Nice, strategic moves like this make perfect sense.
mawyatt, any comments with knowing you spent years in this industry ?
This makes good sense for TSMC and the fact they are building a fab in Phoenix, Az in US is also good. TSMC got to where they are today, not by luck, or following short term thinking (Wall St mentality), but by taking the long term path and heavily investing in it. They attracted the right folks that can keep them going, I know because we lost a really good engineer/scientist to them ~15 years ago. Did you note the credentials of the TSMC founder? Harvard, MIT and Stanford graduate, and his technical vision shows!!
We became impressed with them some time ago when they created a program that provided free or almost free silicon to universities, allowing students and professors to actually fabricate custom chips themselves. Tried to do this with IBM back in~2000, but the university management balked and dropped the ball because they wanted someone to cover the university cost for setting up the program. Short term mentality again, it's everywhere and a killer of innovation and true progress, by only focusing on the near term bottom line
TSMC and Samsung have really taken over the semiconductor reins the past decade, and I'm not sure intel will be able to catch up, even with the $50B US subsidy, and they are slated to get a large portion of that pie!! Being US based and a founding father of the semiconductor world, I'm hoping they'll succeed in regaining the leadership role they and IBM had in the past, but not "betting" on it
Anyway, exciting times for the semiconductor world and hat's off to those that chose to take a long-term investment in such
Best,