The Arizona desert is playing a key role in the international semiconductor great game. North of Phoenix, the state capital, an industrial behemoth is rising from the ground, an offshoot of Taiwan's TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), the world's leading microchip manufacturer. The microprocessor giant was lured to this remote territory of the American West by a series of local and federal subsidies.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the US has made the revival of semiconductor production a national security priority. Like Donald Trump before him, President Joe Biden wants to reduce the dependence of American industry on Asia, and above all to "counter China," according to the official objective, in a sector so essential to the economy.

Two thousand kilometers from California's Silicon Valley, Phoenix is beginning to deserve the nickname "Silicon Desert" from its marketers. Since the health crisis and the reindustrialization advocated by Biden, the city has become a hub for the development of advanced technologies; the setting for an episode of the global chip war, the battle between Washington and Beijing for control of a component essential to smartphones, connected cars, video games, medical devices etc.

Today, 80% of semiconductors are manufactured in Asia (and 90% of the most advanced in Taiwan), compared with just 12% in North America. At a time when the island of Taiwan is threatened by China, the Pentagon is anxious to end its dependence on TSMC for its missiles and fighter planes.

On the edge of Interstate 17, the highway that winds its way north through the red dust, TSMC is building two "fabs" (manufacturing plants, in the jargon of the industry), covering five square kilometers, a gigantic construction site occupying 12,000 workers. Fab 21 will produce chips with an engraving fineness of 4 or 5 nanometers (billionths of a meter), a technological feat that TSMC is the only company, along with Samsung, to have mastered. The estimated production capacity will be 20,000 silicon wafers per month.

Twenty-eight of its subcontractors have already taken up positions around Phoenix. Taiwan's Sunlit Chemical is building a hydrofluoric acid production plant nearby, at a cost of $100 million (€92 million). The American company Amkor is building a plant in Peoria, 35 kilometers from the TSMC site, to package the Apple chips that will leave the Taiwanese foundry.

TSMC's great rival, the American company Intel, dethroned from world number one, is also building a new factory in its stronghold of Chandler, south of the city, a $20 billion investment. Before its arrival in 1980, Chandler was a farming town of 30,000 inhabitants. It is now a city of 280,000, and Intel is its largest employer, with 12,000 employees.

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