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The Republic of China will not allow a foreign business to acquire TSMC. Furthermore, the United States government is pumping billions of dollars into domestic
by qppo 6y ago
The Republic of China will not allow a foreign business to acquire TSMC.
Furthermore, the United States government is pumping billions of dollars into domestic semiconductor manufacturing. If Apple wants a fab, they'll build one stateside, and they'll get Uncle Sam to pay for it.
But as has been seen by market realities of the last 15 years, affordable silicon manufacturing has been driven by massive scale across all market segments, not vertical integration. To the contrary, the most vertically integrated silicon manufacturers are the ones with the slower, hotter, and more expensive products. Acquiring a fab just for Apple products would probably not make better chips cheaper.
- posguy 6y agoTSMC is literally Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, and I doubt the other leading edge fab clients like Nvidia & AMD would appreciate Apple owning TSMC. If anything, this business is too capital intensive for Apple to want to hold a foundry. Why lock yourself into one companies fabs like Intel did when you can pick between TSMC, Samsung, Intel and any other fabs that are competitive at the time? AMD split off their foundry side. Intel is using Samsung's foundries more and more. Vertical integration does not make sense given the increasing cost of new fabrication nodes.
- qppo 6y ago"the Republic of China" is the official name of the nation that governs the island of Taiwan, I was trying to be a bit facetious. I wanted to say there's no way in hell that the government that continuously faces an existential threat from the communist rulers of mainland China will let go of the single most important business to their national security. Particularly a foreign business that has cozy ties to the Chinese Communist Party and is willing to kowtow to their leadership to access their labor and markets.