Federal Reserve revokes guidance requiring banks to gain preapproval on cryptocurrency activity



The Federal Reserve has rescinded its guidance for banks related to handling cryptocurrencies and digital assets.

In a recent press release, the Federal Reserve Board said it was removing guidance that forced banks to seek special permission before dealing with digital assets.

According to the release, a 2022 supervisory letter established an expectation that banks would provide advance notification of planned cryptocurrency activities, while updating the Reserve of ongoing ventures.

The justification for the requirements included market instability, money-laundering concerns, and consumer protection.

"Certain types of crypto-assets, such as stablecoins, if adopted at large scale, could also pose risks to financial stability," the expunged letter read.

However, the board now says it will no longer expect banks to provide notification and will instead "monitor banks' crypto-asset activities through the normal supervisory process," the press release explained.

The 2023 letter, since withdrawn, required banks to demonstrate, "to the satisfaction of Federal Reserve supervisors," that the bank had controls in place in order to conduct safe transactions surrounding cryptocurrencies. This was called a "supervisory nonobjection" where banks did not get to engage in an activity and then have it scrutinized, but rather they needed to submit their "proposed activities" to the Federal Reserve in order to move forward.

This was not a form of an approval process either, though, but rather a "nonobjection."

Taking off more reins

The Federal Reserve board also said it would be working with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to determine if additional guidance to support innovation with crypto-asset activities is needed.

According to Crowdfund Insider, the OCC announced in March that it would be making its own changes to its Comptroller's Handbook booklets and guidance. On change from the federal agency, which works within the Treasury Department, was that it would no longer examine institutions for "reputation risk."

"The OCC’s examination process has always been rooted in ensuring appropriate risk management processes for bank activities, not casting judgment on how a particular activity may fare with public opinion," said Acting Comptroller of the Currency Rodney E. Hood.

"The OCC has never used reputation risk as a catch-all justification for supervisory action. Focusing future examination activities on more transparent risk areas improves public confidence in the OCC's supervisory process and makes clear that the OCC has not and does not make business decisions for banks."

President Trump recently signed an executive order aimed at establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve, which at the same time forbids the acquisition of other digital assets except through forfeiture proceedings.

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AI Child Sexual Abuse Images Would Normalize Pedophilia, Not Cure It

In a world where AI child porn is normalized as a therapeutic tool, we'll have pro-pedophile activists normalizing pedophilia itself.

Heat death of the discourse?



There’s an undeniable feeling of the air coming out of the balloon of discourse on x.com. Some of this is natural enough. We can’t be at a fever pitch all the time, and now that the most important election of all time is over, we’ve all earned at least a breather.

But there’s a deeper, more sweeping effect at work.

The Perfume Nationalist just laid it out as well as anyone in a long and bracing X thread. “It may have taken seven years but I've reached this point,” he begins. “The plot lines are so utterly repellent because it ended, we won. The things you all fight about are completely made up. We won and you can just let Trump do everything.”

Trump’s win shifted the center of political gravity away from the ideological intelligentsia toward not just 'tech' but to the agentic, whether human or machine.

“I don't need to know which malignant groupchat dirtbag leftist who was based-curious in 2021 has written a substack renouncing their dalliance with the right,” he goes on, subtweeting a raft of right-wing-disenchanted online personalities whose grievances and disappointments were recently aired out by a lefty New York Times columnist. “You should've known they were bad at the time. You didn't trust the plan. We won. The side of good won. There was a happy ending. The big Snow White book closed on the page that said THE END. You're free now you can go read a book. There's nothing here since it ended.”

The rant expands from there. “Everyone is supposed to be happy at THE END like Beauty and the Beast where the household appliances are changed back into people. But here you chose to stay household appliances."

"Everyone anonymous has an incredible real job as a lawyer or a censor at the libtard factory. You don't even have to shill your wares here.”

