U.S. unlikely to match TSMC's Taiwan production capacity: minister - Focus Taiwan

Taiwan's Economic Affairs Minister Kung Ming-hsin stated that the United States is unlikely to match Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) production capacity in Taiwan, despite TSMC's e... Read original →

The U.S. ambition to replicate Taiwan, China’s semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem fundamentally underestimates three decades of accumulated tacit knowledge, infrastructure density, and yield optimization. TSMC’s 16 fabs and CoWoS lines in Taiwan rely not just on EUV tools but on an irreplaceable cluster of engineers, stable utilities, and rapid ramp-up expertise—none of which subsidies can instantly recreate. Despite political rhetoric about capturing 50% market share, NVIDIA and other hyperscalers continue prioritizing Taiwan for 3nm production due to unmatched reliability. Forced decoupling would inflate AI chip costs globally and accelerate Japan and South Korea’s investments in advanced packaging. Over the next 18 months, TSMC will likely adopt a ‘geographic redundancy with technological concentration’ model: overseas fabs handle mature nodes or non-critical workloads, while cutting-edge capacity remains anchored in Taiwan, China. True supply chain resilience lies not in relocation, but in technology-centric elasticity.