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I am wondering if this concentration of capacity in Taiwan with China looming over it is really such a great idea.

• vkou 6y ago
  It's been a great idea for Taiwan, and it's been a great idea for price sensitive consumers, who don't give two figs about where in the globalized marketplace their products come from. Whether it's been a great idea for someone who isn't a price sensitive consumer doesn't matter - markets don't optimize the world for the comfort of ideologues. You can't sell ideology. If China were to successfully annex Taiwan, there would be two likely outcomes. 1. China would be difficult to sanction, because in a world with chip shortages, we can't drop our reliance on TSMC fabs. (See, also, Russia selling oil and gas to the EU, despite sanctions on it. Given the option to take the moral high ground, and using Russian natgas to not freeze to death in the winter, Germans are taking the latter, while the Department of State gnashes it's teeth.) 2. Or, as some posters on HN gleefully speculate, the TSMC fabs will be destroyed, either by TSMC, or by the United States. I'm sure that will be quite cathartic for all of thirty minutes, until we all realize that we're in for a multi-year chip shortage that makes today's problems look like nothing. Hope everyone's looking forward to half the supply, and quadruple the prices.
• fastball 6y ago
  TSMC is building a fab in AZ.
  • knowaveragejoe 6y ago
    While true, if I recall correctly that fab will be a tiny minority of TSMC's overall output.