What is going on is that “the right” or the “anti-woke” rebel alliance became so intellectually top-heavy during the bad old Biden years that many of its leading and most popular figures defined the identity of the movement as an intellectual one, a talking one, one that not only won by talking but could only talk, not do — at best, have ideas and then talk about them.

So it became extremely important to have the right ideas, the very best and most correct ideas. But at the same time, paradoxically, it became essential to the movement and its leading online figures that their incredibly superior ideas also be strangely ineffective or unpopular — in a constant state of existential threat and crisis, demanding perpetual belligerent defense and pedantic exposition.

Trump’s win shifted the center of political gravity away from the ideological intelligentsia toward not just “tech” but to the agentic, whether human or machine. What is especially interesting is that this shift not only imperils the identity and the lifestyle of the perpetually arrogant and embattled “wrongthinker” who is ackshually right about everything; so too does it undermine the basic value proposition of X as the so-called “global public square” — transparently an onboarding scheme to achieve a new cyborg sort of “collective consciousness.”

There is a lot of talk in certain online circles about the antichrist-like vibe of this swarm consciousness and the identity that arises from it, but the naive or practical version of the notion must also be acknowledged, namely that our human consciousness is always already relational — and so far, at least, the printing press and the television have done a lot more than digital technology to encourage and accelerate violent, destructive substitutes for the shared spiritual consciousness of Christian communion.

And whereas print and television unleashed an overwhelming world war on words, Trump’s win amid today’s digital conditions augurs the paradoxical corrective that, if we’re headed into a golden age, perhaps it’s because we’re rediscovering how silence is golden.

That leaves the question of what will become of X, the internet, or AI itself if the blather and discord subside and the bots become heirs to a desertified digital commons … and who will actually care!

Everything’s bigger in Texas — especially Nvidia’s new $500 billion AI factories



Nvidia, the AI chip manufacturing giant, recently announced plans to build new AI factories in Dallas and Houston. These plans represent a significant advancement in the production of AI supercomputers entirely within the United States.

In its announcement, Nvidia revealed plans to partner with Wistron in Dallas and Foxconn in Houston. Other partners include TSMC, Amkor, and SPIL. Wistron is a Taiwanese information and communications technology company headquartered in Taipei, while Foxconn is the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, focusing on research and development.

This announcement marks Nvidia's latest step in its long-term plan to produce half a trillion dollars' worth of AI infrastructure in the coming years. The move underscores a growing push to relocate critical high-tech manufacturing back to U.S. soil, amid rising global tensions and increasing demand for secure, domestic supply chains.

Nvidia’s AI supercomputers, billed as “the engines of a new type of data center,” are anticipated to serve as the hub of AI manufacturing, all based in the United States. While the TSMC factory in Arizona is already producing the Blackwell chip, these new factories are the first of the “tens of gigawatt AI factories” expected to be built in the near future.

Nvidia's founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, said, “The engines of the world’s AI infrastructure are being built in the United States for the first time.” He continued, “Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain, and boosts our resiliency.”

As Huang explained in his keynote address at the GTC 2025 conference last month, the next step in AI manufacturing is scale and efficiency. One solution to the massive logistical challenges that accompany this type of manufacturing in these “AI gigafactories” is the “digital twin” model: “We use the digital twin to communicate instructions to the large body of teams and suppliers, reducing execution errors … ensuring a future-proof AI.” Essentially, the digital twin is a computer copy of the factory and its millions of parts, allowing for clear communication across the supply chain and for readily available “what if” scaling experiments.

Huang also announced that the next generation of chips will play an increasingly important role in the rollout and scaling of these new U.S.-based gigafactories and AI supercomputers. This chip is called the Vera Rubin super chip, named after the astronomer who discovered dark matter. As he demonstrated in his address, this chip is dramatically more efficient and inexpensive to produce. It also represents a leap in sustainability, consuming far less energy than its predecessors — critical for powering the next wave of generative and reasoning AI and machine learning applications across industries.

