Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will add two advanced chip packaging plants at the Chiayi Science Park in southern Taiwan, the island's National Science and Technology Council Minister Wu Cheng-wen said at a groundbreaking ceremony on Sunday.
Phase II, which Wu Cheng-wen said would add a third and fourth plant to the site, was officially launched at Sunday's ceremony. Of the two Phase I plants, Wu Cheng-wen said one is already producing at full commercial scale while the other is on the cusp of reaching that milestone.
With all four facilities eventually running, the park's combined tenant companies are projected to surpass NT$300 billion ($9.35 billion) in yearly output and bring roughly 9,000 jobs to the region, according to Wu Cheng-wen.
Surging orders from AI chip customers including Nvidia $NVDA have pushed TSMC $TSM to scale up its packaging operations, with its chip-on-wafer-on-substrate process among the technologies seeing the most pressure, Reuters reported.
Chiayi fits into a much larger industrial geography, Wu Cheng-wen said, describing a planned corridor that would tie together science park locations in Tainan, Kaohsiung, Pingtung, Central Taiwan, and Hsinchu into what he called the world's foremost hub for AI and semiconductor work, according to The Next Web. Beyond semiconductors, the site is slated to attract tenants in fields including biotech, aerospace, and precision manufacturing
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The groundbreaking came on the same day TSMC reported record second-quarter revenue. Quarterly sales came in at NT$1.27 trillion ($39.6 billion), reflecting 36% growth versus a year earlier and landing just above the upper boundary of the $39 billion to $40.2 billion range the company had set for itself in April. Revenue for June alone reached NT$442.68 billion, marking a 67.9% gain against the prior-year month and the highest single-month total TSMC has ever recorded.
TSMC will provide its third-quarter outlook and additional commentary at its earnings conference on Thursday. When the company reported first-quarter results, Chief Executive Officer C.C. Wei described AI chip demand as "extremely robust" and said TSMC would be unable to fulfill demand from American customers for years even as new capacity comes online.