TSMC has aggressive plans. Unfortunately, only a small group will benefit from this

TSMC clearly signals that further expansion of production capacity solely in Taiwan will not be enough. The biggest problem today is the most advanced lithography, which are sought after by customers from the AI ​​and HPC segments. The answer to this problem is to be explicit strengthening the company’s presence in Japan.

As revealed after the president’s meeting CC Wei with the Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichia second factory in Kumamoto will produce chips in 3nm process. This is an important change, because so far the Japanese investments of the Taiwanese giant have been associated mainly with less advanced technologies. Now Tokyo joins the group of locations where TSMC plans real production of modern chips for the most demanding customers.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. A few weeks ago, there were already signals that TSMC wanted to strengthen its presence on the Japanese semiconductor market. Reason? Growing competition from Rapidus, which aims to enter the 2nm segment.

Given the current capacity shortage, the logical step for TSMC is therefore to focus not on mature processes, but on what customers actually expect. The Japanese Prime Minister reportedly described the company’s decision as crucial for the domestic economynot hiding his satisfaction with this direction of development of cooperation.

Expansion in Japan is also a signal that TSMC is increasingly taking geopolitical factors into account in its strategy. In recent months, the company has made high-profile deals agreement with the Donald Trump administrationdeclaring investments of up to $250 billion in Arizona. The plans include not only chip factories, but also advanced packaging plants and R&D centers. At the same time, TSMC was thinking about increasing the scale of the project in Germanybut this direction has stalled for now.