AMD promises to be one of the first clients to use TSMC’s new Arizona chip fab.
In yesterday‘s ‘Goldman Sachs 2023 Communacopia and Technology Conference’ AMD’s chief executive officer Lisa Su spoke a few choice words about the new Arizona chip fabrication facility for the Taiwan giant TSMC; “When you think about the geopolitical situation, geographic diversity is important to us”, she continued “So the Arizona factory is very important to us, we are going to be one of the early users, we are putting our first tape-outs in shortly with the idea of being a significant user of Arizona. I think we will continue to look at geographic diversity as an important piece of it”
The new chip fab in Arizona is expected to be producing chips by February of 2025, it will be the first major chip factory in the western world, much less the US. A by-product of the Biden administration’s ‘Chips and Science Act’ which aims to tempt global technology companies to set up shop in the US (rather than rivals like China) with lucrative business loans and tax credits. Proponents for this move to bring chip manufacturing to the western world site security as the primary motivator for the move, arguing that despite the increased costs it could be vital for continued technological development and IT infrastructure going forward in the event of hostilities braking out between places like China and Taiwan or South Korea as all major chip manufacturing facilities that exist currently are located in one of those three countries.
So what does this mean for AMD and for gamers who love their Ryzen CPU? Well right now, not that much. As the plant comes online and AMD beings shifting more and more of their chip production to the facility we might see the prices rise a little bit, but this is likely to stabilize over time. Contrary to popular belief, labor costs are not a significant portion of the operating budget for facilities like this. Much of the work is automated and the massive infrastructure, technology and machinery costs far outweigh whatever labor cost there might be even in high costs markets like the US. The major win for gamers in this case, especially gamers in the US, might just be that in the event of conflict between the aforementioned countries, gamers will still be able to buy and enjoy future Ryzen and Radeon gaming CPUs and GPUs.
Time will tell if more companies in the gaming space (Intel and Nvidia) will show the same commitment to the Arizona facility, as the news hasn’t exactly been great from inside Arizona’s troubled chip plant. Should TSMC be able to meet their set February 2025 date (which has been pushed back several times) we could see increased innovation in the future as a more global talent pool starts working on the highest end of semiconductor technology.
