During a press conference at the White House Monday, US President Donald Trump and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest chip manufacturer, announced that TSMC will spend $100 billion in the US in coming years to build multiple chip factories, on top of $65 billion already committed to US investment.
TSMC, in a press release, billed the combined $165 billion investment as the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.”
The spending is expected to focus on “advanced technologies,” which could be taken to include chips for artificial intelligence, which has largely been done by TSMC in its Taiwan factories until now. TSMC serves just about every chip maker in the world, including producing the most powerful chips from Nvidia for AI, the Hopper and Blackwell GPU chips.
Also: Intel touts new Xeon chip’s AI power in bid to fend off AMD, ARM advances
Trump said the move means “The most powerful AI chips in the world will be made right here in America,” according to an account by Bloomberg.
“Through this expansion, TSMC expects to create hundreds of billions of dollars in semiconductor value for AI and other cutting-edge applications,” said the company. “TSMC’s expanded investment is expected to support 40,000 construction jobs over the next four years and create tens of thousands of high-paying, high-tech jobs in advanced chip manufacturing and R&D,” it said.
TSMC already has a factory in Phoenix, Arizona, that began producing chips last year and which employs more than 3,000 people on 1,100 acres of land. The company plans to add three more US factories and an R&D center, said TSMC.
TSMC’s announcement comes as chip-maker Intel, which has struggled for years with declining sales and lost market share, has been seeking customers for its own factories in the US.
A Reuters report Monday said that two of the world’s biggest AI chip makers, Nvidia and Broadcom, both competitors to Intel, are nevertheless testing out Intel’s factories to manufacture their chips, citing two unnamed sources.
Also: Best of MWC 2025: The 7 most impressive products you don’t want to miss
The tests, the article states, suggest the companies are “moving closer to determining whether they will commit hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of manufacturing contracts to Intel.” Another Intel rival, Advanced Micro Devices, is also said to be considering using Intel’s factories, though it’s unclear if the company has conducted tests.
Intel’s deals could be impacted, however, by continued delays in the company’s manufacturing process, which has lagged TSMC’s for years. The Reuters report notes that the so-called 18A chip manufacturing method, Intel’s most cutting-edge, recently suffered yet another six-month delay, citing two unnamed sources and documents.
The 18A process is “taking longer than anticipated,” write Reuters’s Max Cherney and Fanny Potkin. As a result, “Without the qualified fundamental building blocks of intellectual property that small and mid-size chip designers rely on, a swath of potential customers would be unable to produce chips on 18A until at least mid-2026,” they write.
Amidst Intel’s struggles, TSMC has had discussions with the Trump administration about absorbing some of Intel’s US factories, multiple news sources have reported. Broadcom has reportedly also considered purchasing some of Intel’s chip-design assets.
