TSMC’s $265B US fab push still lacks a schedule

TSMC says it will raise its US manufacturing commitment to 12 facilities and $265 billion in investment, boosted by another $100 billion pledge announced this week. But for now, the company’s Arizona expansion remains more ambition than timetable.

The announcement came as the Taiwanese foundry posted another AI-fueled quarter, with revenue topping $40.2 billion and profit above $22 billion in Q2. Even so, building advanced chip plants is slow, expensive work, and recent semiconductor history is full of projects that slipped, shrank, or never arrived.

Intel offers a clear example. The company committed $30 billion for two new Arizona fabs, €30 billion for a megafab in Magdeburg, Germany, $25 billion for a fab in Israel, and $20 billion for a manufacturing plant in Ohio. So far, only one Arizona plant has been completed. The German site has been canceled, the Israel project delayed indefinitely, and the Ohio expansion pushed to at least 2030.

TSMC’s own track record in Arizona shows how long these projects take. Since first announcing a leading-edge US fab during Trump’s last administration, the company has built two fab sites and broken ground on a third, spending $65 billion. The first started operating in late 2024, with Apple and Nvidia named as flagship customers early last year. The second, set to produce chips on TSMC’s 3 nm process, is not expected to come online until the second half of next year. The third Arizona fab, announced in spring 2024, is not expected to begin volume production until at least the end of the decade, according to TSMC’s own documents.

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That makes the latest promise look especially tentative. In March 2025, standing with President Donald Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, TSMC CEO CC Wei laid out another $100 billion US expansion plan covering:

• three new fabs
• two new advanced packaging facilities
• one R&D center

None of those facilities has been completed, and the company only acquired the additional 900 acres for that expansion earlier this year.

On the company’s Q2 earnings call, Wei said the schedule for the newly announced four fab sites will depend on market conditions.

“If you ask me to give you a firm schedule, no, we don’t have it today, but we do have a plan.”

That caveat matters. A new fab typically takes four to five years to build and ramp, meaning TSMC’s two $100 billion US pledges could take decades to fully materialize. And money is only part of the problem. Each plant needs thousands of specialized workers, while a McKinsey and SEMI analysis projects a shortage of 157,000 skilled chip workers by the time TSMC’s third fab is finished.