{"id":4948,"date":"2025-11-03T20:02:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T20:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/?p=4948"},"modified":"2025-11-03T20:03:50","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T20:03:50","slug":"another-tech-summit-shifts-from-west-coast-to-arizona-as-state-rises-in-advanced-manufacturing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/2025\/11\/03\/another-tech-summit-shifts-from-west-coast-to-arizona-as-state-rises-in-advanced-manufacturing\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Tech Summit Shifts from West Coast to Arizona as State Rises in Advanced Manufacturing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The following excerpt comes from an article published in the Phoenix Business Journal<\/em> by George Gilder on Friday, October 31. It explains why we have moved COSM, our annual conference on the converging technologies remaking the world as we know it, from Seattle to Phoenix. We invite you to join the brightest minds Nov. 19-21 to explore the future of emerging technologies. Register at cosm.tech<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How did Arizona suddenly surge into the center of transformative new technology?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For nearly 50 years, we have held COSM tech conferences around the country. Nearly all took place in Seattle, where Microsoft and Amazon reign, or in Silicon Valley, home to Intel, Meta, Google, and hundreds of tech vendors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this year, all our sensors and signaling devices lit up whenever we cite Arizona. Why your state?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

It helps when attaching its future to Phoenix is the world’s near-monopoly manufacturer of leading-edge microchips for everything from iPhones to hyperscale data centers for artificial intelligence. Such devices are projected to generate trillions of dollars of new value for the U.S. economy over the next decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m referring to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a 1,100-acre site in North Phoenix, the company is spending an estimated $165 billion to build six new wafer-fabs, the most complex and intricate factories ever built. These fabs will require hundreds of megawatts of electrical power, consume vast amounts of ultrapure water, and depend on machines so precise that a single fleck of dust can botch a million-dollar wafer. Alone in the world, TSMC’s complexes can fabricate chips in volume with features as small as two billionths of a meter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The scale is staggering. TSMC’s first three fabs have already created thousands of high-tech jobs and five times that number in support employment. They are projected to generate more than $33 billion in new economic output for Arizona and $1.4 billion in tax revenues. This is not merely a milestone for Arizona. It is the largest single foreign industrial investment in U.S. history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Intel’s vast Ocotillo campus in Chandler, built over decades, now finds itself rivaled by this new commitment. And Arizona’s role does not stop there. Companies like Microchip, Infineon, and NXP add further weight to the state’s status as a technology powerhouse. Together, these projects are cementing Arizona as the linchpin of America’s future in AI, autonomous vehicles, medicine, defense and beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Future of technology being built in Arizona<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

But why is this particular year so ‘COSMic’ for Arizona? After all, TSMC announced its plans five years ago. The difference now is momentum. Recent reports suggest TSMC is ahead of schedule, already delivering its first chips to Apple and ramping up full production of four-nanometer devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is why COSM, the technology summit I helped found, is moving from Seattle to Arizona on Nov. 19-21 at the Hilton Scottsdale Resort & Villas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The decision reflects a simple truth: the future of technology is being built here. Just as the rise of Microsoft and Amazon once made Seattle a magnet for innovation, Arizona’s semiconductor leadership now makes it the place where the next chapter begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as Arizona seizes this moment, the questions before us grow sharper. Does it really require sprawling gigawatt data centers spread over thousands of acres to mimic human minds that consume only a dozen watts? Could breakthroughs, from wafer-scale engines to optical computing, upend today’s hyperscale models, much as IBM’s mainframes were displaced in the 1970s? With billions in subsidies flowing to established technologies, will disruptive innovators once again rewrite the script?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are some of the questions we will examine in Scottsdale this November. But the larger story belongs to Arizona itself. By anchoring the most advanced technologies of our time, the state has become a proving ground for innovation and a symbol of where human ingenuity is headed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The future has arrived in Arizona. The only question now is how boldly we will build on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following excerpt comes from an article published in the Phoenix Business Journal by George Gilder on Friday, October 31. It explains why we have moved COSM, our annual conference on the converging technologies remaking the world as we know it, from Seattle to Phoenix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":4951,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"coauthors":[105],"class_list":["post-4948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cosm","post_format-post-format-quote"],"acf":[],"author_names":["George Gilder"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4948"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4948"}],"wp:action-assign-author":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post\/4948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}