Report: the White House is in talks with Intel and TSMC about building chip factories in the US to strengthen domestic supply chains
and we will experience far more of them this century. https://www.wsj.com/... Kate O'Keeffe / @kate_okeeffe : NEW: U.S. in talks to get Intel, TSMC & Samsung to build chip factories here. The coronavirus has underscored concerns about dependence on Asia for this critical tech, w Taiwan “a single point-of-failure.” Hurdles remain though: https://www.wsj.com/... w @asafitch @bobdavis187 Jesse Felder / @jessefelder : ‘A new crop of cutting-edge chip factories in the U.S. would reshape the industry and mark a U-turn after decades of expansion into Asia by many American companies eager to reap investment incentives and take part in a robust regional supply chain.’ https://www.wsj.com/... Mark Hachman / @markhachman : Regardless of how environmentally safe chip manufacturing is today, Silicon Valley is still pretty much one giant Superfund site because of chipmakers in the 80s and 90s. https://twitter.com/... Jennifer Smith / @jensmithwsj : A new crop of cutting-edge chip factories in the U.S. would mark a U-turn after decades of expansion into Asia by many American companies eager to reap investment incentives and take part in a robust regional supply chain. https://www.wsj.com/... Cameron Winklevoss / @winklevoss : Looks like Silicon Valley might be coming back to Silicon Valley. https://www.wsj.com/... Bob Davis / @bobdavis187 : Non-Covid news: Intel and TSC negotiating with the Pentagon to build chip plants in the US. DOD wants to depend less on Asia—especially vulnerable Taiwan. Chip firms want DOD support. With @Kate_OKeeffe @asafitch https://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-arc: the Pentagon had already been pressing tech companies for months over how to cut US dependence on advanced chip fabrication abroad, and the coronavirus then turned that national-security argument into an economic one — Taiwan framed as a single point of failure for the world's critical compute. The irony is sharp because Intel itself was drifting the other way, its consideration of outsourced manufacturing signaling the end of the era when Intel and the US dominated semiconductor production.
So the White House is effectively trying to reverse two decades of offshoring by courting the very contract manufacturers — TSMC and Samsung — that American chip firms fled to, while Intel weighs whether it even wants to keep leading-edge fabs at all.
First-order effects
- Intel, TSMC, and Samsung become direct negotiating counterparts of the US government, with any deal hinging on who absorbs the cost gap between building in Arizona-style sites versus their existing Asian capacity.
Second-order effects
- A credible US-fab push forces other western governments into a subsidy competition for chipmakers' siting decisions, the dynamic that later produced the race to capitalize on industrial-policy subsidies; it also pressures Samsung to weigh China exposure against US commitments, a tension that resurfaced under the Chips Act's guardrails against China expansion.
Third-order effects
- If the talks mature into policy, they seed the wave the SIA later tallied as 40+ proposed projects worth roughly $200B since 2020 — a structural shift from market-driven concentration in Asia toward state-underwritten regional capacity, with Taiwan's single-point-of-failure risk as the standing justification.
The trend: Semiconductor manufacturing is being reorganized from a market-optimized Asian concentration into government-subsidized regional capacity, with Washington's fab diplomacy as the opening move.