18,000 Reasons It’s So Hard to Build a Chip Factory in America
The transformation of Phoenix into a semiconductor hub by Taiwan’s TSMC illustrates the difficulties of large-scale projects in the United States.
By Peter S. Goodman
Photographs and Video by Loren Elliott
Peter Goodman, who has written about trade for 25 years, including more than a decade in Asia, reported from Phoenix, New York and Washington.
Dec. 4, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
The computer chip factories rising from an empty expanse of the Sonoran Desert test the concept of immensity. The complex is under construction across 1,149 acres, an area larger than New York’s Central Park. It represents an investment of $165 billion, making it one of the most expensive undertakings on earth.
Here on the northern edges of Phoenix stands a display of the American reach for industrial self-sufficiency. The factories are engineered to make advanced computer chips — the brains of modern manufacturing. Those chips will power data centers that deliver artificial intelligence.
American political leaders celebrate the presence of the plants as insurance against geopolitical turmoil and disasters like pandemics. Whatever happens, the nation will have its own supply of computer chips.
But the company at the center of this enterprise — one cast as vital to national security — is not American. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, the global leader in the industry, has marshaled the investment, the people and the know-how to turn these plans into reality.
Scores of other companies, some of them American but many from East Asia, have set up their own local factories to supply TSMC with everything it needs, from chemicals and components to construction and engineering services. Collectively, they have invested an additional $40 billion in the local economy.
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