In a statement, the White House claimed credit for this onshoring trend in manufacturing: “It’s the Trump effect in action." The statement said, "Onshoring these industries is good for the American worker, good for the American economy, and good for American national security — and the best is yet to come.” The administration emphasized that such investments are laying the groundwork for a new industrial revolution, centered on American technological dominance.

Discord 'misled' parents, exposing kids to predators and explicit content: New Jersey lawsuit



New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin (D) announced on Thursday that the state had filed a lawsuit against the messaging application Discord.

Platkin claimed that Discord has engaged in "unlawful practices that expose NJ kids to violent, sexual content and online child predators." He further accused the platform of "deceptive and unconscionable business practices."

'Discord markets itself as a safe space for children, despite being fully aware that the application's misleading safety settings and lax oversight has made it a prime hunting ground for online predators seeking easy access to children.'

According to the AG, Discord "misled parents into thinking its app was a safe space for kids despite knowing it was a hunting ground for sexual predators."

More specifically, the lawsuit called out the platform's direct messaging safety settings as being deceptive to parents. Discord's safety messaging features automatically scan and delete messages containing explicit content.

Despite the alleged safety features, lurking predators are still able to "stalk, contact, and victimize children," the lawsuit stated. The AG's office noted that the platform "fell, and continues to fall, flat."

Additionally, the platform allegedly misrepresented that children under 13 years old could not create an account. The complaint stated that Discord requires users only to enter their date of birth and does not perform any additional checks to verify age.

Platkin stated, "Discord markets itself as a safe space for children, despite being fully aware that the application's misleading safety settings and lax oversight has made it a prime hunting ground for online predators seeking easy access to children."

"These deceptive claims regarding its safety settings have allowed Discord to attract a growing number of children to use its application, where they are at risk. We intend to put a stop to this unlawful conduct and hold Discord accountable for the harm it has caused our children," he added.

During a Thursday press conference, Platkin noted that the messaging platform "has been at the center of numerous criminal cases involving predators that were found to have used the app to engage in sexual grooming, extortion, and exploitation."

New Jersey's lawsuit resulted from a multiyear investigation by the AG and the Division of Consumer Affairs, which released an informational video explaining the basis of the state's complaint.

New Jersey is the first state in the nation to sue Discord over its alleged failure to protect children online.

A Discord spokesperson told NBC News, "Discord is proud of our continuous efforts and investments in features and tools that help make Discord safer."

"Given our engagement with the Attorney General's office, we are surprised by the announcement that New Jersey has filed an action against Discord today. We dispute the claims in the lawsuit and look forward to defending the action in court," the spokesperson said.

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Chinese factories are using TikTok  to work around retailers and tariffs — big brands say the videos are fake, sort of



Chinese factories are promoting themselves through TIkTok videos and asking American consumers to buy directly from them at a lower cost than retailers.

With President Trump recently raising tariffs on China to 245%, videos have gone viral in recent days of Chinese factories offering products in bulk and/or direct to the consumer from factories that say they supply U.S. retailers.

For example, factories claiming to supply Lululemon and Louis Vuitton have offered products at minimal costs.

As reported by the Independent, one video that garnered 10 million views said it was selling yoga pants from Lululemon for $5 instead of $100, the apparent listed price in the U.S.

Another video reportedly showed a man in a factory who claimed his Louis Vuitton bags can be sold directly to consumers across the world for $50.

Both companies reportedly told the outlet that their products are not finished in China, which raised the question of what "finished" means. Of course, many of these products and factories could be producing counterfeit products, but they also could legitimately be product suppliers that are meant to maximize profits for international retailers.

For Italian products to be labeled "100% Made in Italy" (according the official certification website), a product must be made with "exclusive designs" from Italy, built entirely in Italy, made with Italian semi-finished products, and a have a traceability process.

However, at least some of Louis Vuitton's products do not contain an official seal and simply say "made in Italy."

