TSMC CEO announced the plan with US president, the latest firm to make investment commitments since Donald Trump took office.

Chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co plans to invest $100bn in the United States and build five additional factories in the coming years, it has said.

TSMC CEO CC Wei announced the plan on Monday in a meeting at the White House with US President Donald Trump. “We must be able to build the chips and semiconductors that we need right here,” Trump said. “It’s a matter of national security for us.”

TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is a leading supplier to major US firms including Apple, Intel and Nvidia.

The $100bn outlay, which would boost domestic production and make the US less reliant on semiconductors made in Asia, is in addition to a major prior investment announcement. TSMC agreed in April to expand its planned US investment by $25bn to $65bn and to add a third Arizona factory by 2030.

Former US President Joe Biden in 2022 signed a sweeping $280bn law, the CHIPS and Science Act, to try to reinvigorate chip manufacturing in the US, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. It included a subsidy for TSMC’s US unit in Phoenix, Arizona.

During the pandemic, chip factories, especially those overseas making the majority of processors, shut down. This had a ripple effect that led to wider problems, such as shutting down automobile factory assembly lines and fuelling inflation.

Trump has criticised the law and taken a different approach, instead threatening to impose high tariffs on imported chips to bring chip manufacturing back to the US.

Trump also has said companies like TSMC do not need federal tax incentives.

Investments

Trump has hosted multiple business leaders at the White House since he took office in January to tout a series of investments that aim to demonstrate his leadership is a boon for the US economy.

In February, Apple said it would invest $500bn in the next four years. Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani and SoftBank also have promised multibillion-dollar investments in the US.

TSMC said on Monday that it looks “forward to discussing our shared vision for innovation and growth in the semiconductor industry, as well as exploring ways to bolster the technology sector along with our customers”.

Under Biden, the US Department of Commerce convinced all five leading-edge semiconductor firms to locate factories in the US as part of the programme to address national security risks from imported chips.

Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told lawmakers last month that the programme was “an excellent down payment” to rebuild the sector, but he has declined to commit grants that have already been approved by the department, saying he wanted to “read them and analyse them and understand them”.