Sources: TSMC's first US chip plant is three to six months behind schedule due to labor shortages and difficulty obtaining licenses
Taiwan chip titan faces fight for workers as Intel also builds in Arizona — TSMC's construction delay in Arizona does not necessarily mean the schedule …
Context & Ripple Effects
TSMC's Arizona project had barely broken ground before the schedule slipped: the company and Intel both started building in the state in 2021, and the fight over US construction workers was already documented as a shared bottleneck months before this report. Now TSMC concedes its first US plant is running three to six months late, with labor shortages and licensing hurdles named as the causes.
The delay matters because Arizona is the test case for TSMC's entire US expansion — and the labor squeeze is structural, not one-off, since Intel is drawing from the same pool. TSMC's later admission that the fab would miss its 2024 mass-production target for 4nm chips traces directly back to the shortfall flagged here.
First-order effects
- TSMC's first Arizona fab slips three to six months, pushing back the timeline for US customers counting on domestically made chips, while Intel's parallel Arizona buildout competes for the same skilled trades.
Second-order effects
- With local hiring failing, TSMC and its suppliers resort to flying in several hundred more workers from Taiwan to force the project back on pace — a costlier staffing model that suppliers to both TSMC and Intel later cite, alongside surging construction costs, when they delay their own Arizona plants.
Third-order effects
- The pattern hardens into a structural feature of US onshoring: fabs take longer and cost more to build in Arizona than in Asia, which is why TSMC later reorders its global queue — delaying its second Japan plant to fund US expansion, and accelerating its second and third Arizona fabs by several quarters once the first plant's lessons land.
The trend: US chip onshoring is colliding with a domestic skilled-labor shortage, making imported Taiwanese labor and repeated schedule slips the operating norm for TSMC's American fabs.