18,000 reasons it's so hard to build a chip factory in America

Tangle of red tape often hinders ambitious visions, sowing uncertainty and delay

- Peter S. Goodman

The computer chip factories rising from an empty expanse of the Sonoran Desert test the concept of immensity. The complex is under construction across 465ha, an area larger than New York’s Central Park. It represents an investment of US$165 billion (S$214 billion), making it one of the most expensive undertakings on earth.

Here on the northern edges of Phoenix stands a display of the US’ reach for industrial self-sufficiency. The factories are engineered to make advanced computer chips - the brains of modern manufacturing. Those chips will power data centres that deliver artificial intelligence.

American political leaders celebrate the presence of the plants as insurance against geopolitical turmoil and disasters like pandemics. Whatever happens, the nation will have its own supply of computer chips.

But the company at the centre of this enterprise — one cast as vital to national security - is not American. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, the global leader in the industry, has marshalled the investment, the people and the know-how to turn these plans into reality.

Scores of other companies, some of them American but many from East Asia, have set up their own local factories to supply TSMC with everything it needs, from chemicals and components to construction and engineering services. Collectively, they have invested an additional US$40 billion in the local economy.

This is the inescapable truth behind the transformation of Phoenix into a hub for computer chips: It could never have happened without the expertise and money brought in from across the Pacific. The last major domestic chip plant came online in 2013. So the United States lacks the experience to build one without considerable help.