A look at TSMC's and Intel's struggles to recruit US workers to build Arizona chip factories; the projects began in 2021 and are set to begin production in 2024
Financial Times : Tweets: @shannonkoneil Tweets: Shannon O'Neil / @shannonkoneil : TSMC's struggle to find engineers, technicians, and build up a local ecosystem of suppliers for its AZ semiconductor fab provide a good window into why substantial reshoring will be difficult even in strategic industries https://www.ft.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2021-vintage Arizona fabs were supposed to prove that leading-edge chipmaking could be transplanted to the US on a 2024 timeline, but the labor math never closed: TSMC's first plant was already three to six months behind schedule on labor shortages before production even started. Shannon O'Neil's framing in the FT is that the hiring gap is a window into why substantial reshoring stays hard even when the capital is committed.
The pattern has only deepened since. Recruiters say TSMC's culture and overseas training requirements repel the very candidates its 4,500-worker expansion needs, half of the Phoenix workforce ended up imported from Taiwan, and suppliers have delayed their own Arizona plants citing construction costs and weak local demand — leaving Intel facing the same thin talent pool.
First-order effects
- TSMC and Intel are competing for the same scarce pool of US engineers and technicians, pushing both toward importing Taiwanese staff and stretching their 2024 production targets.
Second-order effects
- Suppliers who would normally cluster around a new fab have held back on building in Arizona, so the fabs lack the local vendor ecosystem that makes Taiwan's fabs efficient — raising costs and slowing ramp for everyone in the cluster.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US chip capacity grows at the pace its workforce and supplier base can absorb rather than the pace subsidies allow, making imported labor and multi-year ecosystem-building permanent features of American fab projects.
The trend: US semiconductor reshoring is bottlenecked less by capital than by the absence of a domestic fab workforce and supplier ecosystem, forcing companies to transplant both from Taiwan.