Arizona’s Tiny Taipei: How a Taiwanese Chip Factory Seeded a Community
The New York Times
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, a global tech giant, brought thousands of workers from Asia to the Phoenix suburbs for jobs at a plant that the Biden administration helped fund.
After Helen Wang finishes work at the new microchip plant looming over the Arizona desert, she drives home to start her side hustle: cooking pots of spicy beef soup and pork noodles for Taiwanese colleagues who are hungry for a taste of home.
There were almost no Asian groceries or Taiwanese restaurants nearby when the first workers began landing on the northern edge of Phoenix two years ago to work at a chip factory operated by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Since then, the workers and their families have turned a mostly white corner of strip-mall suburbia into a Tiny Taipei.
Taiwanese businesses are popping up near taquerias and nail salons. Taiwanese cooks have joined Ms. Wang in ferrying meals to the chip factory’s parking lot. Supermarkets have started stocking Taiwanese sauces and noodles. The sound of Mandarin floats through day care centers and schools, where 282 Taiwanese students are enrolled this year.
The spaceshiplike factory drawing thousands of workers and their families to the area is a crucial part of President Biden’s effort to bolster advanced chip production in the United States. The company, known as TSMC, has committed $65 billion to the project and is set to receive $6.6 billion in grants through the CHIPS and Science Act.
