TSMC is having a tough time getting its Phoenix, Arizona facility up to fully functional standards—large-scale production at Fab 21 has been delayed into 2025 (as announced back in July). Cited factors include workforce-related issues and sluggish installation of state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment. These setbacks are not too disconcerting in the eyes of leadership at AMD—today CEO Dr. Lisa Su declared that her firm will be one of the first in line to contract with TSMC's Fab 21, thanks to long established bonds: "I think we have gotten extremely good at managing supply chain, so I would say that is one of our core strengths. TSMC has been a phenomenal partner for us in terms of advanced technology, both on the silicon side as well as the packaging side, and we very much value that relationship." Su and NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang were key figures present at the Arizona facility's December 2022 opening ceremony.

AMD's top brass is in attendance at this year's Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference, alongside arch rival Intel. The latter has already dropped their own revelation for the day. Su commented on North American chip manufacturing circumstances: "When you when you think about the geopolitical situation, geographic diversity is important to us...So, the Arizona factory is very important to us. We are going to be one of the early users, we are putting our first tape outs in shortly with the idea of being a significant user of Arizona. I think we will continue to look at the geographic diversity as an important piece of it." AMD has been fabless since 2009, and relies heavily on TSMC's tried and true Taiwan-based plants to produce CPU, GPU, DPU and FPGA products—it will be interesting to observe how things pan out when some of this output gets shifted over to a fledgling facility positioned out there in the Sonoran desert.