ARIZONA'S TINY TAIPEI

After Ms Helen Wang finishes work at the new microchip plant looming over the Arizona desert in Phoenix, United States, she drives home to start her side hustle: cooking pots of spicy beef soup and pork noodles for Taiwanese colleagues hungry for a taste of home.

- John Liu and Jack Healy

There were almost no Asian groceries or Taiwanese restaurants nearby when the first workers began landing on the northern edge of Phoenix two years ago to work at a chip factory operated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC).

Since then, the workers and their families have turned a mostly white corner of strip-mall suburbia into a Tiny Taipei.

Taiwanese businesses are popping up near taquerias and nail salons.

Taiwanese cooks have joined Ms Wang in ferrying meals to the chip factory's carpark. Supermarkets have started stocking Taiwanese sauces and noodles. The sound of Mandarin floats through daycare centres and schools, where 282 Taiwanese students were enrolled in 2024.

The spaceship-like factory drawing thousands of workers and their families to the area is a crucial part of American President Joe Biden's effort to bolster advanced chip production in the US. TSMC has committed US$65 billion (S$88.9 billion) to the project and is set to receive US$6.6 billion in grants through the Chips and Science Act.

Now, the future of TSMC's Arizona factory – and the lives of its Taiwanese workers here – may rest on whether President-elect Donald Trump tries to undercut government aid for the company or imposes new restrictions on foreign workers.

Although the TSMC project began during Trump's first term, he has criticised the Chips and Science Act, and accused Taiwan of poaching the American semiconductor industry. And a debate over visas for skilled workers has already caused a rift among Trump's backers.

For the Taiwanese workers, the shifting geopolitics of immigration and trade are far beyond their control.

They say their main concerns are long workdays spent trying to bring the plant online while adjusting to a new life of eight-lane freeways, children's play dates and blistering desert heat more than 11,000km from home.