Asia Power Businesswoman Doris Hsu Talks About GlobalWafers’ New $5 Billion U.S. Plant, Daring Yourself To Achieve

The U.S. is working to boost domestic production of semiconductors, and passage of the $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act this year is helping to attract investment from the likes of Intel, Samsung, GlobalFoundries and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, better known as TSMC.

Another Taiwan-based industry supplier expanding in the U.S. is GlobalWafers, one of the world’s largest producers of silicon wafers used in making chips. In June, it said it would invest up to $5 billion in a plant in Sherman, Texas, creating as many as 1,500 jobs. Groundbreaking on the first silicon wafer plant to be built in the U.S. in two decades will be held on Dec. 1. GlobalWafers already has plants in the U.S., mainland China, South Korea, Malaysia, Japan, Denmark and Italy; it competes against the likes of Shin-Etsu, Sumco and Siltronic, and boasts a customer list that includes IBM, Sharp and Panasonic.

Based on her success to date, GlobalWafers Chairman CEO Doris Hsu made the 2022 Asia Power Businesswomen List unveiled by Forbes Asia this month. I talked to the holder of a graduate degree in computer science from University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana by Zoom from the company’s headquarters in Hsinchu on Wednesday. We discussed the new Texas project, how geopolitics is influencing the company’s investments, and Hsu’s advice for success. “Don’t measure yourself by what you have already achieved,” she said. “You have to measure yourself by what you can achieve with your ability.” Edited excerpts follow.

Flannery: How did you pick Sherman for your latest U.S. investment? You have another factory there already.

Hsu: That is correct. We do have a silicon epi (epitaxial) wafer operation in Sherman established in 1999. At that time, we were just one of the small shareholders of the company. But in 2008, we purchased 100% of the shares. It’s now a very important entity for us in the U.S. and is by far the largest eight-inch silicon wafer epi operation in the industry. It’s very successful, and all of our management team members are formerly from Texas Instruments. That’s a good team.

Why make the new investment in the U.S.? On Feb. 1, we announced that we were not able to make an acquisition of a German company, Siltronic. We then immediately picked Plan B — organic growth. That means that we have to do a lot of expansion on our existing brownfield campuses. We are now expanding in six countries but that’s not enough because our customers want to get more from us; another very important point for customers is geopolitical concerns. Many customers are inviting us to build an operation in their country. They don’t want to see a big Taiwan company, GlobalWafers, build another new fab in Taiwan. They prefer to have a local fab.

So we were invited by several countries, including Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the U.S. and European customers. We care a lot about total cost competitiveness, no matter which side we chose. At the end of the day, we sell wafers; the wafer definitely has to be of good quality and also cost competitive. Cost competitiveness is one of the very important factors for us.

A second one is something that everyone is talking about – ESG and green solutions. We found that we need to be as green as possible. That means we’d better choose a place where energy and electricity resources are not 100 % from coal.

Also, proximity is very important — you have to be as close as possible to your customer. Given all of these factors, we found that the U.S. is the best choice. We have a lot of U.S. customers and there’s very little silicon wafer capacity there. There are big companies like Apple, Amazon, Intel and Micron and so many big foundries and IDMs (integrated device manufacturers), but there is very little advanced silicon wafer capacity. The last silicon wafer factory in the U.S. was built 20 years ago. We are the very first one in the past 20 years, and are going to build the best and biggest in the U.S. as well. I think that’s good.

What’s even more interesting for us is that President Biden approved the CHIPS Act. That made this more interesting because overall construction costs in the U.S. are almost five times higher than in Taiwan or Asia. The equipment price is similar, but the construction price is too high. If we can get government support, that definitely will make the whole project make more commercial sense for us. The CHIPS Act helps a lot from a cost competitiveness viewpoint.

Another reason for us to choose the U.S. is that in Taiwan, it’s not that easy to find a large piece of land and sufficient power supply. For silicon wafers, you need quite a lot of space. We found that Texas is a good location for us because we can also get space rather readily there.

Flannery: You’ve made Forbes Asia’s Power Businesswomen List this year on your success in the tech industry. How did your career interest in a STEM field evolve?

Hsu: I really liked physics and math when I was young. And also, I remember that I learned from one of our professors (C. L. Liu at the University of Illinois) that nothing in high tech or science is easy. It’s very difficult. Only the best one can go up to the very top and stay there. I thought I’d like to stay there very much (laughs). I thought, “Maybe I can try a little bit of this.” That was the background.

Flannery: With so much opportunity in STEM-related fields, what kind of career advice do you give to students and graduates, particularly women?

Hsu: A couple months ago, I was invited to give a talk at one of the very good girls’ high schools in Taiwan. My closing to the young ladies was: “Dare to dream — you can definitely achieve much more than you can imagine.” No matter whether you are girls or boys, as long as you dare to dream, you can achieve much more than what you can imagine.

Also, I say to our team – which includes many females — and what I remind myself is: “Don’t measure yourself by what you have already achieved. You have to measure yourself by what you can achieve with your ability.” I believe we can always do much better than what we imagine ourselves.

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@rflannerychina