[sopchi]

I was very surprised to find in the recent New Yorker long article about Chinese-Taiwanese Relations [1] that TSMC was only mentioned at the very end. I was expecting this to be central to the story. I recommend reading the whole thing to anyone who has an hour to spare.

"One of the most important deterrents to war is Taiwan’s role in producing semiconductors. Seventy per cent of the world’s most advanced chips are manufactured there, many of them at the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. [...] China is similarly reliant on the highest-end chips produced in Taiwan; it doesn’t have the equipment or the expertise to manufacture them. If China seized control of Taiwan’s semiconductor factories, it could conceivably force local workers to run them. But the factories depend on a constant flow of Western material, software, expertise, and engineers, without which production would cease in a matter of weeks. Pottinger told me, “If the Chinese took the factories, there’s no way the West would help run them.”"

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/21/a-dangerous-ga...