The US factory that exposes the contradiction in Trump's politics

Among the cacts in the Arizona desert, just outside of Phoenix, creates an extraordinary collection of buildings that will influence the future of the global economy and the world.

The buzzing of other constructions not only creates a factory for the most advanced semiconductors in the world. After all, it will produce the mass products of the most advanced chips in the world. This work is carried out for the first time in the United States, whereby the Taiwanese company promises to issue billions more in a step in a step that cancel the risk of tariffs for imported chips.

In my opinion, it is the most important factory in the world and is built by a company that you have never heard of: TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. It makes 90% of the semiconductors worldwide. So far, they have all been produced in Taiwan, the island in front of the Chinese mainland. The Apple chip in your iPhone, the Nvidia chips that make your chatt queries, the chips in your laptop or your computer network, all of TSMC.

The facility “FAB 21” in Arizona is closely guarded. Empty paper or personal devices are not permitted if designs are leaked through. It houses some of the most important intellectual property of the world, and the process of producing these chips is one of the most complicated and intense of global production.

They very much protect the secrets that lie in it. Important customers such as Apple and Nvidia trust this company to protect their designs for future products.

After months of asked, TSMC left the BBC one to examine the partial transmission of what some argue, the critical, most expensive, most complex and most important production of the world.

President Trump certainly seems to think that. He often mentions the factory in passing. “TSMC is the largest there is,” he said. “We gradually lost the chip business, and now it is almost exclusively in Taiwan. They stole it to us.” This is one of the regular chorus of the US President.

TSMC's most recent decision to expand its investments in the United States by another $ 100 billion (75 billion GBP) is something that Trump attributes to his threats of tariffs in Taiwan and in the global semiconductor business.

The expansion of the facility in Arizona, which was announced in March, is, like the figurehead for its economic policy – in particular the encouragement of foreign companies, to move factories to the USA in order to avoid high tariffs.

China also carefully observes developments. Taiwan's chip make-up ability was part of what its government described as a “Silicon Shield”, against a much-driven invasion. While the original strategy was to make Taiwan indispensable in this area of ​​critical technology, the difficulties of the Pandemic supply chain changed the calculation because it seemed to be a greater risk.

Many currents of the global economy, border technology and geopolitics flow at this one location and this is the essential contradiction of Trump's economic and diplomatic policy.

He first sees this plant as a copy of America and the preservation of economic and military superiority over China. However, the production of this modern miniaturized miracles at the border of physics and chemistry is naturally based on a combination of the best technologies from all over the world.

Greg Jackson, one of the facility managers, takes me around with a golf buggy. The factories are almost a carbon copy of the TSMC rooms in Taiwan, where he trained. “I would say that these facilities are probably some of the most progressive and complicated in the world,” he says.

“It is quite a dichotomy. You really have, really small chips with really small structures, and this massive furnishings need with the entire infrastructure to be able to produce it … only the mere complexity, the amount of systems it takes is amazing.”

Within the “clothing building”, the workers dress before crossing a bridge to create the cleanest surroundings of the earth to protect the production of this extraordinary microscopic transistor that create the microchips that underpin everything.

Konstantinos Ninios, an engineer, shows me some of the first productions of TSMC Arizona: A silicon wafer with the so -called 4 -nanometer chips.

“This is currently the most advanced wafer in the United States,” he explains. “[It] Contains approx. 10 to 14 trillion transistors … The entire process is three to 4,000 steps. “

If you somehow reduce your body to the same scale and get into the wafer, he says that the many different layers would look like very high roads and skyscrapers.

TSMC was founded in 1987 at the behest of the Taiwanese government when Chip Executive Morris Chang was instructed to found the business. The model should become a dedicated foundry for microchips – produce the designs of other companies. It was very successful.

The progression of the technology is the miniaturization of the smallest characteristic on chip. Its size is now measured in billion stars of a measuring device or nanometer. This progress has made mobile phones possible to become smartphones and now sets the pace for mass use of artificial intelligence.

It requires incredible complexity and costs by using “extreme ultraviolet (UV) light”. This is used to etch the complicated building blocks of our modern existence in a process called “lithography”.

The dependence of the world of TSMC is based on highly specialized bus size machines, which in turn are almost exclusively related by a Dutch company called ASML, including in Arizona.

These machines shoot UV -Helle's tens of thousands through melted tin drops that create a plasma and are then broken by a number of specialized mirrors.

The almost completely automated process for each silicon wafer is repeated a thousand times in layers before the $ 1 million LP size is formed of 4 Nm silicon chips.

“Imagine a particle or a dust particle in which this isamily resolved,” says Ninios to me incredulously. “The transistors will not work. All of this is cleaner than hospital operating rooms.”

Taiwan has no special access to the raw materials – but it has the know -how to remain in the complicated process of manufacturing these atomic building blocks of modern life for years.

Some in the Taiwanese government are careful to spread the limit of this technology in front of the island. Trump wasted little time by the company's decision to bring the highest technology in the United States back to its economic policy.

He said this would not have happened without the stick of his planned tariffs on Taiwan and semiconductors. Those with whom I speak to TSMC are diplomatic in terms of this claim.

Much of it was planned and subsidized after the chips act by the former US US US -American chips.

On the sidewalk in the building there are photos that show Bidens visit in 2022, the construction site in the stars and stripes is draped and a banner with the inscription “A future in America”.

“The Semiconductor supplier chain is global,” says Rose Castanares, President of TSMC Arizona. “At that moment there is really no single country that can do everything from chemicals to the production of wafer to packaging. So it is very difficult to relax this whole thing very quickly.”

The tariffs do not help in the semiconductor supply chain. The supply chain extends all over the world. Regardless of whether it is the silicon wafers from Japan, the machines or mirrors from Germany required from the Netherlands, all types of materials from all over the world are required. Now they could be exposed to import costs.

However, the chief of TSMC was quickly off the brand to confirm the expansion of the US location at an event with Trump in the White House. In the past few weeks, America's tech elite – has been employed by Apple's Tim Cook about Nvidia's Jensen Huang – to tell the world that TSMC Arizona will now produce many of the chips in their US products.

The global chip industry is very sensitive to the economic cycle, but its most modern technology enjoys very healthy margins that can pillow some of these planned tariffs.

There are many geopolitical subtexts here. The factory is the focus of the US strategy in order to obtain technological, AI and economic dominance through China.

Both the bidges and the Trump administrations have developed guidelines to restrict the access of Chinese access to border -neck guideline technology -from an export ban from ASML machines to the new legislation to prohibit the use of Huawi -Ki -Ki -Ki -Chip in US software or technology all over the world.

Taiwan's President Lai called on democracies such as Japan and the USA this week to develop “non -Red” supplied chains in order to counteract China.

However, not everyone is convinced that this strategy works. Chinese technologists are prohibited in the forbidden to develop competitive local technology. And Bill Gates said this week that these guidelines “have forced the Chinese in terms of chip production and everything to advance the full speed”.

Trump wants TSMC Arizona to be a cornerstone for his American golden age. But the company's history so far is perhaps the ultimate expression of the success of modern globalization.

For the time being, it is a struggle for global technical and economic supremacy, in which the factory technology of Taiwan, of which a large part is moved to the Arizona desert is critical capital.

Top -picture -Kredit: Getty

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