October 5, 2025
Story by Sasha Hupka, originally published via The Arizona Republic.
PHOENIX, AZ (October 5, 2025) – Jennifer De La Cruz hated working two jobs.
She needed to make ends meet. But when she wasn’t serving burgers at Wendy’s, she was picking up warehouse shifts at Amazon. That left little time for her 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.
So De La Cruz, 26, of Phoenix, started looking for something—and she found an equipment technician position at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. She now works at the chipmaker’s massive desert campus, installing parts, cleaning tools and making sure silicon wafers are placed correctly into machines.
She is one of many such workers needed nationally as the semiconductor industry faces a severe workforce gap, driven by soaring demand for computer chips and a push to onshore advanced manufacturing. The need is especially acute in Arizona, creating new, life-changing opportunities for many of the state’s residents.
Jennifer De La Cruz, 26, of Phoenix, works at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. as an equipment technician in nano diffusion. SASHA HUPKA/THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC.
But developing a whole new type of workforce takes time—and the open positions are already coming quickly and unrelentingly. It’s a conundrum hat has business leaders, state officials and educators working around the clock o set up training programs, cultivate talent pipeline, and explain to perplexed job seekers and students what a semiconductor is, anyway.
Their success is crucial. If they can set up residents to take advantage of the coming jobs, the state could see unprecedented economic mobility. If they fail, chip companies will get their talent from elsewhere—and born-and-raised desert dwellers could be left behind.
Experts said chipmakers would largely prefer to hire Arizonans. They have multibillion dollar investments in the desert to protect, so relocation isn’t an option. If they can’t get local talent, they’ll just find others to bring in and onboard. “The companies are on a no-fail plan,” said Pearl Chang Esau, of Shan Strategies, a workforce consulting firm that counts TSMC as a client. “The question is whether our state, workforce and education system will rise to the opportunity so that Arizonans can participate in the high-tech economy.”
TSMC Arizona President Rose Castanares said she wants employees to “be here for a really long time.” Local talent tends to be easier to retain, so she said it would be ideal if all of the company’s technicians came from Arizona.
She noted that the chipmaker has al-ready seen “great success” tapping local talent for such positions—more than 90% of its current technicians hired in the United States are Arizonans. TSM also has technician employees on loan from Taiwan. Officials didn’t provide a breakout but said a “significant” portion of its technicians were U.S. hires.
Castanares is also hopeful that a majority of the chipmaker’s engineers eventually will come from within the state. Arizona State University is a big work force partner on that front, she said.
She said it’s an “all hands on deck” effort to build in-state talent pools for both types of positions. It still may not be enough to All the company’s total need. But Castanares said it “won’t be for lack of trying.”
“I would love or it to happen,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s feasible.”
Experts: The data is complicated, but ‘a huge demand’ is coming
The numbers are stark—and nuanced.
The Semiconductor Industry Association estimates that the chips ecosystem will add 115,000 jobs nationwide by 2030. Of those positions, 67,000 could go unfilled without new programs to increase the country’s skilled semiconductor workforce.
Workforce
Many of the coming jobs will be based in Arizona. An estimated 25,000 current and upcoming roles in the state are directly linked to semiconductor manufacturing, according to the Arizona Commerce Authority. More are likely to come as the chips boom continues.
Nick Irigoyen, who manages work-force development initiatives and apprenticeships programs at the SEMI Foundation, said the massive numbers sometimes keep him “awake at night.”
“There’s definitely a huge demand in our industry for talent,” he said.
At the same time, national data shows slowing job growth—including in the manufacturing sector. Doug Walls, labor market information director at the Arizona Office of Economic Opportunity, said the state is down 1,600 jobs in computer and electronic parts manufacturing since last year. That sector includes the semiconductor industry, as well as other types of computer-related advanced manufacturing. Labor data tends to be a so-called “lagging indicator,” meaning it reflects past economic events as opposed to real-time conditions. Walls said the declining job numbers appeared to be driven by timing and some chip companies streamlining legacy operations.
