For decades, Taiwan’s chip industry has had one crucial advantage: concentration. Chip makers, suppliers and engineers work within close reach of one another, and that ecosystem has made Taiwan indispensable.
Now TSMC is expanding around the world, and Texas could become its next major frontier in the United States. No final decision has been made, but the question is already bigger than where the next fab goes: how much of Taiwan’s ecosystem can move overseas, and what must remain at home?
Host: Laurel Stewart
Guests:
Dr. Yeh Yao Yuan
(Professor and Endowed Chair in International Studies, University of St. Thomas)
Jeffrey Kuo
(Assistant Research Fellow, National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology)
On this episode of The Chain Maker, we unpack:
✅ Why Texas is being considered, from the "Silicon Prairie" corridor between Dallas and Sherman to universities, population growth and port access
✅ How agglomeration worked in Hsinchu, and why it is hard to replicate through top-down policy
✅ Why most of the supply chain would still come from Taiwan, Japan and South Korea
✅ How U.S. tax incentives change the economics of building another campus
✅ Why talent and work culture may be the biggest bottleneck, and what sending Taiwanese engineers abroad means for Taiwan’s talent base
✅ "Hollowing out" or "mutual dependency"? Whether a silicon shield becomes a silicon network
TSMC has not made a final decision on Texas. But the challenge is clear: making global expansion strengthen Taiwan’s influence without weakening the capabilities that made it indispensable.
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