A Louis Vuitton handbag's tag that says 'made in Italy'

The Independent noted that it found at least one video that falsely claimed to be a Lululemon supplier. However, a Lululemon spokesperson told the outlet that just 3% or thereabouts of the company's finished goods are manufactured in mainland China.

The specific nature of the remark is indeed for a reason, as the provided list of manufacturing partners on the Lululemon website revealed that manufacturers from "China Mainland" were categorized separately from "Taiwan."

Other locations like Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka appeared many times on the list of partners.

Other widely circulated video included $100 alleged Gucci products sold for just $1.49, while another factory boasted laundry pods being sold at a rate of 20 units for $1.

One auto-parts factory promoted a woman in a grime-covered location around dozens of engines who sang, "Many auto parts in my factory, if you need auto parts you can find me."

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Chinese official avows Beijing is behind cyberattacks on US, identifies motive: Report



U.S. officials and tech companies have long understood that the communist regime in Beijing has orchestrated numerous significant cyberattacks on American institutions and critical infrastructure. In a secret December meeting, Chinese officials apparently admitted as much and identified a major reason for doing so: America's continued support for the island nation of Taiwan.

A pair of anonymous sources said to be familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that Chinese officials met with elements of the outgoing Biden administration during a December summit in Geneva that was led by Nate Fick, the State Department's then-ambassador at large for cyberspace and digital policy.

Whereas previously, China has played off Volt Typhoon — its hacker outfit tasked with espionage and information gathering — as a criminal crew of rogue hackers or the product of Western fantasy, the Chinese delegation apparently acknowledged that it was indeed a state-backed enterprise.

According to Microsoft, Volt Typhoon has pursued "development of capabilities that could disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia region during future crises."

Blaze News previously reported that Volt Typhoon — distinct from Salt Typhoon, the Chinese state-sponsored hacker group that recently compromised at least eight American telecommunications companies, enabling Beijing to spy on the Trump and Harris presidential campaigns — has hit critical infrastructure in Guam and other American regions, affecting communications, manufacturing, transportation, government, maritime, and other sectors.

The U.S. National Security Agency, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI, and various allied cybersecurity agencies in the Anglosphere issued a joint advisory in 2023 highlighting "a recently discovered cluster of activity of interest" associated with the group. In their advisory, the cybersecurity groups noted that "one of [Volt Typhoon's] primary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) is living off the land, which uses built-in network administration tools to perform their objectives."

The New York Times reported at the time that while the Volt Typhoon attacks on the U.S. presently amount to a likely espionage campaign, "the Chinese could use the code, which is designed to pierce firewalls, to enable destructive attacks, if they choose."

In January 2024, the Department of Justice announced that it had disrupted certain efforts by Volt Typhoon to "target America's critical infrastructure using a botnet."

Former FBI Director Christopher Wray noted, "Volt Typhoon malware enabled China to hide as they targeted our communications, energy, transportation, and water sectors."

According to current and former U.S. officials, Wang Lei, a senior cyber official with China's ministry of foreign affairs, not only acknowledged the infrastructure hacks at the December 2024 summit but indicated that they were executed in response to the American military's backing of Taiwan.

Wang's comments were reportedly in response to American officials' suggestion that China's prepositioning in civilian infrastructure could be viewed as an act of war.

U.S. officials told the Journal that while the Chinese delegates at the summit did not explicitly state that Beijing was directly responsible for the group and its actions, "American officials present and others later briefed on the meeting perceived the comments as confirmation of Beijing's role and was intended to scare the U.S. from involving itself if a conflict erupts in the Taiwan Strait."

Dakota Cary, a China expert at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, told the Wall Street Journal that an official such as Wang would acknowledge the cyberattacks only if told to do so by Xi Jinping's regime and that doing so would likely serve to signal to the inbound Trump administration the stakes of America's involvement with Taiwan.

