Peter S. Goodman

These plants have to be built to extraordinary specificity.

I mean, it's, you know, it's kind of an industrial magic trick to make a computer chip, and it involves, you know, beaming light onto tiny pieces of silicon.

It's sort of like a photographic negative.

We're talking about...

fractions of a thousandth of a percent of the width of a human hair.

Things have to be just so.

And in Taiwan, there are thousands of people who've come through an apprentice system, who've actually participated in building fabs.

The last time we completed a large-scale fab in the computer chip industry in the United States was 13 years ago.

So we just simply don't have the muscle memory to

to build one of these plants.

We can't do this without relying on places that have this expertise.

And those are places in East Asia.

They start bringing in specialized workers from Taiwan, which immediately causes, you know, major animosity with local unions.

And the local unions say, well, hold on a second.

If the federal government's writing a check for six plus billion dollars...

We should be getting the job.

And TSMC says, you will be getting thousands of jobs.

But to get this thing off and running right now, we got to go find some people who know how to install the specialized, highly advanced equipment that goes into these plants.

So they bring in people to do that.

So eventually the unions win some promises that TSMC will hire a certain number of workers and peace reigns with the unions.