Senate Democrats Seek Suspension of TSMC Deal | Hacker News Reader

Senate Democrats Seek Suspension of TSMC Deal

eetasia.com

In my perfect world, governments wouldn’t rip me off by spending my tax dollars on their favored industries.

But we live in the real world and China throws money to undermine US industry. Letting all of our knowledge of how to build actual things leave the country is a strategic blunder. Not just chips, but everything! And 3D printing hasn’t enabled us to print whatever we need in an emergency. We need this knowledge for national defense.

So if we want to print a few billion dollars and hand it to Taiwan, whatever. Drop in the bucket compared to the $7 trillion printed this year. Democrats are making a mistake.

Dammit - the TSMC fab would have a been an awesome boost for Phoenix...

Just when you think you got a lil good news, some politician gotta screw it up

> In a May 19 letter addressed to U.S Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, the senators requested the two Trump administration cabinet members to “cease any such negotiations or discussions” until the relevant authorization and appropriations committees have been briefed on plans, including any commitments the two departments have made to funding, tax breaks, licenses, or other incentives.

Do such deals normally require the approval of Congress?

No.

And despite the language here, they don’t really have a way of stopping this from happening.

>Do such deals normally require the approval of Congress?

Not that I'm aware of...

This is clearly very related to efforts to take TSMC away from China.

Conjecture:

This new fab was announced the same day as restrictions on TSMC selling chips to Huawei, it's 2nd biggest customer.

Presumably behind closed door negotiations, TSMC made clear that if they were banned by us from selling chips to China, they'd just split the company into a "China branch" who breaks these US rules and a "USA branch" that follows US sanctions.

To preempt that, the US government offered a sweet deal to TSMC, to start a fab in the US with massive subsidies, on condition they didn't move any more tech to China.

TSMC has been used by Taiwan as a strategic - only we can do this- car by the Taiwanese government for a while. China started a effort to create a advanced foundry independently. The USA has global foundries and Intel. This is another effort.

TSMC was already loosing their monopoly.

TSMC's chip fabrication tech is world leading, and is vital for thousands of other industries. Nearly every computing device has some of TSMC's parts in, and if TSMC tech was restricted, performance metrics would decrease across a lot of industries.

That's why both China and the US are offering TSMC sweetheart deals to not sell tech to the other.

Whoever loses this battle will probably be left 3 years behind in CPU and GPU performance. Which in turn will make them dead in smartphones, laptops/desktops, cloud computing, scientific simulations, etc.

You really think China is going just sit back and allow Huawei to be cut off from any sort of leading edge IC manufacturing.

I would not be too surprised if TMSC helps to start up a fab with plausible deniability on the mainland catering solely for Chinese production.

China already has a multi tens of billions of dollar project to do that.

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