Earlier this week, Tim Culpan (of Culpium newsletter fame), claimed that TSMC Arizona's flagship Fab 21 production facility experienced a major power cut around mid-September. The Taipei-based journalist has gathered information about this unfortunate incident from unnamed semiconductor industry figures. An unwanted interruption—supposedly caused by an outsourced industrial gas vendor—affected: "the flow of crucial inputs needed for chip making, forcing the facility to shut down for at least a few hours...As a result, the company had to scrap thousands of wafers that were in production for clients at the site which include Apple, NVIDIA, and AMD." Earlier today, a TSMC representative confirmed—to Tom's Hardware—that a power outage did occur, but did not disclose any details regarding the loss of wafers.

The Culpium insider article loosely connects the aforementioned incident to an apparent drop in TSMC Arizona profits—around the third quarter of this year. Culpan outlined some minor fallout effects: "impact to clients is likely to be negligible, I was told, and the financial loss to TSMC may be covered by insurance. Capacity at Fab 21 is still quite small, and many products being made there have already been taped out and manufactured in Taiwan previously. In past disruptions, lost production and revenue was made up in the subsequent quarter." Roughly ten months ago, the semiconductor giant's home operations were affected by an earthquake . Industry moles reckoned that (up to) 20,000 wafers were damaged during this wave of seismic activity; deemed to be very minor setback. The various fabs apparently bounced back swiftly into 24/7 production mode.