TSMC are the only guys who can do 5nm, and everybody wants 5nm. It's not like you can just push a button on your AWS console and get a new 5nm fab.
I have to admit that I really take for granted how easily it is to spin up additional capacity for projects nowadays. This statement put that into focus for me.
That said, at some point if this continues, the shortages will start to affect AWS, Azure, GCM, DO, Linode, OVH, etc. capacity. And that will get nasty fast.
The pandemic showed us that the supply chain is more frail than we think. I also just finished Wages of Destruction, about economics in Nazi Germany. And at last I explored the nooks and crannies of an abandoned hospital.
It's eye-opening to see how complex a large building is, with all its pipes, wiring, and shafts. That's without considering the satellite buildings, or the specialised equipment on the actual production line.
It's also surprising to see how much depends on components and raw materials produced thousands of kilometres away.
And at last, it becomes obvious that you can't just spin up a new factory, nor can you trivially retool one or re(al)locate thousands of its workers.
Scaling up demands feats of logistics. Scaling down can bring financial ruin to entire regions.
This draws interesting parallels to the production of vaccine. You can't just throw more people at it for the same reasons.
Why not?
I mean... look at the current plague pandemic - we've been listening that you cannot just create more space in hospitals overnight, or build new rooms, and this and that... but it's not overnight... it's been a year now, and if they started building the first time they said "it cannot be done overnight", we'd have a lot of nice empty rooms now.
I remember waiting for some parts in 2002, that were delayed due to many stupid logistic issues in Korea (fifa world cup was there, then), and the excuse was the same... you cannot just make more factories overnight. Graphics card prices are overinflated, ram prices are inflated, ssd prices are inflated.... basically, anyone who starts building any form of production now, will be able to sell whatever the company puts out without issues.
I know I might sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there is either some cartel deal between huge companies (intel, amd, nvidia, qualcomm,...), to keep prices artificially high and blame parts shortage, or they're all incompetent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabricati...
There is a table on the right, and there are rougly 2-3 years between 'generations' - so 2-3 years between starting a new production line of top-of-the-line flagship (eg.) cpus, to making a new production line for even newer, "smaller" (transitors) cpus, and the old line making other, cheaper ones.
I'm not saying that Johnny Sixpack can do it in his garage, but companies like Intel, AMD, samsung, etc. surely could do it in that timeframe, because they're already doing it now.
In the end, making chips just isn't that high on the overall list of things to be able to opt.out of normal market forces. If it looks like customers will pay enough to make rapid expansion and the changes necessary to enable such rapid expansion worth it, it'll happen.
But demand is not actually that much higher than normal, and thus the investment has limits. You can be sure that everyone is working to finish their expansions as fast as possible (hundreds of billions of investment over the next few years) and get their broken-down fabs back online ASAP, but its not like they suddenly can spend massively more resources on it. Compared to big challenges like fighting COVID its overall a minor concern, and as you point out even that did not go as all-out as it could have.
A semiconductor fab typically needs several of these machines (maybe only one or two of the best machines for the smallest layers, but more of the coarser machines for the less dense layers) in order to produce chips competitively.
So here's what actually happened. Car companies cancelled their orders because there was this thing called COVID. Those slots on fabs got sold to other people in the entertainment industry because at the time it was believed people would just stay at home and the entertainment sector would need the extra fabs.
In a sudden twist of what could be called "irony", it turns out people are scared of getting on public transit during and after covid so everyone who relied on that or uber/lyft started buying cars so demand for cars went up. Car companies tried buying their slots back kicking off a giant demand hike which basically had people buying fab slots for far more than they are worth... the issue is that those ICs aren't like a graphics card.
If you don't have 5nm chips, well that's fine, you can't produce a graphics card per IC, for a car, there could be dozens of different chips. If your 30nm chips are out of stock, it doesn't matter how many 105nm chips you have in stock, you can't sell half of a car.
For example Pinole Valley High School https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2016/04/14/west-contra-costa-sc...
Google says Contra Costa County has nine high schools.
The new fab TSMC is building in Arizona is 12 BILLION DOLLARS - for a single fab.
That's 100 of these high schools for the price of a single fab facility.
Having said that, it is pretty remarkable that Apple has gotten themselves in a situation where a supplier has so much leverage over them. TSMC can set the prices and conditions and there isn't a lot anyone can do about it.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16463/snapdragon-888-vs-exyno...
Half joking
How does Huawei get those new chips at 7nm?
Sanctioning and restricting China is most certainly going to be a catalyst for a rapid development of domestic advancements (including, of course, surreptitiously stealing it from other countries/companies). Anyone who thinks China won't be right with the top makers in a few short years is fooling themselves.
Then they want to use that new economic power and convert it to military power. Then use the military power to restart a civil war and take over peaceful countries like Taiwan.
Sounds kinda dumb to not try to stop that, lol. I don't think you want to live in a purely might makes right world.
There'd be no more "might makes right" with PRC as the biggest superpower compared to the US. Just a different kind.
By what metric? Clearly a country like Nazi Germany would’ve been a bit higher on the “might makes right” scale. Thus if you critically look at the CCP, you could see they are based on autocracy and will spread autocracy.
US is based on democracy with both oligarchal and free market capitalism.