AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC’s US plant costing 5% to 20% more
Successive administrations have imposed increasingly stringent regulations on exports to China of such chips, citing national security concerns
[SAN FRANCISCO] Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) chief executive officer Lisa Su said that the chips her company gets from supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) cost more when they are produced in TSMC’s Arizona facilities.
Compared with similar parts from factories in Taiwan, the US chips will be “more than 5 per cent but less than 20 per cent” in terms of higher costs, she said at an artificial intelligence (AI) event in Washington on Wednesday (Jul 23). AMD expects its first chips from TSMC’s Arizona facilities by the end of the year, Su said.
The extra expense is worth it because the company is diversifying the crucial supply of chips, Su said in an interview with Bloomberg Television following her onstage appearance. That will make the industry less prone to the type of disruptions experienced during the pandemic.
“We have to consider resiliency in the supply chain,” she said. “We learned that in the pandemic.”
TSMC’s new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield, the amount of good chips a production run produces per batch, Su told the audience at the forum.
The event was hosted by the All-In Podcast team and a consortium of tech leaders and lawmakers known as the Hill and Valley Forum. US President Donald Trump and other administration officials also appeared at the venue to discuss the rollout of their “AI action plan.”
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Su said she welcomes the engagement between government and the industry and the fact that AI is a priority for the administration.
“What I really like about the AI action plan is that it’s quite actionable,” she said.
AMD and larger rival Nvidia recently gained a reprieve on restrictions imposed on shipments of some types of AI accelerators to China. It’s still not clear how many licenses will be granted, or how long the companies will be allowed to ship the chips to the country, the biggest market for semiconductors.
Successive administrations have imposed increasingly stringent regulations on exports to China of such chips, citing national security concerns. Those rules have cost US chipmakers billions in revenue.
Su said that the policy going forward needs to be balanced. Allowing shipments to US allies will help make sure the country’s technology remains foundational to AI systems everywhere.
“It’s a tricky dribble,” she said. “I think the administration has been doing a good job of working with us.”
At the event, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was asked about the administration’s policy on the export of AI chips.
“We are comfortable with allies buying a significant number of chips and having a large cluster,” he said. “How large those groupings of server computers are and how much access US companies have to them would be factors.”
During her onstage remarks, Su added that she sees continued high demand for AI chips, citing investment in AI by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk. AMD is Nvidia’s nearest rival in the market for AI accelerators, chips that help develop and run AI models. BLOOMBERG
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