"TSMC var den värsta tänkbara arbetsplatsen på jorden"

Several American former employees said they felt relief after quitting. In group chats, engineers celebrated the departure of their friends. “TSMC was the worst possible place to work on Earth,” one American ex-TSMC engineer told Rest of World. Another, who recently left the company, described TSMC as having “a purely authoritarian work structure.”

Bruce resigned in 2023. He is still friends with his Taiwanese former colleagues, and kept his TSMC badge, water bottle, and TSMC T-shirt as mementos. He said he felt triumphant walking out. The American workers had voiced their concerns in meetings with management, but he didn’t see changes happening. “All of us gave them every chance to listen, but they never did,” he told Rest of World.

Despite the flood of investments, the U.S. has a long way to go before chip self-reliance, experts told Rest of World. TSMC Arizona’s first two facilities are expected to make 600,000 wafers a year — a fraction of the company’s current annual capacity of 16 million wafers. Many of the chips made in the U.S. still need to be shipped back to Asia for assembly, testing, and packaging. Chip packaging company Amkor, which has most of its factories in Asia, will build a plant in Arizona to package Apple chips made at TSMC.