Arizona’s manufacturing boom offers potential lessons for Canada

It is no simple matter to count the construction cranes towering over the cactus and shrub of the Sonoran Desert, on a vast plot of land rapidly being transformed into one of the most sophisticated manufacturing centres on U.S. soil.

The site stretches over an area big enough that anyone prepared to lap it five times would complete a marathon. Each different angle reveals new signs of its enormity: a line of earth-movers; arched tents that create shade over stacks of palleted goods; great piles of dirt next to the skeleton of an industrial building quickly taking shape.

And this is just the beginning. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing has pledged to invest US$165-billion in Arizona, the largest foreign direct investment the U.S. has ever seen.

It is the centrepiece of a boom that has made this state home to one of the fastest-growing manufacturing sectors in the country.

U.S. President Donald Trump, and his calls for a restoration of American manufacturing greatness, is hardly the most important reason for what’s happening in Arizona. In fact, across the U.S., the opposite is true. The country is shedding manufacturing jobs – down nearly a per cent over the past year, with 12,000 lost in August alone. And new employment provided by reshoring, the process of bringing work back to American soil, has contracted by at least a third since its peak in 2022, during the Joe Biden administration.

What is happening in sun-baked Arizona, however, offers a window into how parts of the U.S. economy are nonetheless being remade, in ways that offer potential lessons for Canada.

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From 2015 to 2021, manufacturing’s contribution to Arizona GDP expanded by nearly half, almost quadruple the national average. The state’s exports rose at five times the national pace. Manufacturing employment is up 15 per cent from 2018 to 2023, some seven times the U.S. average.

“I’m a firm believer that right now is the best time in American manufacturing since World War Two – and Arizona is the best place for it,” said Weston Smith, who has, in the space of just a few years, transformed a longboard rental company from a dorm-room business into Lux Precision Manufacturing, a company etching parts for Virgin Galactic rockets and Apache helicopters out of chunks of aluminum.

Change is everywhere. Grand Canyon University, which calls itself the largest Christian university in the country, has added concentrated training for machinists and semiconductor technicians. Other community colleges have installed a clean room and model electric car assembly lines to impart real-world skills. Local schools have begun teaching children Mandarin, in the expectation that TSMC will be a major employer for generations to come. Across northern Phoenix, ancillary industries are buying up plots of land while real estate developers are raising new subdivisions in the shadow of dusty mountain peaks.

“People have a tough time believing what we’re doing here,” said Danny Seiden, president and CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry.

Some federal policies have been helpful. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in Mr. Trump’s first administration slashed corporate taxes. The CHIPS and Science Act, launched under that administration and signed into law by President Joe Biden, helped, too. TSMC alone will receive US$6.6-billion in direct funding and another $5-billion in low-cost loans under that act.

“The feds can be a force multiplier of what states are doing and doing well,” Mr. Seiden said. “Capital goes where it’s most wanted and stays where it’s most welcome.”

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But in other ways, Mr. Trump’s tariffs and policy whiplashes have hurt.

The Trump administration, Mr. Seiden said, has both attracted investment and potentially frightened it away, massively increasing the cost of visas used by tech workers and sending agents to raid a Hyundai construction site in Georgia.

Among major manufacturers, meanwhile, expansion in the U.S. is closely linked to factors that reach beyond the whims of the White House, like an imperative to be closer to customers.

“All our overseas decisions are based on customer needs, as they value some geographic flexibility, and a necessary level of government support,” TSMC chairman and CEO Dr. C.C. Wei, said on an earnings call in July.

But Arizona has also benefited from a concerted effort to rethink how it does business, led in part by a woman from North Bay, Ont.

Sandra Watson is president and CEO of the Arizona Commerce Authority, or ACA, which was created in 2011 in the wake of the great financial crisis. Arizona, with an economy deeply dependent on home-building and financial services, had shed hundreds of thousands of jobs. “We realized that Arizona’s economy was not diverse enough,” said Ms. Watson, echoing some modern-day criticisms of the Canadian economy.

State leaders replaced the commerce department with the ACA, a public-private partnership whose board is stacked with CEOs of companies and universities, with the governor as chair. The state had a legacy of making semiconductors and aircraft – Motorola began operations here in 1949; Howard Hughes began work on a Tucson missile plant two years later. The ACA set out to reinvigorate that history.

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In 2013, Ms. Watson flew to Taiwan to meet TSMC with what she calls an “unsolicited proposal” to build on Arizona soil.

In the years that followed, her office worked, too, with the White House on the CHIPS and Science Act, whose funding gave a “much-needed incentive for companies to compete on a level playing field,” Ms. Watson said.

Bringing educational institutions into the fold helped. At Grand Canyon University, electricians are now studying under the same college banner as those pursuing a doctorate in health care administration. Students from families below the poverty line are graduating into jobs that pay $50,000 and upward. Some of the programs are delivered free of tuition, funded by companies like TSMC.

For Arizona, growth in manufacturing means “we’ve got a lot of years of productivity, jobs, opportunity,” said Shelly Seitz, program manager for the university’s centre for workforce development.

But the state’s years of effort also positioned it to take advantage of the pandemic, when dramatic disruptions to supply chains raised urgent questions about the viability of dependency on critical components manufactured on the other side of an ocean.

For Mr. Smith, COVID-19 was the push into manufacturing. “Everything was being imported from China, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of boards sitting out on a ship. And I said, ‘What can I do to make our own components?’”

Now, that work is bearing fruit. Lux Precision Manufacturing is in the midst of expansion, with workers tripling in size the small company’s floor space. Mr. Smith has felt the pain of Mr. Trump’s tariffs. Much of the aluminum he uses comes from Canada, which is now considerably more expensive.

Even so, demand has been strong, in part because he does work for the defence industry, which has experienced its own boom as Russia’s war on Ukraine prompts western countries to raise defence spending.

“We’re booked up six months in advance right now,” Mr. Smith said. “And it just keeps on growing.”