TSMC factories rise in the Arizona desert ↦

I enjoyed Sunday’s New York Times piece by Dan Wang about all the impacts, from the geopolitical to the personal, of Apple’s chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor building fabs in Arizona as an attempt to boost American manufacturing capability and reduce risk of a future Chinese attack on Taiwan: In Arizona, I saw how Taiwanese engineers are training American workers to build some of the most complex technologies in the world. TSMC is doing for America what Apple did for China. And guess what? TSMC engineers and their families are having a great time. In interviews, they marveled at their new lives in the Sun Belt — the large homes, the friendly community, the opportunities for their kids. The question is how long this can last. I didn’t realize that a majority of Arizona residents weren’t born there, but I’m writing this from the Phoenix-area home of a California transplant with people from Minnesota and Wisconsin in houses on either side. And yesterday I was south of Tucson with family members who also came from California. It’s that kind of place.