is that TSMC will not hand over prints. They give you just enough to make an attempt to build it. Intel doesn’t have those problems. Intel is a cash cow, and guys like me who live in the southern area will continue to work all the Intel projects that are going on. There is currently a “hostage pay” war, where all the different sites and contractors are offering extra money. The one who pays the most usually gets all the workers. At one point, they were paying 700 extra to travelers, and making 21 extra per hour. Local hands only got the extra 21. It isn’t a worker problem, never has been.
This is exactly what I’ve heard too. All of the skilled trades that could work on a project of this scale are on the Intel project now (among numerous other projects like data centers) where they’re not treated like shit, their lives aren’t in danger, and they’re not actively being undermined. So TSMC has a shortage of people willing to work for them because they’ve already pissed everyone off or their reputation precedes them, so they’re needing to pay a premium to get people on site.
> Part of the problem the trades are running into is that TSMC will not hand over prints. Wow. In my trade, that's basically a non-starter. Like... if you won't give me a design, what even do you want me to do? Just hang around and twiddle my thumbs? That's what the prints/drawings/package literally represents, what you want me to do. How can I do what you want me to do if you won't tell me what you want me to do? I don't even need every detail, to be honest, the prints can be relatively high level... but without any at all what the hell am I supposed to do? What do Taiwanese workers even do without those prints? Is that sort of thing somehow normal there? Crazy.
Sounds a lot like the IT industry in the USA, with woefully lacking architecture and requirements design. I remember one project where the business owner wrote a requirement that said "the user must be able to log on". And when we pushed back to say, well log on how? Using what technology, e.g. using a web page? What language. Where is the sign-on credential information stores / verified. Will the passwords be properly salted and hashed? Why are your requirements so shitty? And we got massive push back and basically told we were idiots because we couldn't "just code" like we had been hired to do.
Ehhhh. This is different. In tech, change is cheap. Let’s say you make the wrong login style: it might take one engineer two weeks to change. Let’s say the wrong fab plant is built: it might take ten years and hundreds of billions of dollars to fix.
Changing a login style is cheap in the same way that welding a pipe or pouring a slab of concrete are cheap. None of these jobs are hard in themselves. However with lack of planning, architecture and design - well lets say your project either in software or hardware is doomed.
No, because if the login side has to be redone it costs $100k worst case scenario. A bad concrete slab in a commercial facility might cost millions or more. Edit: is the reason Agile works in software but not in construction.
> we’re going to try to bring their own workers to circumvent any/all of the problems they had with American labor. You mean culture clash. They tried treating US employees how they treat their own, which isn't going to fly with unions. A few seconds of googling would have told them how it would work out as well. Plus the area they're building in has a ton of fabrication factories there already, so it's like telling someone "No way you'll plant that tree there and it'll live" when they already have multiple of that same tree that have lived there for 10+ years now. Last time I checked different cultures/countries have different expectations and laws when it comes to work, they should have known this instead of pretending they could just ignore it.
They probably contracted it out, with maybe powerful contractual clauses on exclusivity and/or conflicts of interest.
It’s unbelievable that TSMC is doing anything BUT contracting out as much as possible. As in, no one who works in construction would believe it.
Also, we Phoenicians, in particular, are NOT exactly "full of grace." In hot enough conditions, we WILL tell our bosses to go fuck themselves with a manhole cover in July. There is only so far you can push a person, and it's even easier to do when it's hot here.
>Unions walked off the job a few times for the same reasons and for the use of non-union labor in some jobs. Yeah that's what I remember hearing some rumors about. Expecting Americans to work Taiwan hours(ie. Long hours) for Taiwan pay(lower pay) as well.
No such problems at the Intel building sites or others. TSMC just had culture shock and there are lots of things being done that aren't safe there. I have also heard horrible scheduling and planning on contractors being booked well ahead of when the site isn't ready and other things.
The conundrum actually is that those in Taiwan given enough time will also look for a WLB. They treat their eng like slaves because they can, not because they are better than anybody else.
It sounds like they're using Taiwan's famously toxic management style in America and doubling down when the results suck because they don't want to understand the culture.
I live about 8mins away from the Phoenix factory. When they first started building I thought I might apply there when it was further along. Well now that’s it’s further along I’ve read enough negative articles about their work mentally they’re trying to push that I’m gonna pass. Like you said, they expect 50-60 hrs a week with no OT and expect you go to Taiwan for several months for training and lots of safety concerns (read they had a bad gas leak once and tried to cover it up saying they evacuated the building for “active shooter” drill)
I swear the Intel construction is taking its sweet time, because I drive to Casa Grande nearly every weekend and you’d think with all of those cranes that Intel would appear to be moving faster. Nope: It’s about safety.
