Due to the huge demand for advanced processes, TSMC invested US$29 million to purchase a 13,100-square-meter factory in Nanke

According to TSMC's official announcement yesterday, in response to the current supply and demand imbalance of advanced processes, the company plans to continue expanding production in South Taiwan Science Park and will spend NT$860 million (approximately US$29 million) to purchase the factory and ancillary facilities in South Taiwan Science Park from solar manufacturer E-Tong. This is the third time TSMC has purchased land assets in South Taiwan Science Park in recent times, indicating TSMC's expansion intentions in South Taiwan Science Park.

According to the announcement, the Nan Ke plant that TSMC purchased from Yi Tong has an area of ​​13,100 square meters and is located at No. 8, Nan Ke 2nd Road, Xinshi District, Tainan City. The total transaction amount is NT$860 million, which will be used for operations and production in the future. In fact, in order to expand advanced process capacity, TSMC has recently purchased factory assets in Nan Ke for three times. Recently, TSMC announced that it had purchased the Nan Ke plant of Litte Optoelectronics for NT$3.65 billion.

In addition, in May 2020, TSMC also purchased the factory and land of the mask box supplier Jiadeng in Nanke for NT$660 million. In total, TSMC has spent more than NT$5.1 billion on three recent asset transactions in Nanke, showing TSMC's ambition to actively expand in Nanke. Currently, TSMC's Fab 18 in Nanke is the production base for the latest 5nm process and the next 3nm process. As various customers are actively competing for production capacity, there have even been reports that major customer Apple has asked TSMC to give priority to the supply of nanometer production capacity in 2021, which has led TSMC to actively deploy in Nanke to prepare for future production expansion needs. In addition to advanced processes, market insiders said that future expansion projects will also include advanced packaging.

Seeing TSMC's aggressive expansion of advanced processes in the Southern Taiwan Science Park, ASML, a global semiconductor equipment giant, also officially unveiled its EUV technology training center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park on the 20th. The training center, which has invested NT$470 million, is expected to train 360 EUV technology engineers each year, which means that TSMC can now directly send its personnel to the training center, which not only improves training efficiency, but also increases training capacity to meet TSMC's future needs for advanced process development.