Driven by AI Boom, TSMC To Invest $2.9 Billion in Advanced Chip Plant in Taiwan (reuters.com) 29
Driven by a surge in demand for artificial intelligence, Taiwanese chip maker TSMC plans to invest nearly T$90 billion ($2.87 billion) in an advanced packaging facility in northern Taiwan, the company said on Tuesday. From a report: "To meet market needs, TSMC is planning to establish an advanced packaging fab in the Tongluo Science Park," the company said in a statement. CEO C.C. Wei said last week that TSMC is unable to fulfil customer demand driven by the AI boom and plans to roughly double its capacity for advanced packaging - which involves placing multiple chips into a single device, lowering the added cost of more powerful computing. For advanced packaging, especially TSMC's chip on wafer on substrate (CoWoS), capacity is "very tight," Wei said after the company reported a 23% fall in second-quarter profit. "We are increasing our capacity as quickly as possible. We expect this tightening will be released next year, probably towards the end of next year."
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Taiwan will not go down easily. China would take a giant whipping both physically and sanction-wise. It's like risking losing at least one leg to gain a third arm. Xi may be aggressive, but he's not suicidal or a religious nut.
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T will F up many parts of the mainland also.
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When China invades Taiwan, all of these plants are rubble. Even if Taiwan doesn't have their own plans to scuttle these plants, foreign allies like the US wouldn't allow them to fall into China's hands as a result of an invasion.
When China invades Taiwan, 60% of worldwide chip manufacturing and 90% of the most advanced chip manufacturing gets destroyed along with the country of Taiwan. TSMC undeniably has plans to rebuild its capacity based on the IP it will still own, and has already started the process of
All conditioned on one fact (Score:1)
You believe they ended their nuclear program when they said they did.
I don't.
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Another consideration is the impact on militaries if TSMC is destroyed. Where are the chips for US military weapons and systems currently manufactured? Given that Intel's US fabs are still behind, the US military either has to rely on old processes or on TSMC and Samsung. Although Taiwan's security situation is much more precarious than South Korea's, both are targets of adversaries that are highly armed and have long-standing grudges.
Of course, the other question is where the electronics boards for West
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The US military isn't necessarily on the bleeding edge. In fact GlobalFoundries may still be supplying chips to them. Intel is probably on the list as well.
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Yeah. Russia sure discovered that for themselves.
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Note that this is a packaging facility and not an actual fab. TSMC has (or recently had) an overcapacity problem wrt fabs.
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It's a good thing that someone is paying attention.
I've seen movie before (Score:2)
The usual pattern is that by the time a plant is finished, the market or fad tanks, and the plant has to scramble to change its spots for the Next Big Thing.
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Transistors etched in silicon have been around for a while. I think they'll probably be popular for a little while yet.
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But chips are often tuned for different purposes.
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TSMC doesn't tune chips. They take your design and print it on silicon.
The people who *are* "tuning" chips are making GPUs. Those have also been pretty popular for a while now.
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Are you saying TSMC can switch from making CPU's to GPU's to AI chips etc. almost on a dime just by downloading CAD plans?
I thought each use type had different hardware characteristics, if you want them optimized. Otherwise, sounds too easy. Almost nothing at that scale is template swappable.
It's almost like claiming a battleship can be a competitive cruise ship just by changing the furniture and wall paint.
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TSMC can make CPUs or GPUs by swapping in a new mask with a new design. They're concerned with etching really small patterns on silicon. Their fabs are specialized for the size of those patterns, the size of the wafer they put them on, the material they're etched into, and a few other things like how many layers they can do.
When you send a new design to TSMC they don't build a fab just for you. It does require that a mask be made, which is expensive. There's can also be optimization of your particular desig
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Also "an AI chip" is almost always a GPU. In the cases where it's not exactly a GPU, like Tesla's thing or Google's TPU, it's pretty much a GPU rearranged a little bit with maybe a few special functions. They're all CPUs specialized for doing matrix multiplication really fast.
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No, I don't think you have. This is a packaging facility, not a fab. The process you're describing has more-or-less happened recently for TSMC since demand for wafers has declined over the last 12-18 months, giving TSMC a bit of overcapacity.
What TSMC doesn't have enough of right now are packaging facilities to implement their latest-and-greatest chip stacking packaging and testing technologies (CoWoS, for example).
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Re: I have an alternative suggestion (Score:3)
Re: I have an alternative suggestion (Score:2)
Ok so that's surprising. (Score:1)
So why on earth would TSMC not diversify and build a factory OUTSIDE of a country which China clearly wants to 'take back' some time soon?
Seriously, it's folly to even consider building more in Taiwan right now. Not much you can do about the amazing facilities there now but at least have a secondary plant not in Taiwan.
Surprised.