Semiconductor History | JASM, 菊陽町 — The Taiwanese Fab That Restarted Kyushu

The building has "jasm" written on the side in lower case, and from the road you mostly see cooling towers and a grass bank planted with young trees. TSMC held the opening ceremony for Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing in 菊陽町, Kumamoto, on 24 February 2024. Morris Chang came, at ninety-two, along with TSMC's chairman and chief executive, Japan's trade minister, the governor of Kumamoto, and the heads of Sony, Denso and Toyota. Those last three are shareholders, not guests. JASM is majority-owned by TSMC with Sony Semiconductor Solutions, Denso and Toyota holding minority stakes, and the Japanese government carrying a large share of the cost. The company was established in 2021 and building started in April 2022, which is fast for a fab of this size. Mass production began in December 2024, on 22 and 28 nanometre processes and 12 and 16 nanometre ones — mature nodes, aimed at cars and industrial equipment rather than phones. The interesting thing about Kumamoto is the direction of travel. Japan invented the flash memory in this collection's other Japanese entries and led the world in DRAM in the 1980s, then lost both; the fab that has revived Kyushu's chip industry is Taiwanese, staffed in part by Taiwanese engineers who moved here, built by a company that started inside a Taiwanese government laboratory in 1987 with ninety-eight people. Kyushu's integrated circuit output passed one trillion yen in 2024 for the first time in sixteen years. A second fab was announced in February 2024 and has had a harder time: construction was paused in late 2025, and the plan has reportedly shifted from 12 and 6 nanometre work toward 3 nanometre, with operation now expected around 2027 or 2028. Treat any schedule for Fab 2 as provisional. On 28 July 2026 a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto Prefecture, with strong shaking recorded in 菊陽町. TSMC reported utilities back to normal within days and normal operations resumed in early August, according to reporting at the time. Taiwan learned what an earthquake does to a fab in 1999; this was Kumamoto's first real test of the same question. The site sits beside farmland north-east of Kumamoto city, near 原水 station on the Hōhi line. It is a working fab with no visitor access, and what the public road offers is the view in the photograph: a white box, a row of cooling towers, and a lot of new landscaping on ground that was fields three years earlier. Photo: Keeteria, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (the JASM plant in Kumamoto, 2024).