A look inside TSMC

Unbundling the engineering model as the current system is highly integrated - do certain segments of the process better than the incumbents. This would be primarily a business model innovation, not an engineering one.

New architectures, as Intel have shown lately, their architecture isn't perfect. This requires a new set of design thinking from the ground up and challenging existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets. Risc V gives some hope to this idea.

Non-silicon (Photonics, GaN, Diamond, Quantum, etc.) computing technology would require new skills with different materials that the incumbents don't possess. Still years away though.

Commodity EUV and further process simplification would greatly reduce the barrier to entry but requires new uninvented engineering technology and practices.

There will probably be a continuing growth of demand for making chips, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some folks get into the market with "old" tech. So it's unlikely any one will jump in right at the bleeding edge, they may work their way up to more modern processes over time.

I could see a niche of 'home grown' fabs in various countries / regions that server local demand that is paranoid about supply chain security.

Depending on how automated you make the fabs, I wonder if it would be possible to sell "limited runs" of chips to people, kind of like book self-publishing but with VHDL/Verilog.

We can filter or recycle them but it cost a lot at scale. This is an open secret in EE schools.

There are a LOT of things to untangle. The first thing is the difference between leading edge fabrication, and everything else. If you look at this wiki list of active fabs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...), you'll see lots of plants still building stuff at 45nm+, and a large chunk building in 22-45nm.

There are only 3 main leading edge manufacturers', TSMC, Intel, and Samsung (I'm discounting Global Foundry since they publicly announced they're not chasing smaller process nodes). All of them concentration their fabs in their home country. Intel has some fabs in Ireland (I don't really know why..), Israel (Intel's Israel team is top-notch and a real contributor to Intel's success, so I guess that makes sense), and one in China (cause that's the world we live in). All of Intel's leading edge plants (10 and 7nm) are in the USA.

Of the non-leading edge plants, you'll also find that the majority of companies also concentrate their fabs in their home country, with American companies being a bit more dispersed. I would evaluate that the majority of fabs reside in a company's home country. I wager a bunch of the greater American dispersion comes from mergers/acquisitions. There's been a lot consolidation in the chip industry (at every level and vertical) in the last few decades.

I think what you're seeing isn't so much companies moving their fabs off shore. What you have is that most companies are no longer willing to invest their own R&D into pushing fabrication processes, so they stop building new fab plants, and instead look for a fabrication house to buy from. And today there's really only one choice, TSMC, which happens to be Taiwanese.

TSMC was the first company to be a "pure-play" company that did no design work and only manufactured orders. This was back in the days when the guys at Intel and IBM had the attitude that to be a real player in the industry, you had to have your own fab. But there was an increasing amount of fabless design houses in the US that would piggyback off the excess fab capacity that Intel/IBM had after they were done with their own chips, and TSMC targeted that demand by tables companies for manufacturing capacity directly.

The takeaways I got was fabs moved away from the US because TSMC and the like figured out an innovative business model that let them focus on a single part of the supply chain that provided substantial cost savings for all these new fabless companies in the US. Meanwhile, the old established players like Intel/IBM with fab experience weren't willing to hop on this new segment and kept their fab capacity mainly for making their own designs. Although TSMC started in a high capital low return segment, as opposed to fabless that could produce and capture most of the value in a chip design, the IP itself, TSMC eventually became so good at what they do and process nodes became so expensive to develop that no other US companies had the incentive to enter this segment from scratch and lose money for years before catching up with TSMC for frankly not very high returns. The only US company keeping up with TSMC is Intel, and that's because they've been manufacturing from the start and have enough volume to make investing in a fab and spreading that fixed expenditure over all their chips worth it.

The people in the C-suite are Taiwanese.

The fabs are in Taiwan. The people who operate the fabs are in Taiwan.

The people who do the R&D for all the processes live in Taiwan. The people who create the Intellectual Property live in Taiwan.

Analogously, many decades ago Mitsubishi Group, a Japanese company, bought Rockefeller Center. Ha ha. Good luck with that. If things didn't work out it's not like they could disassemble 30 Rock and put it on a boat to Japan. Unsurprisingly they no longer own it.

It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships.

TSMC's assets are in fabs that are difficult to disassemble without great expense. And the other important assets go home every night. "Foreign investment" isn't able to spirit them out of the country.

TSMC is a Taiwanese company. Who gives a fuck what some bookkeeping entries in some computer ledgers say about "foreign investment".