| You are making the situation sound much less precarious than it is. The reality is that the US has only really done something in the last few years, and those changes and attempts to hedge will take a very long time to materialize. Odds are the US and Europe will never enjoy the comparative advantage Taiwan has in the semiconductor supply chain. What does that mean? One of the west’s key strategic advantages is the ability to lead in frontier compute technologies. China, in addition to rapidly working its way up the value chain and nodes, can easily mitigate much of this advantage if it deems the calculus worthwhile. It need only disrupt Taiwan and basically all leading edge fab capacity is off the table. Outside of the work Intel is doing, the US does not have leading edge fabs. We do not have the skilled workforce or supply chain to take advantage of leading edge fabs. Why is this situation with Taiwan so difficult to unwind? In the West there is a fantasy that if war breaks out, we will just load all the Taiwanese onto a starship and bring them over to the US where they will happily resume their work in OUR fabs. But they don’t want that. They want their home and ideals to be defended, and they’re willing to do the work… from their soil. The reality is the fabs are bargaining chip with the West, far better than any iron dome. The question becomes, how did we get in this position? And the answer is deliberately. The US saw putting semiconductor production in Taiwan and a way to reduce cost and challenge the Japanese, but also a way to imbed incentives into our foreign policy for protection of tenuous Taiwanese democracy and independence. We have known this for a very very long time. |
That's such a silly statement, and completely taking away the ingenuity of the Taiwanese. Taiwan(and Korea)'s semiconductor rise came specifically because the US hammered Japan's semiconductor industry in hopes of taking over their market share. It also happened in part, because the US massively attacked the RoC(Taiwan) nuclear industry, which left a lot of those engineers without a future, add on top of that a national strategy that caused two different strategies between UMC, TSMC.
This is a culmination of heavy engineering focus in Government, higher education and national support, along with a market gap created by clobbering the dominant player in the industry at the time.
What the US is doing right now does the opposite. It creates a market gap in the industry due to Taiwan being completely beholden to the US. The only reason for the rise in domestic semiconductor production and supply chain in China is specifically because the US tried to restrict China's access to these goods and in turn inadvertently created a similar situation for Taiwan that it did for Japan 1986. Leaders with cooler heads like the Mediatek CEO acknowledged as much and warned that this is what is going to happen.