It's pretty easy to send chips as freight. They are small and valuable, so the price density per unit volume (or specific price per unit weight) is high. They d

It's pretty easy to send chips as freight. They are small and valuable, so the price density per unit volume (or specific price per unit weight) is high. They don't fall apart if you jostle them and they survive at lots of different temperatures. If we can ship bananas from Guatemala to Portland before they turn yellow, I'm certain that we could send chips from a Western fab to an Eastern assembly plant. I think the bigger challenge is perhaps getting the boules/substrates. My understanding is that the best ones come from Japan, and if your fab yield is low, you're getting far more raw inputs than finished outputs. One solution to that problem would be to make the silicon crystal in the same region as the fabs. Another would be to set up a distributor corporation that buys in massive bulk to get shipping costs down, then slowly sells off inventory to manufacturers. There are some essential chemicals involved in semiconductor fabrication as well, but I think you can probably find those in any region of the first world.