TSMC Pushes Back Arizona Fab Production to 2025

TSMC has recently announced a production delay in its long-awaited Arizona-based Fab 21. The delay has pushed back the company’s schedule for mass production to 2025. TSMC cites a lack of skilled workers as the primary reason behind this postponement.

TSMC Arizona Fab Delay

In order to supply TSMC-made chips to the US, the giant made a decision to construct Fab 21 in Arizona. The project was initiated around 2 years ago in April 2021 up until late July 2022. Last December, TSMC started to deploy equipment, however, the company has since then faced unforeseen circumstances.

Fab 21 was expected to be fully functional, producing 20,000 N5-based wafer starts per month sometime in 2024. However, as the number of skilled workers is insufficient, this date has been pushed back to 2025. All of this boils down to the fact that the local workforce employed was not experienced enough for this endeavor.

Chairman TSMC Responds to Fab 21 Delay

Chairman TSMC, Mark Liu states:

“While we are working on to improve the situation, including sending experienced technicians from Taiwan to train local skill workers for a short period of time, we expect the production schedule of N4 process technology to be pushed out to 2025”

Mark Liu

As such, to alleviate this situation, Tom’s Hardware reports that TSMC is employing 500 Taiwanese-based workers to install the necessary equipment. This is still a major delay that can cost TSMC and its partners a lot. Although, it may be possible to hand over some of the orders to TSMC’s fabs in Taiwan.

Do note that Fab 21 will manufacture the N4 process in 2025. While that is a huge delay, it may not cost TSMC as much since next-gen CPUs are GPUs will most likely resort to TSMC’s N3. Arrow Lake will use TSMC’s N3B process as suggested by leaks. Zen5 may opt for N3 along with NVIDIA’s Blackwell and AMD’s RDNA4 GPUs.

Source: Tom’s Hardware