TSMC says first advanced U.S. chip fab ‘dang near back’ on schedule. Here’s an inside look

Published

4 months ago

December 13, 2024

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Atop a newly-completed, 3.5-million-square-foot building that stands on 1,100 acres in the Arizona desert north of Phoenix is a giant logo of a microchip wafer and the letters TSMC.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s first Arizona chip fabrication plant, or fab, is making history because it’s the most advanced chip fab on U.S. soil, and Apple has committed to being the site’s largest customer.

CNBC first visited the fab in 2021, not long after TSMC broke ground. TSMC initially announced the plant would cost $12 billion and pump out 5-nanometer chips by the end of 2024. Three years later, that price tag has soared to $20 billion and full production is delayed until 2025.

Instead, the fab is in pilot production, making sample wafers and sending them to customers for verification. TSMC has committed to building two more fabs on the site by the end of the decade, for a total investment of $65 billion.

The project is “dang near back on the original schedule,” TSMC Chariman Rick Cassidy told CNBC during an exclusive first look at the completed fab in November.

“When we came to the U.S., we knew we were going to go through a learning process,” Cassidy said. “Whether it was permitting, learning how to work with the trades, learning how to work with the unions, local labor laws. Lots of learnings that went on. Now we’ve overcome those.”

TSMC chairman Rick Cassidy shows CNBC’s Katie Tarasov around its newly completed fab on November 7, 2024, where it will make advanced chips on U.S. soil for the first time.

Andrew Evers

With the help of some 2,000 employees, the fab is set to make more advanced chips than originally planned. It will produce 4-nanometer chips, at a rate of 20,000 wafers per month, TSMC said.

Wafers cost upwards of $18,000, according to a Morgan Stanley report. They’ve continued to rise in price, taking TSMC’s stock value with it over the past couple years.

“We’ve seen TSMC be able to kind of name its price, and everyone’s going to pay it because right now it’s the dependability and the quality that is needed,” said Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group.

‘On par with our Taiwan compatriots’

The fab’s yields are anticipated to be “right on par with our Taiwanese compatriots,” Cassidy said. Still, some 92% of the world’s most advanced chips are currently made by TSMC’s Taiwan fabs, so the U.S. is far from self-reliant.

“It’s difficult or impossible for the U.S. or any country to be fully self-sufficient in everything that they need to build semiconductors,” said Stacy Rasgon of Bernstein Research. “That’s a pipe dream.”

Despite being the birthplace of microchips in the 1950s and remaining a top chip design hub, the U.S. now manufactures only 10% of the world’s chips and none of the most advanced ones. When supply chain chaos collided with booming demand for consumer electronics during the pandemic, the resulting chip shortage exposed the big risks of relying on outsiders for such a critical technology.

In the event of aggression between China and Taiwan, an earthquake or some other event that impacts Taiwan for a period of time, “the entire market, the entire world could suffer from lack of availability of leading edge nodes,” Newman said.

A deadly 7.4 magnitude earthquake in April briefly halted production in Taiwan and led to a $92 million loss for TSMC. The Arizona buildings are “well prepared” for earthquakes, Cassidy said.

TSMC’s first fab in Arizona, shown in November 2024, where it will make advanced chips on U.S. soil for the first time.

TSMC

Other fears surfaced when President-elect Donald Trump expressed opposition to the $52 billion CHIPS Act in October during his campaign. Weeks later, the U.S. Commerce Department finalized TSMC’s allotted $6.6 billion from the bipartisan bill.

“Repealing the CHIPS Act would make Americans less safe,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told CNBC in an interview, adding that she doesn’t think the incoming administration would repeal it.

“I just don’t think they’ll do that,” Raimondo said.

Talks with TSMC about bringing advanced chip production to the U.S. began in 2018, during Trump’s first term.

“I set up a phone call between the chairman of TSMC and the head of Apple,” said Wilbur Ross, who was commerce secretary at the time. “Apple became very strongly supportive of the idea of TSMC coming.”

Rose Castanares, a 26-year company veteran and now president of TSMC Arizona, was also involved with the early conversations. Customers “wanted supply resilience,” Castanares said.

Relying on chips from Asia has also complicated the U.S. drive for technological dominance. That’s why President Joe Biden hit the chip industry with a complex web of export controls meant to keep China from pulling ahead with advanced tech.

