Engineering, Procurement and Construction Breakbulk & Project Cargo
announced plans to increase its US investments by $ 100 billion to $ 165 billion. And after twice pushing back construction plans for its chip plant complex in Arizona, TSMC CEO C. C. Wei said during the company’ s July 17 earnings call that the company would bump up its production timelines“ by several quarters” to meet strong demand from US customers.
‘ Staggering’ volumes
“ The construction commodity volume is staggering. We’ re looking at piping and cabling in the millions of linear feet.”
Samsung’ s $ 44 billion chip fab under construction in central Texas is also facing scrutiny. News reports have surfaced in recent months that a lack of customers could force Samsung to push back the facility’ s 2026 completion date, although Samsung denied those claims in a statement to the Houston Chronicle in July.
Meanwhile, the world’ s largest chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.( TSMC), is doubling down on its US investments and accelerating construction timelines following previous project delays. In March, the company
www. joc. com
Engineering, procurement and construction giant Bechtel is known for taking on projects that are first of a kind or massive in scale, including the Hoover Dam and the Channel Tunnel, or Chunnel, linking Great Britain and mainland Europe.
Semiconductor projects have recently grown in scale to that level of projects, Kristin Homsi, Bechtel Manufacturing & Technology’ s supply chain manager, told the Journal of Commerce.
“ The construction commodity volume is staggering,” Homsi said, adding that these facilities call for novel technologies that need to be“ designed and engineered into existence.”
Bechtel is building advanced semiconductor facilities in the Midwest for an undisclosed client, Homsi said. These projects can require as much steel as eight Eiffel Towers, and as much concrete as a new nuclear power plant.
“ We’ re looking at piping and cabling in the millions of linear feet,” she said.“ These quantities make logistics incredibly complex.”
Lu pointed out that getting the manufacturing and production equipment in on time is of critical importance to the financial viability of the projects, and that logistical precision is critical to ensure facilities can start producing as soon as possible.
“ Every day that you’ re not manufacturing, a $ 20 billion fab could be losing as much as $ 5 million a day,” he said.
The demand for constructing semiconductor fabrication facilities makes for an especially heavy-lift cargo for breakbulk and project logistics providers and carriers.
Constructing semiconductor fabrication plants often requires the transport and handling of extremely large, highly sensitive equipment and other components.
“ We’ re talking about thousands and thousands of these types of materials that need to go into these fabs,” Lu said.
Transporting the components and related equipment involves moving massive pieces, such as air processor units, tanks, water treatment components and other heavy machinery.
“ That requires a more specialized service that can handle these more technical, high-value goods,” Lu said.
In the spring and summer of 2024, Intel’ s $ 28 billion silicon chip plant under construction in central Ohio required 24“ super load” cargo movements over land. One of the loads, transported by Shelbyville, Ky.-based Edwards Moving & Rigging, weighed nearly 1 million pounds.
Lu said that on fabs DHL has worked on, the company has had to extensively map out the transport of supersize loads.
“ A lot of planning has to be done months and months in advance, just for one piece,” he said.“ And it’ s coming from all different locations in the US and overseas.”
September 2025 | Journal of Commerce 11