TSMC will officially begin installing tools at its fab near Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday. publication plans to build another phase of its Arizona plant. This will almost quadruple the investment in the site and significantly increase the production capacity of the fab.
The second fab at TSMC’s Arizona site (or, by some accounts, the second phase of Fab 21) is expected to go live in 2026. N3, N3E, N3P, N3S, and N3X. The company also announced Tuesday that it will increase Camp’s production capacity to 600,000 wafer starts per year. It will begin operations in 2026 and will be one of the most advanced fabs outside of Taiwan.
TSMC’s first fab, located in Arizona, will produce chips using the company’s N5 family of technologies (N5, N5P, N4, N4P, and N4X processes) when it comes online in 2024. Production capacity is approximately 20,000 wafer starts per month, or 240,000. Wafers are launched annually and require approximately $12 billion in investment to build and equip.
The new N3-ready production facility will almost quadruple the investment TSMC makes in Arizona. The chipmaker expects total investment in the state to be about $40 billion when both fabs are built and equipped with production tools, making Camp the most expensive fab ever built. become one of
Note that TSMC’s N3 production node family will be very advanced even in 2026, but it will be 3-4 years after TSMC goes live in Taiwan. While they help meet the needs of the company’s clients, Foundry’s then-main production technology was the N2 (2nm class) with gate-all-round transistors used to manufacture state-of-the-art chips in Taiwan. TSMC’s Crème de la Crème node will remain in Taiwan, but the foundry will also have advanced manufacturing capabilities in the United States.
The company may eventually build additional modules for Fab 21, but for now these expansions are years away and it’s unclear how much capacity TSMC’s clients will need beyond 2025. The company isn’t talking about them. The foundry market will look very different in a few years, as Samsung will have state-of-the-art production capacity for US customers from 2025 to 2026.
“TSMC Arizona is committed to being the greenest semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States, producing the nation’s most advanced semiconductor process technologies and developing the next generation of high-performance, low-power computing products,” said TSMC Arizona Chairman. We will be able to use it for years to come.” Mark Liu.
