Semicon: Why California and Arizona Want To Partner With Taiwan

At this year's Semicon, the U.S. is betting big on semiconductor reshoring, with states like California and Arizona sending delegations from across different industries. But as the Trump administration weighs new tariffs on chips, I sit down with officials, business leaders, and academics to find out more. People call us GO-Biz. So we're the economic development arm for the state of California. It's our first time here at Semicon Taiwan. We have nearly $80 billion in trade between California and Taiwan. $26 billion of that is in the semiconductor sector. So we'd love to see those numbers grow. Beyond that commercial transaction, we have academic partners that are with us this week as well. The whole world needs to continue producing engineers. We have a lot of students that are excited about software. They're excited about programming. And we haven't had as many as we should. For example, in Taiwan, when earthquakes happen, engineers have to rush back to the fab to see if anything happens, to take care of it right away. So how would you use the educational institutions or use the programs to kind of communicate with American students on what might happen, what to expect when they step into the semiconductor industry? The students that we work with at the University of California, they're not sleeping. They're working. They're solving problems. They're often doing it in more of an academic setting. And we need to expose them more, which is something we're seeing here in Taiwan. Expose them more to hands-on. What is it like in that industry setting? With the geopolitical tensions or the Trump administration is trying to put a new tariff on chips, how do you think that that would impact the companies looking to build or expand over there? The very fact that we're talking about this is a problem in and of itself. The fact that the Trump administration is creating this uncertainty, this instability for the business community. You talk to any business leader, regardless of political party, what they want is certainty. What they want is stability. And that's exactly what they're not getting out of this administration right now. And it's also really affecting SMEs. So that's something that California and Taiwan share. California has over 4 million small businesses. It's the small businesses that are being affected by this. And why would we want to stifle that? With TSMC investing $265 billion in Arizona, the state has sent a delegation made up of city mayors, architects and policymakers to learn from past experience and ease the process of getting federal state permits. So we help any business coming from Taiwan to Arizona on how to get federal state permits so they can build and operate. America has a lot of bureaucracy on how we permit things. It could be a hundred permits on one job from various municipalities or state or federal depending if it's air or something like that.