[postingawayonhn]

The equipment they need to manufacture the latest chips is made by a Dutch company. The US has convinced the Dutch government to ban the export of that equipment to China. If China managed to gain control of TSMC they would loose access to that equipment.

[adventured]

Plus the US can trivially exfiltrate all the IP related to TSMC before China properly takes the island. Insiders will happily turn it over for any number of reasons.

The next step if China were to move on Taiwan, other than getting all the data and IP from TSMC's internal networks, would be to spin up a US division and assign that IP to that new corporation. And then the US should try to get as many of TSMC's employees to the US that they can.

Operation Paperclip TSMC.

[cma]

The US didn't just convince them to, the US was a big part of the development of technology with a government/industry consortium in the late 90s (EUV LLC) with DARPA being a big part. That partnership worked with ASML under terms that are now letting the US have a big say in export controls.

[unionpivo]

Part of the equipment.

Sure an important part. But lets not forget that there is a lot of knowledge in TSMC too. And China is trying to slowly buy their engineers.

Intel and AMD (now Global Foundries) both had access to same Dutch company's product and they didn't or barley managed to keep up.