TSMC built solar on site, but it's not nearly enough to cover the 2.85 gigawatt-hours per day needed to run the first fab. That's equivalent to the power used by roughly 100,000 U.S. homes. TSMC said it's purchasing renewable energy credits to offset that. But amid the AI-fueled data center boom, Arizona's largest utility warned that it could run out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade.
That's also when TSMC plans to start production at its third Arizona fab, which Cassidy said is "probably going to be 2 nanometer and more advanced."
TSMC is also broadening its global footprint. It opened its first fab in Japan in February and broke ground on an $11 billion fab in Germany in August.