Recently, the crystal foundry Longtou TEK has made a large investment in the United States, especially its Arizona line, with the goal of strengthening the U.S. chip manufacturing industry. However, despite the large scale of these investments, their production capabilities are still far from meeting the huge chip demand in the United States.
According to wccftech's report, US Secretary of Finance Scott Bessent said that Taiwan Power's facilities in Arizona can currently only meet about 7% of the U.S. chip demand, which represents a significant gap between the U.S. local chip production and its large demand.
The report quoted from Scott Bessent that one of the main reasons why TECHNOLOG's chip production failed to develop rapidly is over-monitoring. He said NTU is currently dealing with local inspectors because of bureaucratic procedures of local supervisory agencies or setting up barriers during manufacturing, resulting in multiple plans being delayed. For example, when the factory of a chip line is quickly built, they may need to constantly adjust the plan. However, at this time, you will encounter someone local inspector saying that their pipelines should be here, not there, so that they do not meet the regulations and require construction permission to stop. This local law and bureaucratic process has caused a substantial delay and obstacle to the development of NTU in the United States.
The report said that in order to address these challenges, the Trump administration is working to remove obstacles caused by laws to promote the establishment of a more convenient supply chain in the United States to provide a more friendly environment for companies such as Taiwan Electric Power to expand production in the United States. Especially at the moment, the Taiwan power supply has focused its focus on the United States. In addition to expanding production capacity, it also represents the time when advanced processes, including the A16 process technology line is transferred to the preparations in the area. However, considering the large demand scale in the United States, it is expected that it will take several years to establish a strong supply chain in the United States.
In addition, in the current fierce competition, American customers still mainly rely on Taiwan Power rather than local Intel Foundry or Samsung, which has also led to some additional cost problems. For example, AMD executive director Su Zifeng once pointed out that it is 5% to 20% to purchase AI chips from Taiwan Power's U.S. factories, which highlights the complexity of establishing supply chains in the United States.
In summary, although TEU has made a lot of investment in the United States and plans to introduce advanced processes, its facilities in Arizona can currently meet only a small part of the U.S. chip demand due to existing capacity limitations and delays brought by excessive monitoring. To understand this problem, the U.S. government is working to simplify regulations to accelerate the establishment of local supply chains, but this will still be a time-consuming and costly process.