Former Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSMC) pledge to invest an additional US$100 billion in the United States is unlikely to help the country regain global leadership in chip manufacturing, according to a report from the Financial Times this Wednesday.
Gelsinger emphasized that TSMC’s research and development remains concentrated in Taiwan—an arrangement he views as a barrier to U.S. semiconductor dominance. He stressed that the Taiwanese company hasn’t made any announcements to relocate.
TSMC has previously clarified that its U.S. operations will focus solely on process technologies already in production, while core research and development will continue to be based in Taiwan. Unless the next-generation transistor technology is being designed stateside, Gelsinger said, the U.S. does not have leadership in chip manufacturing.
Gelsinger did, however, acknowledge that President Donald Trump's tariff threats had been “incrementally beneficial,” providing chipmakers like TSMC more incentive to establish facilities on American soil.
Addressing the Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek, Gelsinger dismissed it as “good engineering” but lacking “major breakthroughs.”
He added that for AI to become truly mainstream, new technologies are needed to drastically cut the cost of inference.