$6.6 billion TSMC deal in Arizona the latest in the CHIPS Act’s rollout
$6.6 billion TSMC deal in Arizona the latest in the CHIPS Act’s rollout
The Biden administration has announced another major deal out of the CHIPS program: a preliminary agreement for up to $6.6 billion in grants, plus up to $5 billion in loans, for the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — commonly known as TSMC.
A few weeks ago, Intel secured a similar deal for up to $8.5 billion in funding. The CHIPS and Science Act was a 2022 law designed to restart the semiconductor industry in the U.S.
The new TSMC funding, combined with money the company is pledging to spend on expanding facilities in Arizona, represents a $65 billion investment altogether, per Mike Schmidt, director of the CHIPS program office at the Department of Commerce.
“In terms of the development of a new asset from the ground up, this is the largest foreign direct investment in the history of the country,” he said.
Schmidt stepped into his role shortly after the CHIPS Act became law and says it’s basically been nonstop since then to get these funds out the door. “It’s been a startup in government,” he said.
But the Commerce Department had to build a team from the ground up to figure out how to spend the almost $40 billion in manufacturing incentives, plus other elements of the program.
“President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act just about 20 months ago, which in government time is yesterday. And they’ve hired 200 people,” said Vivek Chilukuri, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “These people who are like material engineers and software designers, and you need the nerds also, frankly, along with the business people, and then you need the national security people on top of that.”
But now that the funding is being distributed, the Commerce Department says the U.S. is on track to produce about 20% of the world’s most advanced chips by 2030. That’s something that would be impossible without the CHIPS funding, according to Zach Butterworth, who formerly worked as Biden’s White House director of private sector engagement.
“It’s an industry we lost in the ’90s,” he said. “And without government intervention, it would not be coming back at this scale.”
It’s also not a bad election year message for Biden either.
“It certainly has not escaped my notice that this money is going to be used for a plant in an important swing states,” noted Sarah Bauerle Danzman, who teaches political science at Indiana University, Bloomington. “Not just with CHIPS but also with some of the investments being made kind of concurrent to the IRA.”
The IRA, or the Inflation Reduction Act. “There seems to be an interest in citing locations in swing states, for a variety of reasons,” she said.
And that, Danzman added, is giving businesses in all sorts of industries even more incentive to make sure they are on good terms with policymakers in D.C.
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