This will be a six-phase program supposedly and the first $12 billion won't be spent for the next several years so speculation becomes an academic exercise. Fire up your google translate:
https://udn.com/news/story/7240/5284669
I grew up in Chandler in the 80s and 90s in the shadow of Intel and Motorola. Generally speaking, there's very little downside to this whole thing except a generational over-investiture. Intel is years behind TSMC in semiconductor manufacturing capacity and semiconductor plants just don't last. They're infill sites when they get redeveloped and not brownfields--I believe the only waste product from Intel on Chandler Blvd was basically purified water.
TSMC should be a clean plant, but as far as its petrochemical suppliers, who knows. I have expressed reservations about traditionally dirty industries located in North Phoenix but I presume site-selection teams will probably put them in Casa Grande or the West and East Valleys by rail access where feedstocks are ample.
What strikes me as odd about this is TSMC is hiring and internally sourcing up to 1,000 engineers (this means almost everything these days) to staff the plant in the immediate phase. I have
this book in my small Phoenix library and it goes into a bit of the relationship Phoenix had with Taiwan back then. In retrospect, this could have been anticipated, but who knows.
So rather than just being a manufacturing center like I had anticipated, TSMC also wants this to be a design center. A lot of that depends on their ability to attract engineers from elsewhere, and I think Northern California could come through. Silicon Valley is a design center with I don't think any actual fabs anymore so that labor supply is there. I don't think there will be any cultural impact beyond a slight uptick in dim sum places tbqh.
The question of how did Chandler, etc change with Intel is hard to answer because Intel built on the far reaches of the city when almost nothing was there.
What did happen was that there was a "there" there--rather than being something like a purposeless, middle-rate generic sprawl district like Superstition Springs or wherever else that developed around the same time, an actual job and employment center happened instead. Part of this is an accident of geography--there would always be more East Mesa but not so much South Chandler/Tempe. The land values have always done better in the latter and I expect this to be duplicated in the TSMC site.
Finally, as for direct environmental effects--TSMC does not typically sprawl. The above link has a massively dense industrial complex like their suppliers. But it makes no sense to speculate without things like lot coverages and tree & shade master plans because none of the zoning documents mean anything right now to my knowledge. When a site plan is submitted is the time to think about that.
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