The State Department did not comment on the December meeting but told the Wall Street Journal that the Trump administration has made clear to Beijing that it will "take actions in response to Chinese malicious cyber activity."

The Chinese embassy in Washington apparently accused the U.S. of "using cybersecurity to smear and slander China" and spreading so-called disinformation.

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Upgrade to a dumbphone



I will spare you the argument against smartphones and go directly to the part where you redesign your life and your engagement with tech by switching to a dumbphone.

You’re going to come to a place and time when, as with the redeemed crackhead, the Spirit compels you to turn from your addiction and drop the pipe and the rock for good because all the myriad justifications have worn thin and have shown themselves to be empty.

There are innumerable manuals, studies, and paths related to dropping addiction. Or, if you prefer a gentler euphemism, building new habits.

Or you won’t — and, in the best-case scenario, your life will be characterized by an internal war you wage against your better self as directed by a set of parasitic algorithms.

So here's a list of suggestions about how to get into the dumbphone.

Find an alternative (for now)

If you want to go full cabin-in-the-woods, there are ways and means. Good luck out there, and meet me at the tree line. However, if you decide that staying in phone (voice and text) contact with the world of men is necessary or wise, then you’re likely looking at what we lovingly refer to as the dumbphone. We are stepping back into 2004.

We all know the Nokia stands out. (No one is sponsoring this article.) They are cheap and rugged, and the plans are flexible. Get one.

Backstop expectations

Employers, loved ones, and almost everyone else expect you to have a phone and everything that comes with it. Cut them off at the proverbial pass by building in some alternatives to those few features of the phone that are (sort of) useful.

Get a small flashlight. Buy a dumbphone with a half-decent camera.

Pick up an atlas or "Thomas Guide." If that’s not enough, perhaps it is worthwhile to retain or install some equivalent navigational aid or app in your vehicle.

Advice: Once the dopamine circuits in your brain have been stabilized, you can go back and refine your replacements. Escape need not be perfect. You’re going to find yourself on the outside; the world is now weird. Just keep refining your alternative methods.

Pick a time

As you design your way out of the smartphone trap, what’s frustrating is that almost no one is going to sympathize or know how to help. You’re on your own.

It’s quite a world where you need to justify your choice not to participate in something so strongly correlated with depression, dissatisfaction, isolation, and lifestyle choices generally at odds with those proven over huge stretches of time. (You don’t need the studies if you lived through 2008 ... or 2016 ... or 2020 ... or ...)

Pick a long weekend or vacation to make the initial change. This at least gives you some leeway to flop around and bemoan flagging levels of dopamine and do the interior work of shoring yourself up to carry through the operation.

Call in some favors

As with the above, it’s wise to tell your loved ones — especially your spouse — that your communications situation is changing. There are mixed reports regarding the value of “accountability partners” (individuals to whom you report your progress in some difficult personal change), but again, if you’re going all in, why not throw everything you’ve got at it? No doubt, husband and wife picking up the dumbphone together is only sensible.

Lay in provisions

It is always best to keep that "Thomas Guide," those comforting snacks, and the other considerations mentioned above close to hand and mind, but there are other problems to address, too. For example, there are decisions to be made about whether to keep sundry smartphone apps and resources and, if so, which ones.

The big question for many potential dumbphone users will be about social media use. As it stands, the vast majority of users are stuck to their phones for their X or Instagram fix. Both of these and probably many similar platforms are available in a desktop version. Getting used to the differences in the interfaces (assuming you’re keeping some tether to them at all) is a worthwhile preparatory step.

The situation extends, of course, to crypto wallets and apps and any other phone-based software you care to hold on to — it may be easier to let go of the smartphone if much of its supposed utility can simply be stored on a laptop or a desktop.

Power through

There are innumerable manuals, studies, and paths related to dropping addiction. Or, if you prefer a gentler euphemism, building new habits. The issue, of course, is that the modern mind, when pressed, excels at justification.

