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TSMC reportedly plans to build 12 fabs, four packaging facilities in Arizona — plan purportedly part of Taiwan's agreed $500 million investment in the US
TSMC is reportedly mulling another round of expansion in the U.S., which will expand its capacity in Arizona to 12 fabs, four advanced packaging facilities, and at least one R&D center, if the recent rumors published by DigiTimes are to be believed. The said round of TSMC's expansion in America will work as a part of the intergovernmental deal between the U.S. and Taiwanese governments under which Taiwanese entities are to invest $500 billion in various American high-tech sectors.
Rumors about TSMC's plans to significantly expand its site near Phoenix, Arizona, have been floating around for some time, but the company has never confirmed them. Back in early March, it was reported that TSMC planned to expand its presence in Arizona to 10 advanced fabs, but DigiTimes now claims that the company is looking forward to building another Gigafab complex adjacent to Fab 21, bringing the number of fabs to 12 and increasing the number of advanced packaging facilities to four. For now, this should be considered a rumor because some numbers do not add up.
TSMC recently acquired approximately 900 acres of land adjacent to its existing 1,100-acre campus, bringing the total area of the site to 2,000 acres, which is comparable to a small town, according to market rumors. The acquisition, along with industry chatter about plans to increase investments in Arizona by another $100 billion, certainly supports the possibility of a major expansion of the Fab 21 and possibly another site in the region. TSMC's existing plan includes building six Fab 21 modules, two advanced packaging facilities, and one R&D facility, up from three Fab 21 modules planned initially.
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Unofficial information that TSMC needed to acquire land to build additional Fab 21 phases, two advanced packaging facilities, and an R&D center emerged last fall, so the buyout of an additional 900 acres points to sticking to the existing expansion plan introduced in March 2026.
Furthermore, doubling the number of fab modules in the U.S. from 6 to 12 over the next 5 to 10 years will cost considerably more than $100 billion, as a modern leading-edge 2nm-class logic fab module with a roughly 20,000-wafer starts per month capacity costs roughly $25 billion to $35 billion. Building six or more advanced fab modules (that will probably be capable of 1.4nm or more advanced technologies) will cost considerably more than $100 billion.
While we certainly have to keep in mind that there is no smoke without fire, for now, all the rumors about TSMC's expansions in the U.S. should be taken as rumors. In fact, even if the company has plans to expand its capacity in America due to strategic reasons, it does not look like the company has finalized any plans, which is why all the information that surfaces cannot be accurate.
Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
This is good news. Upcoming tech products are going to need more. More transistors, more compute, more memory, more TEEs, more graphics, more more! We need the production centers supporting future tech to be geographically diverse too to better withstand both natural and political disasters.
