Nearshoring vs Reshoring in Semiconductor Procurement

Processing a 300mm wafer at TSMC's Arizona fab costs less than 10% more than making the same wafer in Taiwan. Labour, the factor most often blamed for keeping chip production offshore, accounts for under 2% of the total. The assumption that semiconductors are too expensive to bring home is weaker than it looks, which makes nearshoring vs reshoring a live question rather than a theoretical one.

Nearshoring moves production to a neighbouring country in the same region, such as Mexico for a US buyer or Poland for a German one. Reshoring brings production entirely back to the home country. Both strategies trade unit cost in exchange for proximity and control.

Nearshoring vs Reshoring, Defined

Nearshoring and reshoring differ on one axis, which is distance. Nearshoring relocates production to a nearby country that still offers a labour or land cost advantage. Reshoring returns it to the buyer's own country, accepting the highest cost base in exchange for the shortest supply line and the tightest regulatory control. Onshoring describes the same destination, covering any decision to produce domestically, including capacity that was never offshore to begin with, which is why the two terms get used interchangeably.

Neither strategy describes what most electronics manufacturers are actually doing. McKinsey's December 2025 supply chain risk pulse survey of around 100 global supply chain leaders found 39% pursuing dual sourcing for components or raw materials, against 33% developing supplier nearshoring or onshoring plans. Among those facing tariff impacts, 45% were increasing their inventories as a mitigation measure.

Below, we summarise a few of the strategies companies use to decide their manufacturing operations:

What a Reshored Wafer Production Actually Costs

Reshoring semiconductor production costs less than is often assumed, largely because of automation. TechInsights' 2025 analysis reported by Tom's Hardware found that processing a 300mm wafer at TSMC's Arizona fab costs less than 10% more than the same wafer made in Taiwan. Equipment accounts for well over two-thirds of wafer cost, and Toolmakers like ASML and Applied Materials price identically across regions.

Labour Costs Across the Semiconductor Value Chain

Labour, the factor usually assumed to drive the gap, came to less than 2% of the total cost in advanced wafer fabrication. US wages run roughly triple Taiwan's, and it barely registers, which is the paradoxical part of the picture for an industry widely assumed to be too expensive to bring home.

The Switching Costs That Break Reshoring Budgets

Beyond unit cost, switching costs are the biggest pressure on reshoring budgets. Transition inventory, capital expenditure, supplier ramp-up, and requalification all occur before the first compliant part ships, and SAP's analysis of nearshoring realities notes that these are often miscalculated. Reshoring Initiative founder Harry Moser told a US House Small Business Committee hearing in November 2025 that when companies move from ex-works price comparisons to total cost of ownership, the US win rate rises from 8% to 32%.

[Compare your current part costs against traceable inventory]

The Benefits of Reshoring for Semiconductor Buyers

In the 2025 Reshoring Survey, OEMs put manufacturing located near engineering joint top of their reasons to reshore, at 45%, level with reduced freight and duty costs, ahead of avoiding geopolitical risk at 38%. Four benefits recur in the procurement context.

1. Faster engineering change orders. A shorter distance between design and manufacturing tightens the feedback loop on revisions, which matters on programmes where a BOM changes repeatedly before it freezes.
2. Regulatory and traceability alignment. RoHS, REACH, conflict minerals and cyber-resilience documentation come from a supplier operating under the same regime as the buyer.
3. Reduced tariff exposure. Domestic production reduces exposure to changes in import tariffs on the finished component.
4. Government incentives. Incentives were the single most cited reason in the Reshoring Initiative's 2024 data, appearing in 736 citations.
5. Segment the BOM by concentration and criticality. Identify the parts that are both exclusively supplied and would stop a line, since that is the segment where risk mitigation, including partial onshoring, becomes relevant.
6. Price the whole switch, not the part. Add up total landed cost-plus requalification, transition inventory, tooling and ramp-up, then compare on total cost of ownership rather than ex-works price, since that reframing lifts the domestic win rate from 8% to 32% in Reshoring Initiative data.
7. Check the calendar against the risk. If the exposure lands this year and the new capacity lands late this decade, the two timelines do not meet, and a buffer component or an additional supplier covers the interval.
8. Test tariff and export-control sensitivity. The US brought in a 25% Section 232 tariff on certain advanced logic chips in January 2026, so model what a duty at that level, or a new export-control regime, does to each candidate.
9. Plan the exit. Decide before you switch what happens to remaining parts, open orders and long-lead commitments, because that decision determines whether resilience shows up as a cost or a recovery.

