Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or TMSC is facing challenges regarding chip production in USA. The Congress passed a bill to increase the manufacturing of semiconductor chips domestically. This affected to the Samsung Austin Semiconductor, who already invested a billions of dollars for a manufacturing plant.
Why the rise in Chip Production cost?
USA wants to decrease its reliancy on China for semiconductor chips for security reasons. They congress is pushing more and more domestic chip production in USA. However it’s is nor that easy it is expected to be. The Production plant based in Austin is looking for workers. They need to fill around 430 positions. These positions include Fabrication engineer, Infrastructure tech team and other.
The problem arises from that fact that there are not many qualified workers. The competition among others companies for hiring qualified individuals in really high. Companies like Apple or Intel are paying as much money as they can to hire these workers. This also means that hiring and manufacturing costs are going to be higher than countries like china. This was central reason for other countries to get these countries to make chips for them in the first place. Gina Raimando, Secretary of Commerce said that they need about 100,000 technicians in the next few years to even compete with these countries.
Officials in other countries such Japan and Taiwan show same concers. Due these countries lower birth rates, the number of qualifies technicians is going down. This has led these countries to lowering the requirements to foreign workers. Taiwan has now started to employ people directly graduate from top 500 universities in the world. While, before a person these students needed either a masters in degree or 2 years of work experience.
How much will this affect the prices?
The price rise is expected to be around 30% on average for devices. However, the price change can affect some gadgets more than others. Devices using 3nm and 5nm chips will be affected much more. However, the markets may normalized with time as USA invests more in the industry. If the number of workers increases, labor cost will decrease. The govt. changes could also help in semiconductor chip prices
