The Biden administration is pressuring companies involved in the semiconductor supply chain to be more transparent as the global chips shortage continues to wreak havoc across many industries, officials said.

Chinese tech giant Baidu said on Wednesday it had begun mass-producing second-generation Kunlun artificial intelligence (AI) chips, as it races to become a key player in the chip industry which Beijing is trying to strengthen.

Infineon chief executive Reinhard Ploss on Tuesday supported the idea of Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) building a chip fabrication plant in Germany, expressing a clear preference for its technology over that of Intel.

TSMC is finalizing a decision to put its first chip plant in Japan into operation as early as 2023, Nikkei has learned.

Taiwan's Foxconn and TSMC said on Monday they had reached deals to buy 10 million doses of Germany's BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine, putting the total cost of the highly politicised deal at around $350 million.

Washington's moves showed that "the US is pressuring Taiwan and TSMC to support its supply chain" over China, said Paul Triolo, an analyst at consultancy Eurasia Group. They also challenge TSMC's historic position of neutrality and the company's strategy of "being everyone's foundry."

Taiwan will allow Terry Gou, the billionaire founder of Taiwan's Foxconn, and TSMC to negotiate on the government's behalf for COVID-19 vaccines, a spokesman said on Friday, but warned he couldn't guarantee success.

Hsinchu Mayor Lin Chih-chien, in an interview with Reuters late on Monday, said that he could not guarantee total safety for the city's tech firms, but that the government had rolled out rapid testing stations.

About 20 Japanese companies, including electronic component maker Ibiden, will work with TSMC to develop chip manufacturing technology in Japan, the Nikkei newspaper reported.

Japan's government wants TSMC and Sony to invest JPY1 trillion (US$9.2 billion) to build the country's first 20 nanometre chip plant, the Nikkan Kogyo newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the National University of Taiwan (NTU) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have jointly announced that a significant breakthrough was made in the development of 1-nanometer (nm) chips. The research results are published in the international journal Nature.

TSMC is weighing plans to pump tens of billions of dollars more into cutting-edge chip factories in the US state of Arizona than it had previously disclosed, but is cool on prospects for an advanced European plant, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The US Commerce Department is pressing TSMC and other Taiwanese firms to prioritise the needs of US automakers to ease chip shortages in the near term, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said.

TSMC is planning to build several more chipmaking factories in the U.S. state of Arizona beyond the one currently planned, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

While more and more chips are needed in the US, fewer and fewer are manufactured here.

Shipments of the new chipset - tentatively known as the M2, after Apple's current M1 processor - could begin as early as July for use in MacBooks that are scheduled to go on sale in the second half of this year.

The EU's industry commissioner Thierry Breton is to meet with Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger and a top TSMC executive this week as the bloc seeks added sway in the semiconductor supply chain.

Tighter US sanctions against China's Huawei Technologies announced in May 2020 shifted the global semiconductor supply chain in a way nobody had expected, with a flood of orders enriching Taiwanese foundries and changing the island's landscape.

Tianshu Zhixin said in January that BI was made using an unidentified 7nm process node and 2.5D chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging. On Wednesday, it confirmed our suspicion that BI was made using TSMC's 7nm FinFET process.

"I have never seen anything like this in the past 20 years since our company's founding," said Jordan Wu, co-founder and chief executive officer of Himax Technologies, a leading supplier of display drivers. "Every application is short of chips."

Apple's custom-designed 5G cellular modem will likely debut in all 2023 iPhone models, according to Barclays analysts Blayne Curtis and Thomas O'Malley. In a supplier-focused research note shared with MacRumors, the analysts said chipmakers Qorvo and Broadcom should be among the companies that benefit from the shift to Apple's in-house solution.

As the US looks to fulfill its semiconductor needs on its own, Arizona is fast emerging as a base for the domestic industry's revival. Already home to large Intel workforces, the state will soon add staff from Taiwan's TSMC, supplier LCY Group, and potentially Samsung, as a slew of industry giants eye sites in the sun-beaten Southwestern state.

Looking ahead, cutting edge wafer supply might not be the biggest headache for big chip companies. As TSMC chairman Liu sees it, a renaissance is coming. One day chip design will be as easy as writing code.

Qualcomm incoming Chief Executive Officer Cristiano Amon said US sanctions against China's Huawei Technologies may help alleviate a global shortfall in semiconductor supply. If Huawei's in-house chip unit HiSilicon can't get its designs manufactured, the company may order more chips from other providers. These limitations will also free up capacity at TSMC, Amon said in a webcast with Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall.

The European Union is considering building an advanced semiconductor factory in Europe in an attempt to avoid relying on the US and Asia for technology at the heart of some of its major industries.

TSMC is reportedly struggling to keep up with demand

A shortage of auto chips has exposed TSMC's key role in the supply chain.

The remarks could signal a shift in focus at the Shanghai foundry which has seen its chances of closing the tech gap with bigger rival TSMC hurt by US sanctions

Apple is joining the automotive party because it has to and if Apple is going to develop an automotive-grade C1 processor, it requires foundry partners with automotive-qualified processes.

Dan Loeb's Third Point says Intel has lost out to TSMC, Samsung and AMD.

TSMC is aggressively recruiting over 600 engineers and executives for what will be its first US plant in 20 years.

A job description on Intel's website gives us a rare glimpse at Intel's outsourcing plans. It's no secret that Intel will outsource more production to TSMC in the future, but so far, the company has been pretty vague about the details.

Google and AMD will be among the first clients for TSMC's new SoIC chips, which use a new 3D technology to stack and link different types of chips in one package. The new chip packaging approach is meant to make the chipset smaller but more powerful and energy efficient.

City officials in Phoenix, Arizona on Wednesday unanimously voted to authorize a development agreement with chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co that would provide $205 million in city funds for infrastructure such as roads and water improvements for a planned $12 billion semiconductor factory in the city.

Samsung Electronics is pouring US$116 billion into its next-generation chip business that includes fabricating silicon for external clients, betting it can finally close the gap on industry leader TSMC as soon as two years from now.

Samsung Electronics is intensively investing in the expansion of its foundry business in efforts to catch up to Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC, which continues to dominate the contract-based chip-making business.

The deleveraging of China-U.S. supply chains and protectionism on both sides of the Pacific will only drive up costs and limit the flow of ideas, the chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co said on Wednesday.

A group of US senators last week proposed yet another bill to revive the domestic chip industry, the American Foundries Act of 2020 (AFA). This new bipartisan proposal is the second such measure in a month, following the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) act, introduced on June 10. The two initiatives highlight the effort by the US government to localize the electronics supply chain and rebuild the domestic semiconductor industry now that most of the world's production has shifted to Asia.

Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday urged the Trump administration to answer "serious questions" about Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd's plans to build a U.S.-based $12 billion plant, flagging national security concerns and potentially undisclosed subsidies.

TSMC has halted new orders from Huawei Technologies in response to tighter US export controls aimed at further limiting the Chinese company's access to crucial chip supplies, multiple sources told the Nikkei Asian Review.