[nixcraft]

TSMC is at risk due to geopolitical tensions, particularly between China and the USA. These risks led to Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway selling its stake in TSMC. Investors are worried about that. That s my best guess. Apple also opened three factories in India and other places to mitigate this risk.

[arroz]

Well NVIDIA depends entirely on TSMC

[addaon]

> Well NVIDIA depends entirely on TSMC

Yes and no. If NVIDIA loses access to TSMC due to geopolitical events, presumedly their competitors do too. There might be a couple years where they face increased competition from their own used market if they're unable to produce chis competitive with the previous generations', but at some point Samsung et. al. will catch up on capability and capacity, and NVIDIA will be as well positioned relative to their competitors to take advantage of that as they are today. The only case where this would be significantly different is if one of NVIDIA's major competitors was independent of TSMC and thus could use the lean times for NVIDIA to leapfrog them; but that would require considering Intel a real competitor.

[paulmd]

Arguably in this sense their only competitors would be screwed even harder. The last non-TSMC GPU that AMD has released is based on GloFo 12nm/14nm, NVIDIA would actually be ahead with Samsung 8nm. Intel's only dGPUs are TSMC as well, they flatly don't have a product without TSMC.

[addaon]

I think Intel's advantage in this hypothetical is access to foundry space. Porting their current CPU designs from TSMC to their own foundry is non-trivial (although it can't be that hard -- their integrated graphics are fabbed on their own process, and share quite a bit with their discrete units), but at least having completed that effort they have somewhere to go, instead of fighting over what will be extremely over-subscribed Samsung fabs.

[cykros]

NVIDIA also depends on not getting the Micron treatment from China. Or even not having China take a particularly hard line on their Micron policy and disallowing NVIDIA to import Micron chips to use in their manufacturing produce for export from China.

But, NVIDIA's heavily exposed to the LLM craze.

Do with that what you will.

[arroz]

Apple factories in India don’t lower their dependency on TSMC

[red-iron-pine]

Yeah but it does lower the dependency on Taiwan, with is the T in TSMC.

[RC_ITR]

How? iPhones were assembled in the PRC, not Taiwan (though interestingly, Foxconn the owner of both the PRC and India plants, is Taiwanese).