A Biden administration effort to untangle global chip supply snarls is facing resistance from lawmakers and executives in Taiwan and South Korea, complicating attempts to resolve the bottlenecks hurting industries from automobiles to consumer electronics.
The issue has become particularly thorny in Taiwan, home to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. , which accounts for more than half the global contract chipmaking market. That dominance has already prompted rivals like Intel Corp. to call for more domestic investment and spurred governments in the US, EU, Japan and China to mull efforts to bolster their own chip industries to reduce their reliance on the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturing hub.
Smaller peer United Microelectronics Corp. declined to comment on how it may respond to the US query, though Chief Financial Officer Liu Chi-tung told Bloomberg News that the company will protect customers’ non-public information. The potential standoff comes as chip shortages are going from bad to worse. Lead times in the industry—the gap between putting in a semiconductor order and taking delivery—rose for the ninth month in a row to an average of 21.7 weeks in September, according to Susquehanna Financial Group. That is by far the longest since the firm began tracking the data in 2017.