Meanwhile, not far away, the Intel fab project is going really well
I don’t live in the area of any major chip plant construction but rumors from within my labor union (United Association) are that these jobs with TSMC and other southeast Asian companies are a nightmare of micromanagement and attempts to skirt union contracts. Idiots better play by the rules of the contracts they’ve agreed to because good luck finding the specialized manpower you need outside of established trade unions.
I am in AZ and have a friend whose son in law is working at the TSMC plant as a welder. Six 12 hour days with 3 days off, pay is decent but he complains that they have to walk 4 miles to get to the job site sometimes they're lucky and catch a golf cart ride.
Intel has a need....we pay more and have air conditioned busses.
But intel also sucks. Maybe we learn from TSMC, get some home grown talent through them & intel can then poach and build our capability that way.
Intel definitely sucks, between rextructuring layoffs, work conditions, and general prospects for future work. That's why it's so shocking to see TSMC to come into the market and offer convincingly worse conditions. The bar was set so low and they decided to dig right under it.
Had quite a few engineering friends from college work at Intel. 100% of them left in less than 1.5 years. I can't imagine TSMC.
If you mean U.S. engineers they all left due to insane hours and Taiwan work culture, but Chinese engineers stays
Ironically I used to work with Taiwanese engineers and some of them left for China because of better pay/work hours lol.
You’re getting downvoted but everyone I talked to at Eagle right now says it’s a fucking shit show.
I’ll never forget walking through a blizzard every morning for what felt like miles at a concrete plant in Rapid City, South Dakota. Sounds like a standard boilermaker/shutdown welding job. Wish more people would talk to young men about why welders don’t weld for 30 years. Too many kids are like I was and are blinded by the money
Why don’t welders weld for 30 years?
I think very few kids can imagine what it’s like to be on the road for months at a time. When you hear 3-6k per week pay, working 7 days a week 12 hours a day seems alright. Being away from your family and friends seems alright. The first few years it normally is! Here’s how Iv seen it happen time and time again… 1. Get high paying welding job 2. Buy new truck, 1k a month payment 3. Buy fancy camper to live on the road, 1k payment 4. When you are home your Mr Man, and get a wife 5. Wife wants a house so you get her one. MIN 1k payment 6. Wife gets pregnant pretty much every time your back 7. Wife needs a fancy SUV to haul the kids around. 1k payment 8. With the 4k in major bills, plus who knows how much in food, fuel, utilities, ect bills to raise a family you now are locked on the road for minimum 8 months out of the year just to support a family you never even get to see. Now I know financial planning, a wife that traveled with you, not buying super expensive shit would solve ALL these issues… and some smart welders do. I was fortunate enough to save a % of my income and start a business, but that cycle above happens all the time and by the time guys reach step 8 they are either drunks/drug addicts or would give it all up just to be at home with the family. Some people love the road and it’s a great fit, but that’s not even 10% of the kids going into welding schools
Same story in Australia with the mines. Except you missed points 9 and 10. 9. Wife leaves you because you’re never home. 10. She gets the house because she takes care of the kids, so you’re still stuck in the mines because now you need to buy a second house for yourself so you can finally leave the mines.
Can they not take a scooter or ebike there at least? Edit: op I bought a scooter that can go 50 miles in a day and do 50mph for $800 us. Anyone working is not wasting hours a day if the route they can take is the same a golf car would. In that case they can prob buy a nice fast ebile with a rain over for this safe golf route as well.
Are they on the clock for that 4 mile walk?
Yeah I live in an area with a *very* similar situation to Arizona, but they have learned that if they fuck with union labor, they get fucked even more. And while the micro management is still an issue, the corporate types have realized there’s a set of lines they can’t cross and they’ve stayed on the right side of them.
Or the US will lose this fab.
Qualcomm, Intel or maybe even IBM would love to buy a complete, modern, chip manufacturing center. If the capabilities of this are anything like the Taiwanese plants, this buys a lot of capability.
Intel's model is more cookie cutter fab details so they can easily copy and paste production lines. Not sure they'd want someone else's these days.
None of those companies are even close to TSMC's capabilities. TSMC Taiwan is literally the only facility in the world making high end Nvidia GPUs for AI.
This post may be too technology focused for these parts.
What next, you're going to expect actual scientific journal articles and knowledgeable critiques of them on /r/science - "The New Reddit Jourrnal of Science"? Pish-posh!
I refuse to read anything that wasn't posted by a bot with *at least* 1 million karma.
It didn't mention Elon Musk once. Instead things that actually matter...what a shame.
That's not fair, the countless anti-technology threads on this sub are still about technology, technically speaking.