Many anticipated fabs are not yet online in Arizona. Plus, the nation is in a period of economic uncertainty driven by trade policy shifts, geopolitical risks, and other factors.
Meanwhile, Intel Corp.—a major employer in the state—has struggled. Once the world’s most dominant chipmaker, the company has fallen behind on developing new technology devoted to mobile devices and chips for artificial intelligence, and it’s now facing a fight to maintain its dominance in personal computer and data center operations. In recent months, it has executed several rounds of layoffs that have cut about 800 jobs in Arizona.
But experts generally agree that the projected growth is still coming. The Office of Economic Opportunity estimates the state will add 5,600 computer and electronics manufacturing jobs by 2033, and 31,500 jobs across all manufacturing sectors.
Patrick Ptak, a spokesperson for the Commerce Authority, said the “job situation is actually looking pretty good right now” as companies ramping up chip production pick up displaced workers.
“We’re working with those from Intel and trying to pair them with those doing hiring at LG, TSMC and other places that are scaling up pretty rapidly right now,” he said. “It’s hard to quantify that because it’s all happening in the ups and downs.”
Educators, business leaders working to build pathways into industry
The workers needed in coming years largely fall into two buckets—technicians and engineers.
Irigoyen said the need is most acute for technicians across the industry. Those workers don’t need college degrees to start in the industry, making them far quicker to train and get into positions than engineers. And, they are well-paid–Walls said the median salary for a technician in Arizona is about $78,000.
That’s a bright spot for those in the workforce development space, who see the jobs as solid options for those looking to upskill or unable to afford a traditional, four-year degree. Educators across the state are now launching apprenticeships, degree programs, accelerators and other initiatives to develop new workers for such roles.
At the postsecondary level, community colleges are partnering with com-Danies to launch specialized courses that provide skills-based training and connect students with industry experts. The Maricopa County Community College District, the state’s largest community college system, currently offers 31 degree and certificate programs that directly or indirectly support the semi-conductor industry.
Valerie Jones, the system’s vice chancellor of workforce and economic development, said educators are moving fast to build a futureproof set of programs.
“We’re trying to work at the speed of business as we are developing our curriculum,” she said, adding that the system wants to meet companies’ needs as technology continues to evolve.
But it’s not enough to just build pro-grams. Chang Esau said it’s important that future workers see clear paths to employment.
“We need all the parts of our education system working together to make sure that the pathway is seamless and we don’t end up with students who graduate from high school and have to retake courses,” she said, adding that otherwise, the workforce funnel leaks. “People don’t have time or money for this.”
That’s part of why many of the programs at community colleges are stackable, meaning that students take flexible, shorter courses and string them together to work toward larger certifications. The community college district offers a 10-day bootcamp intended to help students gain entry-level employment or identify additional career pathways in the semiconductor industry.
And, the industry still needs engineers. Glen Wilk of ASM International, which develops machines to make microchips, said his company requires “a broad range of engineers to develop processes and materials.” It has a large research and development center located in Phoenix, and was one of the first semiconductor firms to set up shop in the desert in 1976. The local talent pipeline is in place, Wilk said—but it needs to scale.
Increasingly, semiconductor companies are also competing with each other for workers. Alyx Cima, a spokesperson for ASM, said the company is heavily focused on retaining its talent and has rolled out internal training, leadership courses and career roadmaps to avoid losing its employees to other chip-related businesses.
“No company is immune to this war for talent, at all,” she said, adding that ASM has experienced “hypergrowth” in recent years.
‘A blank stare’: Companies, officials hope to tackle awareness problem
Nolan Cottingham, 23, is used to fielding questions about his job.
He is a process technician in diffusion at TSMC. That means he oversees tools that shoot ion beams, or streams of electrically charged atoms, into specific parts of silicon wafers to infuse them with a positive or negative charge—a crucial part of the chipmaking process.
“It’s really hard to explain,” said Cottingham, who previously worked at In-N-Out Burger. “Going from flipping burgers to monitoring multibillion-dollar tools is just a different brain function.”
