TSMC Chips Deal Promotes the Logic of Biden's Industrial Policy
It rebuts the idea that a lack of skilled U.S. workers is an impediment to manufacturing growth.
BY DAVID DAYEN APRIL 10, 2024
For months, executives at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) insisted that skilled American workers weren’t available to build their chip factories, that this shortage was delaying construction of their first U.S. fabrication plant in Arizona, and that this exposed the key weakness of the Biden administration’s industrial-policy agenda, too concerned with creating win-win scenarios and not focused enough on removing barriers to building. The usual suspects in the media gleefully parroted TSMC’s claims as proof of their belief system.
Within a few days, this entire edifice fell down.
TSMC abruptly announced that pilot production would actually begin this month, and chips would start rolling out in Arizona by the end of the year, several months ahead of schedule. The timeline, former Prospect scribe Lee Harris quipped, was being “preponed.” A few days later, TSMC and the Commerce Department announced a deal under the CHIPS Act that would deliver $6.6 billion in grants to the manufacturer and another $5 billion in loans, not only to stand up the two Phoenix plants already promised, but to build a third that will make two-nanometer chips, some of the most technologically advanced in the world.
https://prospect.org/economy/2024-04-10-tsmc-chips-deal-biden-industrial-policy/