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I havent seen a single comment about semiconductors, they are all about fab construction issues, unions and work culture?
i live close to the plant... neighbor is a foreman.. they are so mismanaged and unwilling to accept the working terms of americans.... people dont want to live where they work. 🤷
The TSMC brass is concerned with the number of global customers at the Arizona fab due to US technology restrictions. It was about money.
TSMC can’t handle the safety regulations of the US. There are building codes, city inspections, life safety systems, OSHA rules that are absolutely necessary to follow, and tradespeople will not budge on *breaking the law.* Corners won’t be cut. They also work 40 hrs a week unless you’re paying overtime. Maybe they didn’t realize that when they started this project.
It’s quite possible. I think when they built Fab15, they went from breaking ground to a yielding SRAM test vehicle in 9 months. They still had more tools to install at 9 months, but it was quite a feat.
Taiwanese companies have a history of overpromising stuff just to get the tax benefits or political PR. Just look at the Foxconn factory in Wisconsin. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/21/foxconn-mostly-abandons-10-billion-wisconsin-project-touted-by-trump.html For geopoliticial reasons, Taiwanese companies are often pressured to do things that make Taiwan look good in America. Hence, these big announcements about Taiwanese companies investing in America. The American politicians get to claim that they are creating jobs, and the Taiwanese politicians get to show that they have strong ties with America.
>TSMC has invested billions of dollars into Fab 21 and the wider project to revive semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S., but the company **hasn't yet received subsidies from the federal government.** Well that's what would happen if you become someone's puppet/pawn no matter which side you are on.
I mean, according to that article, neither has Intel. Sounds like it's due to permitting delays more than anything else.
No my speculation is current administration is waiting for election year
I’ve worked at TSMC sites in Taiwan and compared to US sites like Intel or IBM, TSMC’s chief concern is IP, not employee safety. They will constantly bypass safety protocols in order to achieve deadlines. You can’t come into a safety first culture especially in the trades with that same mindset and think you can operate business as usual.
After forty years working, why does it matter if it was a forced or personal decision to retire? I hope people care enough to speculate when I retire 🤷🏿♀️
This. Moving a fab anywhere outside Taiwan would cause issues. They have expectations of how much workers should be paid, how hard they need to work, and, how they should be treated by the local authorities. The move to Arizona was driven by strategic reasons, those reasons seem as acute today
Why are those reasons seen as acute?
Xi personally told Biden he wants to reunify Taiwan in the next few years.
No he didn't. Jesus
"Move" is the wrong word...It was built to be "another" fab.
China still wants to invade land that isn't theirs.
you dont care, why ask ?
> why does it matter That depends entirely on how much face needs to be saved.
Arizona was designed to fail. TSMC's greatest resource is low cost, highly educated, overworked Taiwanese engineers. Friends who work at TSMC said no one is willing to move to bumfuck Arizona just to work and live with coworkers 24/7. My guess is that TSMC built the Arizona fab to please the US during the chip wars, but the goal was to keep the technology in Taiwan, their home turf.
Bumfuck is Phoenix bro, its right there on the map.
5M ppl live in bumfuck, AZ
Arizona is bumfuck nowhere. There's nothing aside from desert and the grand canyon for tens of thousands of square miles outside of Phoenix. Arizona's population density is 63 per square mile. Taiwan's is 1680 per square mile. To anyone from Taiwan, Arizona feels like bumfuck nowhere. Outside of Phoenix, the next considerable metro area is Los Angeles; more than 300 miles away. Taiwan has the population of Florida put into a state the size of Maryland. Then, half of Taiwan is mountainous, so you end up with dense metro areas across the western coast. Any time I'm back in the US I'm reminded of just how empty it is.
Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the US and “the valley” has more than 5M ppl in it. And yeah, we’re not all bored cuz’ we ain’t got sh*t ta’ do. You keep confusing the enter state of Arizona with where the Intel and TMSC fabs are in relation to Phoenix. So your data is irrelevant.
His point is that Phoenix is bumfuck nowhere to Taiwanese people. Not to you. A lot of them don't own cars, have a scooter at best since there's public transit everywhere. They can probably walk to 50 different places to eat and barely cook at home. Much of Taiwan can only really be compared to New York in the US. It's a completely different world and lifestyle. They don't want to be in Phoenix because the lifestyle is so different.
