Forecast of improvement

That is the information that Nikkei Asia has just quoted from a new report from market research company TrendForce. Accordingly, the above results are obtained from the US attracting investment from Taiwanese and Korean chip manufacturers.

TrendForce forecasts that the US will account for 22% of global production capacity for advanced logic semiconductors by 2030, double the figure in 2021. Meanwhile, over the same period, Taiwan's market share in this field is expected to fall from 71% to 58%, and South Korea from 12% to 7%.

Semiconductor shortages during the Covid-19 pandemic have prompted the US to pour resources into attracting chipmakers to build domestic production facilities to ensure a steady supply of these critical items. Rising geopolitical risks, including tensions between China and the US, have provided additional impetus.

Change the situation

The US is focusing on manufacturing logic semiconductors, especially advanced chips used in data centers, telecommunications and military hardware. Logic chips are also important to compete in artificial intelligence (AI). Although US-based NVIDIA has a near monopoly on AI chip design, the US relies heavily on Taiwan for manufacturing.

In the US, the private sector has announced more than $500 billion in investments in the semiconductor industry since 2020. This is an effort to revive the US semiconductor manufacturing industry, which had a global market share of 37% in 1990 but fell to 10% in 2022. The downward trend is expected to reverse this year when semiconductor manufacturing projects officially operate.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) recently announced that it will invest an additional $100 billion in the US to build three more facilities, including two factories for advanced packaging processes and a research and development center. The packaging of logic semiconductor chips along with high-performance memory - also required for AI - is mainly concentrated in Taiwan, so TSMC's establishment of packaging facilities in the US will add links to the country's domestic supply chain.

In addition, Reuters recently quoted a number of close sources revealing that two US corporations, NVIDIA and Broadcom, are testing the same chip manufacturing system as Intel (US) - a corporation that has invested heavily in the chip foundry sector but has not been effective. If the tests are successful and Intel becomes the manufacturer for NVIDIA and Broadcom, the shift in advanced semiconductor chip production to the US will be even stronger.