Honestly, this is a no-brainer from Taiwan’s POV. The second our economies can get by without Taiwan is the second various governments start questioning whether it’s worth it to ally with them, especially with China trying to undermine Taiwan and anybody who supports them all they can.
In a bizarre way, semiconductor manufacturing for Taiwan has become like nuclear weapons are for other countries.
They’ve made themselves effectively uninvadable because doing so would be an absolute catastrophe for everyone else, including the aggressor.
It’s shocking how much it lines up with MAD doctrine, yet in a completely non-lethal way.
I want advanced semiconductor manufacturing to be less centralised, but Taiwan would be foolish to give up this leverage and security.
Plus all the MAGA dorks that’ll be in charge keep talking about cancelling the CHIPS Act which probably impacts decision making…
It’s pretty wild…my company recently spent 2.5 billion for fab upgrade, spent the money, and applied for chips act money about a year into the process. As far as I know we haven’t received any yet and I hope it goes through because I’m sure a lot of good and honest people will lose their jobs if the company needs to find whatever Chips act was gonna pay.
The natural alliance of any Asian country is with Chinese trade. Especially in tech, where Chinese market is 5x that of US, and Asian market larger than the hegemon colonial universe. Sure, countries want independence, but prosperity comes from peace and trade. The US has to spend a lot to “shit disturb” the region.
They’ve made themselves effectively uninvadable because doing so would be an absolute catastrophe for everyone else, including the aggressor.
The best part of global trade is peace it provides. There is a limit to how aggressive the US can be to China, including its Taiwan proxy, before the US and Taiwan become useless to rest of world. But keeping tech out of China is like the drug trade. There exists a nominally respectful of US country willing to turn a blind eye to smuggling/cut outs, and US is forced to buy nominal respect. China also is heavily investing into a delete America program that will eventually achieve success/parity with Taiwan, and with Huawei, seems ahead of schedule.
How is it that no one else anywhere is able to replicate this fabrication process?
It is extremely complex, requires half a dozen countries just to do, and requires incredible education and extremely long work hours.
I wonder what kind of securities Taiwan needs in order to bargain with china about it.
Joining NATO, being able to be officially recognised as a sovereign country without immediate sanctions by China against whoever did that? Permanent stationing of western troops?
I feel as if China giving up the claim to Taiwan in exchange for Taiwan’s product capabilities to be made available within the mainland China would lead to China becoming the new global superpower for sure.
Their security guarantees involve “we will melt our chip foundries to slag if the PRC invades”. That’s not a joke. That’s an official element of their strategic defense policy. They are pointedly tying the bleeding edge of semiconductor manufacturing - which corresponds to a very fucking big chunk of the global economy - to their sovereignty and territorial integrity. And it’s frankly an extremely shrewd policy.
I haven’t kept up. Are they still 10 years ahead of their competitors? I know they had better yields than, let’s say, Samsung.
TSMC is literally the gold alchemists of the 21st century. And China will swoop them up once doofus trump stops supporting Taiwan when we get their manufacturing within boarders
Oh, let there be no mistake, Trump doesn’t give a damn about manufacturing inside our borders. Trump wants to do what the companies pay him to do. It’ll be the US corporations that have to allow the invasion of Taiwan, I suspect that he’ll have a vested interest in keeping Taiwan around.
Thankfully for Taiwan it takes more than 4 years to build and bring up a state of the art fab at a new tech node.
Taiwan making their position clear to Trump
Sounds like they feel they have enough leverage over US companies where they can keep the leading edge node “exclusive” to in-country manufacturing.
And they do have very strong leverage.
I like Taiwan (I admire China as a civilization, and the democratic part of it especially), but chip production should be decentralized.
Bleeding edge is good and all, but there are plenty of applications where you don’t need anything near bleeding edge. While centralized production means centralization around one specific chain of countries involved in that production. A major center somewhere else would most likely have a different chain. A few major centers - even more. That would create redundancy and improve competitiveness.
