Taiwan's government has approved TSMC investments in the United States totaling $44 billion since 2020, clearing the cumulative value of the foundry's American expansion program under Taiwan's outbound-investment review rules.

The figure, reported by MarketScreener, represents the aggregate value of TSMC's US investment applications that Taiwan authorities have green-lit over the roughly five-year period. Taiwan requires its companies to obtain government approval for significant overseas investments, a safeguard designed to keep strategically critical technology and capital at home. Each TSMC tranche of US spending has therefore passed through this review process before funds and equipment move abroad.

The $44 billion total marks a striking escalation from TSMC's original US commitment. When the company announced its first American fab in 2020, it planned a $12 billion facility in Arizona. Subsequent expansions multiplied that commitment several times over, as TSMC responded to customer demand, US government incentives under the CHIPS Act, and mounting political pressure to advanced manufacturing on American soil.

The approval matters commercially for three reasons.

First, it confirms that Taiwan's government continues to permit — rather than obstruct — the relocation of leading-edge foundry capacity to the US. That question gained urgency in Washington and Taipei as TSMC's Arizona site progressed, with some Taiwanese officials voicing concern that large-scale technology transfer could erode the island's "silicon shield," the semiconductor dominance that underpins both its economy and its security posture. The cumulative $44 billion green light signals those concerns have not translated into regulatory friction.

Second, the scale of approved spending quantifies how much capital TSMC is willing to commit outside Taiwan — and by extension, how much capacity the US can expect from the foundry. Overseas fabs cost TSMC substantially more per wafer than its Taiwanese plants, a gap the company has attributed to higher construction, labor, and operating costs in Arizona. Sustained approval at this scale indicates the customer and political drivers behind the spending outweigh the cost penalty.

Third, the number anchors the investment baseline for TSMC's US customers. Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm — among the foundry's largest accounts — have pressed for geographic diversification of their supply chains. Taiwan's sign-off on $44 billion in cumulative US spending gives those customers regulatory certainty that the capacity they are counting on will actually be built.

The approval also lands amid intensifying competition in advanced foundry. Samsung Electronics and Intel are both racing to scale their own leading-edge capacity in the US, each backed by federal CHIPS Act funding, while TSMC's Taiwanese rival in mature nodes continues to expand aggressively in China. TSMC's ability to move capital abroad at this volume — with home-government blessing — preserves its first-mover position among US-based leading-edge fabs.

For Taiwan, the calculus is delicate. The government must balance US expectations that allied semiconductor production shift westward against the strategic value of keeping the most advanced process technology concentrated on the island. The $44 billion approval suggests Taipei has so far accepted diversification at TSMC's proposed pace rather than capping it.

How Taiwan's review authority treats TSMC's next round of US investment applications — and whether the cumulative approval figure continues to climb at the pace set since 2020 — will shape both the foundry's overseas cost structure and the geography of leading-edge supply through the second half of the decade.