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If you'd look you'd also see the new Japan fab is also losing money. This is normal for a new fab that is starting up. Fab20 in Taiwan is bleeding money like nobody's business until a larger percentage of the tools get set and the money starts getting rolled in by the dump truck for those N2/A16 wafers. If you look TSMC AZ hasn't been making revenue yet, so it is no surprise that losses are egregious. Meanwhile the Japan fab has been up long enough to qualify customer designs, run them, and then ship wafers for revenue so losses are less bad. TSMC AZ on the other hand only just came up/started running customer qualification Si. TSMC Washington (or "the Oregon fab" if your name is Morris Chang) losing money is pretty embarrassing though; no way to sugarcoat that. But I guess that is just a result of limited investment, subscale size, and ancient decrepit technology that hasn't even really been keeping up with all of the fancy add-ons you'd expect for technologies as mature as what they run there.
If you'd look you'd also see the new Japan fab is also losing money. This is normal for a new fab that is starting up. Fab20 in Taiwan is bleeding money like nobody's business until a larger percentage of the tools get set and the money starts getting rolled in by the dump truck for those N2/A16 wafers. If you look TSMC AZ hasn't been making revenue yet, so it is no surprise that losses are egregious. Meanwhile the Japan fab has been up long enough to qualify customer designs, run them, and then ship wafers for revenue so losses are less bad. TSMC AZ on the other hand only just came up/started running customer qualification Si. TSMC Washington (or "the Oregon fab" if your name is Morris Chang) losing money is pretty embarrassing though; no way to sugarcoat that. But I guess that is just a result of limited investment, subscale size, and ancient decrepit technology that hasn't even really been keeping up with all of the fancy add-ons you'd expect for technologies as mature as what they run there.
It isn't a joke, or at least not one he consciously made. He would always call the Camas Washington fab the Oregon fab. And it really drives home just how much of a backwater that operation was and how little Morris thought of those employees that he didn't even know where the fab that was built while he was CEO even is. Could you imagine the sick joke it would be if Sanjay Mehrotra called the new Singapore fab the Malaysia fab, or Pat called Fab34 the British fabs? Now maybe I would cut Morris a an ounce of slack if he had literally never been to the US for an extended time because just across the Columbia River is Oregon and Camas is vaguely close to Portland. But he went to college in the US and spent a 40 year career at TI!
It isn't a joke, or at least not one he consciously made. He would always call the Camas Washington fab the Oregon fab. And it really drives home just how much of a backwater that operation was and how little Morris thought of those employees that he didn't even know where the fab that was built while he was CEO even is. Could you imagine the sick joke it would be if Sanjay Mehrotra called the new Singapore fab the Malaysia fab, or Pat called Fab34 the British fabs? Now maybe I would cut Morris a an ounce of slack if he had literally never been to the US for an extended time because just across the Columbia River is Oregon and Camas is vaguely close to Portland. But he went to college in the US and spent a 40 year career at TI!
