TSMC responds to UAE rumors: 'No new concrete overseas investments'

Taipei, Sept. 23 (CNA) Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) said Monday it has no new concrete overseas expansion plans, following news reports that its top executives recently held talks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

While not addressing the UAE rumors directly, TSMC told CNA that it was always open to constructive discussions on promoting the development of the semiconductor industry, adding it remained focused on its current global projects.

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that top TSMC executives had recently visited the UAE to discuss building a plant cluster similar in scale to the chipmaker's largest and most advanced facilities in Taiwan.

According to the Journal, the UAE has also courted chipmaking investment from South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co.

Under the initial discussions, the investment plans of TSMC and Samsung would be funded by the UAE with the aim of raising global chip production and capping soaring prices without hurting chipmakers' bottom lines, the Journal said, citing a source familiar with the matter.

Commenting on the report, Ray Yang (楊瑞臨), an international strategy development consulting director at the government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), said Monday that he suspected speculation arose after TSMC sent its marketing personnel to the UAE.

"But, TSMC investing in the UAE is a thing which has not even begun to take shape," Yang said.

In recent years, TSMC has intensified its efforts to expand globally to ease the impact of escalating geopolitical tensions.

In the United States, TSMC has broken ground on two advanced fabs in Arizona.

According to TSMC, the first of these is scheduled to start mass-producing chips using sophisticated 4-nanometer process technology in the first half of 2025.

TSMC has estimated that the second fab will begin volume producing chips using 3nm and 2nm process technology in 2028.

TSMC's 3nm process is currently the most advanced used by the firm to mass produce chips.

TSMC has also unveiled it plans to build a third fab in Arizona using the 2nm process or more advanced technology and invest over US$65 billion in the state.

In Japan, the TSMC-majority-owned Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing, Inc. (JASM) opened a fab in Kumamoto in February and announced plans for a second, as part of an estimated US$20 billion investment.

In August, TSMC broke ground on a 12-inch wafer fab in Dresden, Germany, to be built in conjunction with its other partners in the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (ESMC), Robert Bosch GmbH, Infineon Technologies AG and NXP Semiconductors N.V.