The truth of our predicament is likely that the smartphone is a symptom of a much deeper, more subtle malaise. Will reverting to a dumbphone make it feel worse? In the short term, it’s quite common in situations like these for our lives to feel even emptier without whatever was sustaining the illusion of having a genuine experience of being.

For many of us, we’ve already run the gamut of self-improvement and hacks. Dropping the phone is a choice near the tail end of that progression. It’s easy to play the aforementioned game of justification with respect to order of tasks. But it may also be necessary to address other issues before taking up the path of the dumbphone ...

Government overreach warped a law to protect the internet. Now Congress might let it die. Here’s why.



Why does Section 230 exist? Section 230 shields tech companies from liability for the user-generated content they host. If you listened to the 230 absolutists here (one of whom even has a 230 tattoo), the story of 230 might sound like a divine creation story.

In the beginning, God created Section 230. Now, the internet was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the blessings of liberty were hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be Section 230,” and there was Section 230.

So why would Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) even think about sunsetting this law, potentially returning the internet to the world of darkness? In the real story of Section 230, the government created Section 230. And that story begins with good intentions but ends with government overreach.

Let us begin with the good intentions. Imagine that, hypothetically, a rapist and human trafficker becomes a popular social media influencer on X. And one of his victims tweets that he is a rapist and human trafficker. The influencer then files a frivolous defamation lawsuit against not just the victim—but also against X for hosting her tweet.

In that situation, X can invoke the legal shield of Section 230, and the judge will dismiss the lawsuit. But that is only where the story begins, not where it ends.

Imagine that you’re in high school, and you learn from your classmates that there’s child porn of you on Twitter. Multiple people contact Twitter to take it down, and you even provide Twitter a copy of your ID when asked, but it still doesn't take it down — until a federal agent intervenes.

You sue Twitter, alleging that it violated federal child pornography laws. Twitter does not even attempt to contest that allegation. Instead, it invokes the legal shield of Section 230, and the judge dismisses your claim.

That, in a nutshell, is the real story of Doe v. Twitter: “Twitter does not argue that Plaintiffs have failed to allege a violation of Section 2252A but contend this claim is barred by CDA § 230 immunity. The Court agrees.”

In tech policy, we must analyze the full scope of a law. In Moody v. NetChoice (2024), the court chided both sides for confining their battle to the “heartland applications” of a law and for ignoring the “full scope” of the law’s coverage.

And while the 230 absolutists will defend Section 230 based on its heartland applications — defamation and other forms of tort liability — the full scope of Section 230 touches every single federal and state law, including federal child pornography laws.

Section 230 is the government. It’s a special immunity for the tech industry that’s created by the government. Under normal circumstances, the story of Doe v. Twitter should be a story where injustice triumphs because of government overreach.

Yet, when Sen. Graham and Sen. Durbin attempted to narrowly reform Section 230 for child porn alone, they were met with an apocalyptic reaction from both D.C. lobbyists and D.C. think tanks. And the worst culprits were the (corporate) libertarians who supposedly hate government overreach.

Perhaps that explains why both senators are now trying to sunset Section 230: to obtain leverage for 230 reform. In D.C., the easiest path is one where the Congress does nothing. Today, Section 230 stays the same if nothing happens. Sen. Graham and Sen. Durbin lack meaningful leverage — even if they are attempting to reform 230 for child porn alone.

But if Section 230 sunsets on January 1, 2027, it gets repealed if Congress does nothing. Now Sen. Graham and Sen. Durbin hold the leverage. And while I could speak for hours to debunk the bad (or even bad-faith) arguments against 230 reform, those bad arguments also lose their power when the people making them lose their leverage.

No immunity for child porn does not mean, for example, that a tech company would be directly liable for every piece of child porn that a user posts. No federal or state law imposes such strict liability — in part because that would be unconstitutional under Smith v. California (1959). For all this talk of how Section 230 is “the Internet’s First Amendment,” repealing Section 230 would not repeal the actual First Amendment.

