Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking on the All-In Podcast, said the firm’s Arizona site currently delivers just seven per cent of what the US actually needs.

The Taiwanese chip giant began setting up in the US under the Trump administration, with ambitions to shift some of its bleeding-edge node production stateside. But the rollout has been anything but smooth.

Bessent blames overregulation and bureaucracy for delays that are slowing the effort.

He said that TSMC were “dealing with local building inspectors” which was tricky because facility design has to change on the fly, and even minor deviations from blueprints can trigger shutdowns.

Inspectors were saying: “You said the pipe was going to be there, not there. We’re shutting you down,” he claimed.

While TSMC has managed to reach 100 per cent utilisation at its 5nm and 3nm nodes globally, expanding similar capacity in the US has proved far more difficult. The company wants to bring bleeding-edge processes like A16 (1.6nm) to Arizona, but progress is crawling.

Even with record utilisation and global dominance, American chip customers are still almost entirely dependent on TSMC. Domestic alternatives like Troubled Chipzilla’s foundry services or Job’s Mob’s dabblings in silicon are not winning much trust.

Trump is reportedly keen to slash regulatory overheads to make chip manufacturing faster and easier on home soil. But for now, TSMC’s US output remains a fraction of the scale needed. Demand is climbing, and the Arizona fab is falling behind before it’s even out the gate.