TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — TSMC is at the center of a foreign investment drive that has brought US$37 billion (NT$1.19 trillion) into Japan’s semiconductor industry, Nikkei Asia reported Thursday.
TSMC has invested about NT$593 billion in two chip fabs in Japan, with the first beginning mass production of logic chips in 2024 and a second now under construction. The chipmaker has also teamed up with Sony on a joint venture to produce next-generation image sensors, expanding its role in Japan’s semiconductor industry beyond logic chips, per Reuters.
Government subsidies have helped attract foreign companies to Japan, including US-based Micron Technology, which is investing about NT$296 billion to expand its Hiroshima facility and produce advanced memory chips for AI data centers. Israel’s Tower Semiconductor also announced in July that it would invest about NT$119 billion to mass-produce chips for optical communications devices used in data centers.
Japan was once the world’s largest semiconductor producer, accounting for more than half of global output in the late 1980s, but its position weakened after the asset bubble burst, per Nikkei Asia. Japanese companies’ share of the global chip market had fallen to about 10% by the 2010s, while many of the country’s factories now focus on older technologies and automotive applications rather than AI.
Foreign investment is helping strengthen Japan’s chip industry, but the scale remains smaller than in some other major markets. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix announced in June that they would spend a combined NT$17.8 trillion on four chip fabs in South Korea, while TSMC plans to invest NT$1.5 trillion in a new advanced chip facility in Taiwan.
The US is also competing for semiconductor investment, with its large technology and AI companies serving as a major draw. TSMC announced in July that it would invest an additional NT$3.15 trillion in the US, bringing its total planned investment there to about NT$8.34 trillion, while Samsung plans to invest about NT$1.26 trillion.
