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TSMC is the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world and they have technology and manufacturing processes literally no one else has. As of right now thei
by Etheryte 3y ago
TSMC is the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world and they have technology and manufacturing processes literally no one else has. As of right now their market cap is roughly $500B. Surely they hold information that's worth more than $70M.
- s3p 3y agoI mean maybe but that is completely unrelated to what OP is asking. He's questioning whether they would have the ability and the authority to move that amount of money to a criminal.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yellow_lead 3y agoYeah, but that info isn't in this dump. Most of it probably isn't even on paper but in the minds of their top employees.
- silviot 3y agoIf that's true those employees could be kidnapped for a high ransom...
- bigmattystyles 3y agoInstitutional knowledge is more akin to the ship of Theseus. Good companies know this, after all, even super knowledgeable employees sometimes look the wrong way when crossing the street.
- marcosdumay 3y agoThat's a much higher bar than hacking into some computers. And also, as people pointed, unless you are wholesale kidnapping enough people to fill a prison, it doesn't work like that.
- bluGill 3y agoYou would need most of the people. One high level person is meaningless. Sure you can say "Dave" knows everything, but any smart company knows Dave could retire, or die at anytime and so the important stuff he knows is spread among a bunch of other people. Often it is also written down, just not in an easy format.
- alias_neo 3y agoI'm aware of their position; The info in this dump is probably worth little not nothing, but, the interesting conversation to me is whether even if someone did get some of their secret sauce, could they really build another TSMC, or even something similar?
- bluGill 3y agoSure, given a billion dollar budget, few years to work, and a legal environment that lets them use those stolen secrets. It can't be done cheap, overnight, or where the legal environment doesn't allow it. Really only China, while plenty of places have smart engineers, the rest cannot get the rest together (and if they tried it would kill their economy). Note that TSMC depends on other companies for various parts. Without those they need even more money and time to duplicate it all. There is nothing they are doing that you can't hire engineers to duplicate. They figured it out, so anyone could. However it isn't easy, we could be talking about hundreds of billions of dollars.
- kortilla 3y agoA billion dollars is not enough. The cutting edge tech for euv lithography isn’t even TSMCs. TSMC does not have secrets that put them ahead. It’s all about the culture of operations efficiency and just being first to invest in actually implementing cutting edge tech.
- bluGill 3y agoThe lithography is one of the technologies needed that if they can't get can bump this up to a lot more than a billion dollar. It can still be duplicated, but it will take more time and $$$.
- adfhaidfonio 3y agoHell no. ASML is the only company that sells certain equipment needed for photolithography. These machines are physically large and sell for hundreds of millions of dollars. Their export is regulated by multiple governments and international treaties. There are intelligence agencies tracking every single one of those machines and ensuring they don't fall into the wrong hands. This is just one fatal flaw with the plan.
- throwaway290 3y ago> they have technology and manufacturing processes literally no one else has What, not even ASML that literally sells them that tech?:) No need to over dramatize.