No immunity for child porn does mean, however, that if any incident like Doe v. Twitter were to repeat itself, government overreach would not block the victims from seeking justice.

America’s technological horizon



What would happen if the supply of the world’s most advanced chips was suddenly cut off? Supply chains would be devastated, prices of goods would surge, and innovation would come to a screeching halt. This isn't science fiction; it's a potential reality with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company at its center. Based in Taiwan, TSMC currently manufactures 92% of the world's most advanced chips, powering devices from smartphones to automobiles, from health care devices to military equipment. Geopolitically, it's not an exaggeration to say that TSMC is the single most important piece on the global chessboard. The question then becomes: What does this mean for America?

Believe it or not, America was once the leading nation in semiconductor manufacturing and technology up until the 1980s. Then, poor leadership led to a significant decline that resulted in, among other things, manufacturing being moved overseas. This hollowed out America's manufacturing capability. In short, we lost control of the semiconductor manufacturing life cycle to foreign nations. As a result, America has become dangerously dependent on others for what is undoubtedly one of the most critical technologies for any civilization. After 40 years, America has made a move to regain control of its own future.

In May of 2020, TSMC announced its intention to build and operate an advanced semiconductor fabrication facility in America, specifically in Phoenix, Arizona. As of early 2025, TSMC Arizona has begun volume production of its 4-nanometer chip technology in the first constructed fabrication building. Construction of the second fabrication building is well under way. Ultimately, six fabrication buildings will stand in the dry landscape of northern Phoenix. This more than $65 billion project is a massive win for America.

To understand the significance better, let's review the benefits related to the economy, technology, and national security. Starting with the economy, TSMC's investment is projected to generate thousands of direct manufacturing jobs, with estimates ranging from around 6,000 to 7,000. Additionally, it is expected to create tens of thousands more indirect jobs through construction and related industries. Moreover, establishing a major semiconductor manufacturing base in America can catalyze the development of a local supply chain, potentially enticing other technology companies and suppliers to establish operations in the vicinity, thereby fostering a thriving tech manufacturing ecosystem.

The technological and innovation benefits include regaining technological leadership, boosting research and development, and diversifying manufacturing. By manufacturing the most cutting-edge chips in America, the country can reclaim some of its lost ground in semiconductor technology, thereby elevating its standing in global tech innovation. With such close proximity between TSMC and other high-tech companies and research institutions, we can expect increased collaboration, which will likely boost innovation in American semiconductor technology. Perhaps most importantly, with TSMC building advanced chips domestically, supply chain disruptions that start elsewhere in the world can be mitigated or even unfelt.

Last but certainly not least is national security. By reducing reliance on overseas manufacturing for critical technology components, national security is enhanced by mitigating vulnerabilities stemming from Taiwan's geopolitical situation. If you didn't know, China and Taiwan have ongoing political disputes that, if escalated, would be devastating to the entire world, including China. Therefore, domestic production of advanced chips fortifies military technology capabilities, ensures that sensitive technologies are more securely managed, and affords America the luxury of not being so "hands-on" with the geopolitical goings-on between foreign nations.

TSMC's decision to invest heavily in semiconductor manufacturing in America isn't just about business; it's a strategic move with profound implications for economic prosperity, technological sovereignty, and national security. The establishment of these facilities in Arizona marks a significant step toward rekindling America's once-dominant role in the tech industry. The economic benefits are clear, with thousands of jobs and the potential for a vibrant tech ecosystem. Technologically, this move could catapult America back into the forefront of innovation, particularly in semiconductor technology. From a security perspective, it reduces the risks associated with geopolitical tensions, ensuring that the backbone of modern technology isn't held hostage by international disputes. As we move forward, the TSMC project in Arizona not only promises to reshape America’s manufacturing landscape but also reasserts America's commitment to being at the cutting edge of global technology. The future, powered by chips made in America, looks not only brighter but also more secure.