His story speaks to what experts say is one of the biggest challenges they face in building out the semiconductor workforce—nobody knows what chipmakers actually do, and some aren’t even aware that they even have a presence in Arizona. De La Cruz said she often encounters similar situations to Cottingham.
“I’ve had people ask me what I do, and when I tell them about TSMC, they just stare at me,” she said. “It’s a blank stare.”
The awareness challenge has industry leaders and other stakeholders finding out-of-the-box ways to make specialized and complex manufacturing processes digestible for the average person, all while trying to build a more robust workforce pipeline.
One approach is to bring semiconductor training into K-12 classrooms. Jennifer Mellor of the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation said she is working to educate high schools on what semiconductor roles look like and how to build successful technical education programs.
“It’s really just building the whole ecosystem,” she said. “We have to be thinking about additional pipelines of talent.”
The Chandler Unified School District introduced the nation’s first high school semiconductor program earlier this year. Janet Hartkopf, the school’s emerging technology coordinator, said the two-year program at Hamilton High School gets students dual enrollment credits and a certificate of completion. It was developed in collaboration with Intel, TSMC, Microchip, NXP, Cirrus Logic and a host of other chipmakers and suppliers.
Forty-eight students are currently enrolled in the initiative. Hartkopf said getting students and their parents to consider the program is one of her biggest challenges.
“It’s going to be work, because we’ve offshored semiconductors for 25 years in this country, and nobody’s used to hearing about this,” she said. “When I go into a classroom, when I talk to parents, I’m telling them what this is. I’m telling them what a chip is, what a wafer if, what it’s used in—before I can even talk to them about careers.”
Mellor said similar programs are in the works at school districts across the state. In the meantime, company executives and workforce development experts are also trying to engage younger audiences. ASM, for instance, recently unveiled a hands-on exhibit with the Arizona Science Museum to pull back the curtain on microchips.
“I think sometimes our industry can alienate instead of being approachable,” Cima said. “Really, the goal of this museum exhibition was to demystify it—for kids, but also for the community, and parents, and babysitters, and grandparents, and aunts, and uncles, and everybody else. It’s for everybody.”
‘I see a future here’: So far, workforce efforts appear to be paying off
De La Cruz is one of the 1,200 students who have gone through the semiconductor bootcamp at the Maricopa County Community College District since it launched in 2022. The program prompted her to pursue a career in chips manufacturing, she said.
During her first days working with TSMC, she said she thought about leaving.
“Everything looked intimidating,” she said. “Even standing in front of the tools—like, there’s no way I’m getting in that.”
But she stuck it out—and data shows that most of her peers are, too. Irigoyen, of the SEMI Foundation, said the programs it supports have an average retention rate of about 95%.
That’s not to say the work is done. Experts universally agree that existing programs need to continue growing, and new ones are still developing. Mellor also said changes to workforce funding at the federal level have been “really really challenging.”
She referenced a recent move by the US. Department of Commerce to claw back payments to the National Semiconductor Technology Center, operated by a nonprofit known as Natcast.
President Donald Trump’s administration has criticized the private nonprofit and questioned its legality, but the move leaves billions of federal dollars for semiconductor research and workforce development in limbo. That includes funding to support an advanced packaging research facility planned at Arizona State University and launch technical education programs in local high schools.
Still, there appear to be wins for the state’s fledgling high-tech workforce. Maricopa County Community College District officials said their programs directly supporting semiconductor operations are growing. De La Cruz said she believes people are starting to recognize some of the larger semiconductor companies in the local ecosystem.
“The hats are working,” she said, referencing TSMC’s recent swag sale to employees.
Cottingham said he and most other technicians in his department are committed to completing stackable courses and continuing to learn about the chips industry.
“This is basically the job you can retain for the rest of your life,” he said.
De La Cruz feels similarly. Her new job gives her more time with her kids and more money. She just purchased her first home and is enjoying a predictable schedule that allows her to reliably schedule play dates for her children.
“I love my job,” she said. “Right now, I see a future here.”