As a result, investment followed. Computer and electronic products accounted for 86,127 announced US jobs in 2024, the largest share of any industry, according to the Reshoring Initiative's annual data.

Reshoring Disadvantages Procurement Teams Underestimate

Reshoring's main constraints are time, talent and residual concentration risk. New fab capacity takes years to move from announcement to qualified volume production, so a procurement team facing a shortage this quarter gains little from a fab breaking ground.

How Long Does Reshoring Take to Deliver Capacity

Europe's experience makes the timing question concrete. The European Court of Auditors found in 2025 that the EU is very unlikely to hit its target of a 20% share of the global microchip market by 2030. The EU held 9.8% by value in 2022 and is projected to reach 11.7% by 2030, against a target that would require nearly quadrupling capacity. Of the €86 billion attributed to the Chips Act through 2030, the Commission contributes about 5%.

Talent Shortages in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Talent is the harder constraint. Building the fab shell is the solvable part, whereas finding the specialist engineers to run it takes considerably longer, and every region adding capacity is recruiting from the same limited pool.

Why Reshoring Does Not Remove Single-Vendor Risk

Reshoring relocates concentration risk rather than removing it. A single domestic supplier is still a single supplier, so swapping a Taiwanese sole supplier for an Arizonan one leaves the same structural exposure in a different place.

Reshoring and Nearshoring Trends in Manufacturing Supply Chains

Trade data in recent years shows more production moving between countries than back home, and nearshoring needs no new fab to achieve that. Kearney's 2026 data show US imports from Mexico rising 8% between 2024 and 2025, driven mainly by a $47 billion increase in computer and electronics imports. China's direct share of US imports fell below 10%, down from 20% four years earlier, a $135 billion decline. Yet the other 13 Asian low-cost countries gained $193 billion over the same period, more than China lost.

Fictiv's 2025 State of Manufacturing report puts 68% of leaders prioritising onshoring to the US as a supply chain strategy, compared with 50% pursuing nearshoring, with nearshoring to Mexico steady at 46% for a second year.

What the Evidence Says About Semiconductor Supply Chain Management

Researchers have tested the two approaches against each other directly. OECD researchers Cyrille Schwellnus, Antton Haramboure and Lea Samek modelled a shock to Chinese production and found geographical diversification would reduce the hit to output in the most exposed downstream industries by up to 25%. Partial onshoring on top of that diversification "would only have very limited additional benefits."

European Central Bank research on the pandemic period found a similar pattern in French firm-level customs data. Exporters held up better when their most significant imported inputs came from more than one country.

Teams that cope best are the ones that qualified the second supplier before they needed it. Doing it mid-disruption is slow and costly

Geography is not the only variable. SAP's analysis argues that digital integration across supply chain nodes matters more than proximity, since real-time tracking and visibility into tier-two and tier-three suppliers are constrained by operating model rather than by borders. AI is taking on much of that matching and monitoring work, which shifts part of the resilience question from where a part is made to how quickly a buyer learns it is at risk.

The Excess Inventory Every Sourcing Shift Creates

Shortage and excess used to alternate. Now they run simultaneously, and a single BOM can carry both. Our semiconductor mid-year review for 2026 found memory constrained years out, with DRAM pricing up 125% and NAND up 234%, while non-AI consumer components sat in surplus on the same shelves.

Dual sourcing widens that gap. Qualifying a second part number where one used to do so, then holding buffer parts against a shortage that may never arrive, leaves components that stop being assets. Component Sense has redistributed more than 64 million components globally, returning up to 70% of value through Consignment and up to 100% through InPlant™.

How to Choose Between Nearshoring and Reshoring

The decision works best part by part rather than across the whole company at once, since segmentation by product, volume and criticality drives where each strategy fits. Five steps structure the analysis:

Working through those five usually produces a mixed answer rather than a single strategy, with different lines on the same BOM pointing in different directions.

Clear the Inventory Your Sourcing Shift Leaves Behind

Whichever direction you move, the parts you no longer need do not disappear. Dual sourcing, regional duplication and requalification all leave surplus behind, and that surplus loses value every month it sits on a shelf.

Component Sense turns it back into cash and keeps it in the industry rather than in a landfill. Submit your excess list, and we will identify the manufacturers who need those exact parts and handle the traceability documentation. We also plant two trees for every order.