Opinion | To Become a World-Class Chipmaker, the United States Might Need Help – The New York Times
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Opinion Writer
In President Biden’s vision for the U.S. economy, technological supremacy goes arm in arm with high-paying jobs for American workers. But what happens when those two objectives don’t line up perfectly? What has to give?
This question is playing out right now in Arizona, where Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is struggling to ramp up manufacturing capacity. It has pushed back the planned start of production by a year to 2025. Mark Liu, the chairman of TSMC, told securities analysts in July that one key problem is that “there is an insufficient amount of skilled workers” to install the sophisticated equipment.
Liu added that TSMC — the world’s biggest maker of advanced computer chips — was trying to open the bottleneck by “sending experienced technicians from Taiwan to train the local skilled workers for a short period of time.”
The lesson: The United States can become a world leader in making computer chips or it can rely entirely on American workers, but it can’t do both at the same time.
That’s not the message that Biden conveyed last year when he spoke at the groundbreaking for the TSMC factory, in Phoenix. Biden said: “The reason why business should be hiring union folks, if you don’t mind my saying, is simple: They’re the best in the world. They’re the single-greatest technicians in the world.”
Biden’s faith in the American worker may be well placed, but even the greatest technicians in the world are going to face a steep learning curve building something they’ve never built before, especially something as complex as a chip factory, which contains the most sophisticated machines ever built.
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