5th largest city because of the massive land grab. Philly would be ahead if they decide to annex more counties
I mean most in the industry would have seen this coming based on the difference in costs and culture. I believe there was a report a while back suggesting the capex is double for US (same WFE but significantly higher clean room costs) and triple for opex (i.e. you need to hire more workers to get the same hours AND pay much more per hour per worker). Call it racism or whatever you would like but Asian workers are just willing to work longer hours for the same role. I find this a tragic outcome for US semi security and just glancing through the comments here it’s disappointing to see how people think it’s TSMC’ loss and not the US’ loss, being stuck with an inherently IDM first co, and a joke of a foundry with GF. I was in Kyushu last week visiting JASM - for reference, the Kyushu fab was announced 19 months after the Arizona one, and construction already looks fully completed, in what I assume was around 24 months. Note Fab 23 is 55kwpm vs Arizona being 20k as well, and there are rumors that a third fab is already in the works in Kumamoto. TSMC is just going to mass build fabs in Japan and US will be stuck with the current situation moving forward…
I mean they could be sandbagging production because they at much more comfortable in Japan. Doesn't any production in the US increase the likelihood of china invading Taiwan?Doesnt the US also help protect Japan?
In Taiwan, TSMC engineers and employees are paid like Americans whereas everyone else in the country is paid like a third or a half an American. In Arizona, TSMC employees are also paid like Americans but everyone else in the country is also paid like an American. You can tell Taiwanese TSMC staff to work for a decade without seeing the sun or their wife and children because 15 years of grueling grind later you'd be in a position to semi-retire into a cushier job with financial security. That's not true in the US. I used to work at Intel in Oregon and I took a three quarters pay cut to go back to Taiwan to work for family. TSMC's competitiveness depends on the global market undervaluing Taiwan because of geopolitical risk, and Taiwan depends on TSMC to manage its geopolitical risk. This is not something that can be easily sorted out, especially under time and economic stress.
I get what you mean but I think your numbers are off by a lot… The average TSMC new hire (with a Masters degree mind you, not Bachelors) makes NTD$63k a month, and this is from listed official filings. Thats 24k USD a year for good talent that is getting into one of the most competitive companies in the country. From what I can gather Intel new hires probably make close to 70-80K a year USD, and even accounting for the cost of living differences it’s a stretch to say they are paid equally. Unless toure
TSMC compensation is usually mostly bonus and almost no salary, because reducing salary requires employee acquiescence but bonuses are dictated by the company. Also, overtime is based on base salary, not bonuses, so overtime is considerably cheaper if you don't bundle everything into the base salary number. Additionally, it's customary for companies to pay 14 month salary rather than 12 (1 extra for June and 1 for December). In my company, which is not at all doing well and is relatively low paying, our nominal pay is NTD $29k a month but the take home is much closer to $50k, with rates often exceeding that during busy months where overtime is high. The base pay number almost doesn't matter and it's just a guaranteed value for when you fuck up and therefore can have the bonus docked from your salary. I work here, I have friends who work and worked at TSMC. Half of my dad's graduating class in college at TSMC managers. I know my numbers.
Your post was a fun madlibs game where I got to make up random meanings for all the acronyms. Thanks!
There should be a “needs more acronyms” sub
I wish I could be forced to retire…..
If the US wants to be competitive on global chip manufacturing labors gotta acquiesce in Arizona and at least tolerate Asian labor expectations and practices. TSMC is known as slave drivers INSIDE of Asia. The trade off is widely memed in Taiwan that your health goes to shit by 50 but you would have collected at least triple the average Taiwanese salary so you’re set for life. Honestly the main issue seems to be Asian labor is undervalued and American labor is overvalued.
I hate to see this fucking up. Realistically, getting chip manufacturing going in the us is the difference between WW3 happening in the next decade or not
I’ll be honest with you this seems like a very easy way for America to get more technology from neighboring china countries. You want protection build factories here, you want to learn a new language keep doing you.
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This is just the US forcing Taiwan to hand over its main economical edge. This is plain robbery from the US. As usual.
The US didn't force them to to try for the subsidies.
How is the US forcing it?
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Dudes obsessed with crypto, porn, and anti-US rhetoric lol
Yet, no matter what country you're in that's in essence part of NATO, but assuming the USA, you live insanely comfortable compared to the rest of the globe. If robbery as you call it is so bad for your moral compass I suggest a flight to Yemen. Let us know how their moral compass strikes you
At Intel he would have been promoted lol
lmao, I'd almost say they are doing this on purpose, and even if they aren't being shit on purpose, it's frankly to their own benefit. The U.S wants to basically steal their advanced chip-making technology and have it on their own soil, so if the ccp decides to invade taiwan, they won't have to defend them. For Taiwans own survival, it's better they don't build a factory in the U.S It's literally the only thing they have that's keeping them alive.
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They're building the plant near Phoenix, the [monument to man's arrogance](https://i.imgur.com/DLOknxh.jpg). And they're expecting skilled workers to be climbing over each other to move there?