Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced on Thursday that it planned to spend an additional $100 billion on its operations in the United States.
The giant chip maker, which produces chips designed by Nvidia, Apple and others, had previously pledged to invest $165 billion to expand its operations near Phoenix. That brings the company’s total commitment to its fast-growing footprint in Arizona to $265 billion.
The announcement, made during TSMC’s quarterly earnings presentation, is partly in response to increasing political pressure on foreign semiconductor companies to locate factories in the United States. TSMC broke ground on its first factory in Arizona in 2021, during the Biden administration.
But the Trump administration has threatened trading partners with high tariffs if they don’t set up manufacturing operations in the United States to bring money and jobs. Samsung Electronics has two chip manufacturing sites in Texas, while SK Hynix, another big South Korean memory chip maker, is building a facility in Indiana.
The new $100 billion commitment from TSMC would include building four new chip fabricating factories, known as fabs, for the company’s contract manufacturing business. That would be in addition to six semiconductor fabs, two advanced chip packaging facilities and a research and development center in Arizona. The factories announced on Thursday would likely be located on a new chip-making campus on 900 acres of land that the company purchased earlier this year.
The investment would “bring advanced semiconductor manufacturing back to America,” Howard Lutnick, the U.S. Commerce Secretary, said in a statement released after TSMC’s announcement.
C.C. Wei, TSMC’s chief executive, said that the pace of the build-out would depend on “the market situation.”
When asked about the construction schedule on the earnings call, Mr. Wei said: “We don’t have it today, but we do have a plan. And we will try to speed it up as much as possible.”
Mr. Wei emphasized that TSMC was also expanding in Taiwan and Japan.
The factory building in America and elsewhere, Mr. Wei said, was mainly to address the soaring chip demand from the “A.I. megatrend,” as he put it.
The robust demand was reflected in the company’s second-quarter performance. Its revenue grew to the equivalent of $40.2 billion, 36 percent higher than a year earlier. Profit jumped nearly 80 percent in the quarter, to just over $22 billion.
TSMC expects strong revenue and profit growth this year and next. But during the call, TSMC’s executives repeatedly said their strategy was designed to meet long-term demand and to advance its leading-edge chip-making technology. The company plans capital spending to reach up to $64 billion this year.
Xinyun Wu contributed reporting from Taipei.
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