Phoenix
Built on 1,800-year-old Hohokam canals, Phoenix is now America's semiconductor hub—TSMC's $165B investment, Intel's $7.87B CHIPS funding, 140,000+ chip jobs. Same pattern: engineer the desert.
Phoenix exists because infrastructure existed before Phoenix. Beginning around 200 CE, the Hohokam civilization dug 250 miles of canals from the Salt River—the largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere. At their height, 80,000 people farmed corn, squash, beans, and cotton in the Sonoran Desert. Then, around 1450 CE, they disappeared. Their canals remained.
In 1867, a former Confederate soldier named Jack Swilling saw those ancient ditches and recognized opportunity. Using Mexican laborers, he retrenched the Hohokam canals, and by 1868 settlers were growing wheat and barley from Salt River water. Englishman Lord Darrell Duppa named the settlement Phoenix: "A city will rise phoenix-like, new and beautiful, from these ashes of the past." The name was literal—the modern city rose from ancient infrastructure. Portions of those Hohokam canals, now concrete-lined, still supply Phoenix's water through the Salt River Project.
The pattern of building infrastructure to transform desert into habitable land continues. Air conditioning made summer survivable. The Central Arizona Project canal, completed in 1993, brings Colorado River water 336 miles across the desert. And now semiconductors: TSMC's $165 billion investment—one of the largest foreign direct investments in US history—is transforming Phoenix into America's primary chip manufacturing hub.
TSMC Arizona posted its first profit in early 2025 and broke ground on a third fab. Remarkably, yields run four percentage points higher than comparable Taiwan operations. Intel received $7.87 billion in CHIPS Act funding for its Chandler facilities, supporting 11,000 workers. The metro hosts over 140,000 semiconductor-related jobs. Semicon West, the industry's flagship conference, relocated from San Francisco to Phoenix in 2025. A $7 billion "city-within-a-city" called Halo Vista is rising next to TSMC's campus.
Population reached 1.66 million city, 4.78 million metro. By 2026, Phoenix will test whether its oldest constraint—water—limits the semiconductor boom, or whether the city can engineer its way around nature once more, as the Hohokam did two millennia ago.