In October, some TSMC chips were spotted in Huawei devices, despite bans on selling to the Chinese company.

“This problem is as old as time,” Newman said. “There’s a lot of complex rerouting of goods to get gray market to different countries that have limited access to leading edge or the most advanced technology.”

TSMC Arizona president Rose Castanares with CNBC’s Katie Tarasov in the newly completed fab on November 7, 2024, where it will make advanced chips on U.S. soil for the first time.

Andrew Evers

Workers, water and power

Nearby in Chandler, Arizona, Intel is also building two huge fabs.

The U.S. company has a far different business model, designing and manufacturing its own chips, while TSMC only makes chips for others. The relationship between the two companies is solid, Cassidy said.

“We meet with [Intel] weekly and the feedback is we’re helping them increase their ranks,” Cassidy said. “We’re helping them train on the most advanced stuff, so I think they’re pretty happy with what we’re doing.”

Both companies have delayed the timelines for full production at their new Arizona fabs. But where TSMC has remained the uncontested leader in advanced chips, Intel has stumbled time and again.

The two will also be competing for a scarce resource in the U.S. chip industry: workers.

“When we finished the construction of this fab, it was really the first advanced manufacturing fab that had been built in the United States for at least 10 years. Semiconductors is a very, very tough technology,” TSMC’s Castanares said. “The experience is just not here in the United States.”

At the beginning of the project, TSMC sent some 600 engineers to train in Taiwan. Process integration engineer Jeff Patz spent 18 months there starting in 2021.

“The purpose was to go and actually make things, right? And learn how they’re made,” Patz said. “You have to have a kitchen to cook.”

TSMC has also brought experts over from Taiwan on 3-year temporary assignments. TSMC plans to hire at least 6,000 workers by the time all three fabs are completed.

“For engineers, we are actively recruiting at universities in Arizona and all across the U.S.,” Castanares said. Arizona State University “even has what they call a TSMC day.”

Water is another scarce resource needed in abundance.

With Taiwan recently facing its worst drought in nearly a century, TSMC is no stranger to recycling the massive amount of water it needs to make chips. TSMC will take 4.7 million gallons of water daily to run the first Arizona fab, but it will bring that demand down to 1 million gallons a day, in part by recycling some 65% of that, the company said.

It also takes a massive amount of power to make chips.

TSMC built solar on site, but it’s not nearly enough to cover the 2.85 gigawatt-hours per day needed to run the first fab. That’s equivalent to the power used by roughly 100,000 U.S. homes. TSMC said it’s purchasing renewable energy credits to offset that. But amid the AI-fueled data center boom, Arizona’s largest utility warned that it could run out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade.

That’s also when TSMC plans to start production at its third Arizona fab, which Cassidy said is “probably going to be 2 nanometer and more advanced.”

TSMC is also broadening its global footprint. It opened its first fab in Japan in February and broke ground on an $11 billion fab in Germany in August.

Within the U.S., Cassidy said TSMC is also likely to keep expanding.

“There’s room for lots of fabs,” Cassidy said.

Watch the full video for never-before-seen footage inside TSMC’s Arizona fab: https://cnbc.com/video/2024/12/12/inside-tsmcs-new-chip-fab-where-apple-will-make-chips-in-the-us

Technology

USDC stablecoin issuer Circle files for IPO as public markets open to crypto

Published

5 hours ago

April 1, 2025

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USDC stablecoin issuer Circle files for IPO as public markets open to crypto

Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder and CEO, Circle

David A. Grogan | CNBC

Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, has filed for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The S1 lays the groundwork for Circle’s long-anticipated entry into the public markets.

While the filing does not yet disclose the number of shares or a price range, sources told Fortune that Circle plans to move forward with a public filing in late April and is targeting a market debut as early as June.

JPMorgan Chase and Citi are reportedly serving as lead underwriters, and the company is seeking a valuation between $4 billion and $5 billion, according to Fortune.

This marks Circle’s second attempt at going public. A prior SPAC merger with Concord Acquisition Corp collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. Since then, Circle has made strategic moves to position itself closer to the heart of global finance — including the announcement last year that it would relocate its headquarters from Boston to One World Trade Center in New York City.

Hims & Hers shares rise as company adds new weight-loss medications to platform

Published

7 hours ago

April 1, 2025

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Hims & Hers shares rise as company adds new weight-loss medications to platform

The Hims app arranged on a smartphone in New York on Feb. 12, 2025.

Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Hims & Hers Health shares closed up 5% on Tuesday after the company announced patients can access Eli Lilly‘s weight loss medication Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro, as well as the generic injection liraglutide, through its platform.

Zepbound, Mounjaro and liraglutide are part of the class of weight loss medications called GLP-1s, which have exploded in popularity in recent years. Hims & Hers launched a weight loss program in late 2023, but its GLP-1 offerings have evolved as the company has contended with a volatile supply and regulatory environment.

Lilly’s weekly injections Zepbound and Mounjaro will cost patients $1,899 a month, according to the Hims & Hers website. The generic liraglutide will cost $299 a month, but it requires a daily injection and can be less effective than other GLP-1 medications.

“As we look ahead, we plan to continue to expand our weight loss offering to deliver an even more holistic, personalized experience,” Dr. Craig Primack, senior vice president of weight loss at Hims & Hers, wrote in a blog post.

A Lilly spokesperson said in a statement that the company has “no affiliation” with Hims & Hers and noted that Zepbound is available at lower costs for people who are insured for the product or for those who buy directly from the company.

In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s GLP-1 weight loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The offering was immensely popular and helped generate more than $225 million in revenue for the company in 2024.

But compounded drugs can traditionally only be mass produced when the branded medications treatments are in shortage. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in February that the shortage of semaglutide injections products had been resolved.

That meant Hims & Hers had to largely stop offering the compounded medications, though some consumers may still be able to access personalized doses if it’s clinically applicable.

During the company’s quarterly call with investors in February, Hims & Hers said its weight loss offerings will primarily consist of its oral medications and liraglutide. The company said it expects its weight loss offerings to generate at least $725 million in annual revenue, excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide.

But the company is still lobbying for compounded medications. A pop up on Hims & Hers’ website, which was viewed by CNBC, encourages users to “use your voice” and urge Congress and the FDA to preserve access to compounded treatments.

With Tuesday’s rally, Hims and Hers shares are up about 27% in 2025 after soaring 172% last year.

WATCH: Hims & Hers shares tumble over concerns around weight-loss business

Technology

Meta’s head of AI research announces departure

Published

8 hours ago

April 1, 2025

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Meta's head of AI research announces departure

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds a smartphone as he makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Meta’s head of artificial intelligence research announced Tuesday that she will be leaving the company.

Joelle Pineau, the company’s vice president of AI research, announced her departure in a LinkedIn post, saying her last day at the social media company will be May 30.

Her departure comes at a challenging time for Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a top priority, investing billions of dollars in an effort to become the market leader ahead of rivals like OpenAI and Google.

Zuckerberg has said that it is his goal for Meta to build an AI assistant with more than 1 billion users and artificial general intelligence, which is a term used to describe computers that can think and take actions comparable to humans.

“As the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work,” Pineau wrote. “I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world, and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions of people.”

Vice President of AI Research and Head of FAIR at Meta Joelle Pineau attends a technology demonstration at the META research laboratory in Paris on February 7, 2025.

Stephane De Sakutin | AFP | Getty Images

Pineau was one of Meta’s top AI researchers and led the company’s fundamental AI research unit, or FAIR, since 2023. There, she oversaw the company’s cutting-edge computer science-related studies, some of which are eventually incorporated into the company’s core apps.

She joined the company in 2017 to lead Meta’s Montreal AI research lab. Pineau is also a computer science professor at McGill University, where she is a co-director of its reasoning and learning lab.

Some of the projects Pineau helped oversee include Meta’s open-source Llama family of AI models and other technologies like the PyTorch software for AI developers.

Pineau’s departure announcement comes a few weeks ahead of Meta’s LlamaCon AI conference on April 29. There, the company is expected to detail its latest version of Llama. Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, to whom Pineau reported to, said in March that Llama 4 will help power AI agents, the latest craze in generative AI. The company is also expected to announce a standalone app for its Meta AI chatbot, CNBC reported in February.

“We thank Joelle for her leadership of FAIR,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “She’s been an important voice for Open Source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them.”

Pineau did not reveal her next role but said she “will be taking some time to observe and to reflect, before jumping into a new adventure.”

WATCH: Meta awaits antitrust fine from EU