Morris Chang's speech at the TSMC Arizona fab opening ceremony last week:
When I started TSMC back in 1987, I had a dream. Probably because of my background, which up to that point, was primarily America. Probably because of my background, my dream was to build fabs in the United States.
So, eight years from our start up, we started in 1987, and in 1995, we broke ground in a town called Camas, which is in the state of Washington, just on the border of Oregon, In fact, it's very close to Portland, Oregon. We called it Wafertech. It was a well-conceived semiconductor factory. Its technology was completely up to date at that time. It was, I thought, a dream fulfilled.
However, we ran into cost problems. We ran into people problems. We ran into cultural problems. And before long, the dream fulfilled became a nightmare fulfilled. It took up several years to untangle ourselves from the nightmare. And I decided that I needed to postpone the dream, just postpone, just postpone it.
25 years passed and we have a new chairman, Mark Liu. And he happens to share my dream! Now you see a partial, not yet fulfilled, but progress of this dream. Incidentally, this ceremony was called the first 'tool-in'. Nobody outside Taiwan understood what that meant, so now it’s called 'opening ceremony'. It is a Taiwan custom. I did not understand what the name meant at first, but now, I’ve heard it so many times, I’ve been at 'first tool-in' ceremonies so many times, I now understand what it means. Basically it means, the end of the beginning for a factory.
The romance of the beginning is gone! The initial excitement is gone! A lot of hard work remains, a lot of hard work. The twenty-some years in the past have witnessed a big change in the world. A big geopolitical situation. Globalization is almost dead. Free trade is almost dead. And a lot of people still wish they would come back, but I really don’t think they will be back for a while.
In the meantime, because of the change in political situation, the new dream, well…it’s the old dream revived, has the help of the US government, the federal government, the state government, the local government. Not only that, we did learn from our experience earlier, and we are far more prepared now. And we hired almost 600 engineers here a year and a half ago, we sent them to Taiwan, and they were under training in Taiwan for one year to a year and a half. In the meantime, about the same number of Taiwan engineers underwent training in Taiwan also.
So before we see a single wafer, we have more than a thousand people being trained. This I think is a very good sign that we are prepared. It’s a very good sign that my dream of 25 years ago will now be fulfilled by Mark. Anyway I came here specifically to see the end of the beginning and to wish TSMC the best, in the full expectation that we are going to have success. And it will be a very meaningful success as Mark has just said. And my dream lives. Thank you very much.
