Ex-Intel CEO Gelsinger warns TSMC's $165B investment will not restore U.S. semiconductor leadership

TSMC's plan to spend $165 billion on its American manufacturing capacity and an R&D facility will certainly increase U.S. semiconductor production market share. But it doesn't guarantee that the country will regain leadership in process technologies, said Pat Gelsinger, former chief executive of Intel, in an interview with the Financial Times.

"If you do not have R&D in the U.S., you will not have semiconductor leadership in the U.S.," Gelsinger told the Financial Times. "All of the R&D work of TSMC is in Taiwan, and they have not made any announcements to move that [to the U.S.]."

Gelsinger argued that manufacturing alone is not enough to regain technology leadership, even though this will undoubtedly improve the semiconductor supply chain in America. Nonetheless, the U.S. cannot lead in this field without designing next-generation process technologies domestically.

Under the current plan, TSMC plans to build six Fab 21 modules to process wafers using various fabrication technologies, two advanced packaging facilities, and an R&D center in the U.S. The company hopes to house everything at its Fab 21 site near Phoenix, Arizona, though no final decisions about the locations have been made as of last month, when Tom's Hardware spoke with TSMC.

While TSMC's R&D center is certainly planned in the U.S., its focus remains to be seen. TSMC has developed its fabrication processes in Taiwan for decades, although many of its engineers come from the U.S. As manufacturing technologies get more complex and require longer pathfinding processes with each generation, TSMC may offload part of its R&D operations from its Taiwan facilities to the U.S. facility.

TSMC has reportedly hinted that its U.S. development will focus only on refining existing processes, though it did not elaborate. Contract chipmakers like TSMC tend to develop performance-enhanced versions of their process technologies for their alpha customers (e.g., N3 => N3P => N3X) as well as specialty versions of their production nodes for customers that prefer to use mature nodes (e.g., N4 => N4e, N4c). This ensures that their fabs are always filled with orders and their utilization rates are high.

The former Intel executive also acknowledged that tariff threats by President Donald Trump helped the U.S. semiconductor industry by motivating foreign chipmaker TSMC to build additional U.S. facilities. Still, he suggested this was insufficient without deeper R&D operations in the U.S.