Yes, but from what I understand, it won't be the most advanced plant making the smallest feature sizes, so it's not like Apple is going to be utilizing that plant (maybe for ancillary chips, but not main processor). Understandably, TSMC keeps a tight reign on their top-tier production methods, which is their reason for being #1.

It's also 3 years away from opening in AZ (2024). Then they have to fine tune the equipment and processes over x runs. New plants tend to have low yields until those processes are smoothed out and perfected. You don't just set up a plant and start churning out chips with 98% success rate at 5nm once the factory is built. It probably takes 5-6 years from construction start to churning out quality chips in numbers that are actually profitable.

And the machines they’re going to be running take years to build. And they have to be built custom for each site. Not just for each site, but also each location within the site. Just moving a machine a couple of feet can cause massive delays as they have to effectively rebuild the machine for the new location.

ASML has engineers who go out and spend months or a year or more, just taking various measurements of the location inside the building at the site where the machine will be operating. Then those engineers go back to Eindhoven to oversee the building of that machine from the ground up, and run through proving cycles. Then the whole thing has to be taken apart and shipped and then rebuilt at the site. And then there are months afterwards as the team does further work and testing before they can finally use that machine for production purposes.

The Saturn V rocket was much easier to build and move. Nothing the rocket industry has can compare to the difficulty of building and moving these machines.

Disclaimer: I worked as a consultant at ASML for several months, helping them to rebuild their Unix infrastructure systems that they used to support the engineers who did all that design and build work.

Seems like long term the human race is going to lose this ability if something serious is not done to reduce the complexity of building these things. This pandemic has shown that everything is super fragile and with Climate Change on the horizon I cannot believe they decided to build this damn thing in Arizona of all places. Maybe the collapse people were right and we should be working on CollapseOS

[1]: https://collapseos.org/

What makes Arizona a bad place vs other places it might go to? No place will be spared the effects of climate change. Water use is a concern, but it sounds like they plan to recycle nearly all of it.

Arizona is already nearing the edge for what constitutes livable. If something isn't done to mitigate Climate Change soon, I can start to see land being abandoned. This is such a critical factory and a disruption will have massive ramifications. They probably built it there due to tax breaks that may not matter anymore in the future if climate change wrecks havoc.

They are indeed, in Arizona. First they are going to have employees train on-site in Taiwan (will get housing for themselves and their families for duration).

This makes it easier for the US to spin up more, since we gain more trained workers who understand these processes.

I thought similarly - this is true if we can have lossless knowledge transfer. I imagine we would have to put what is learned into practice before translating it into distributed knowledge for a US fab workforce.

The US does produce ~10% of the global chip supply today, and much of the equipment used in the world's factories, and a very significant portion of the software needed, is made in the U.S.A. This is an economic issue. Not a knowledge gap.

> it easier for the US to spin up more, since we gain more trained workers who understand these processes.

Given that they will return