The bigger loss would be the more affordable talented Taiwanese engineers that the west doesn't really have. If they somehow got out of Taiwan before the fabs are destroyed, their work could be recovered relatively quickly.
I could accept it if the Taiwanese were just better at this sort of thing than Americans were, but do we really need to be offshoring strategic resources because it's too expensive to pay engineers middle-class wages?
The USA, in contrast, still imports much of the talent in this area. Our kids weren’t even very interested in computer science until recently, and software has sucked away talent from EE and other hardware disciplines.
It is a profoundly American idea that one must be interested in profession in order to pursue it. And it is one that greatly endears this country to me, along with its people, culture, history, and freedom.
The same does not necessarily apply in south or east asia. For them it is prestige, necessity, and the respect of family. Such motivations obviously exist here in America of course, but I wonder how much of it was simply "we in government want you to do this and will pay you well and make you look good in front of your family".
>and software has sucked away talent from EE and other hardware disciplines.
I blame vc's
It may look so from the West. Big name equipment like steppers, and deposition tools come from the West, but a lion share of everything else is a product of the local supply chain.
Without that, setting up new fabs elsewhere is not possible.
Because some globally single source consumable are too locally produced, you cannot talk of even resuming production at existing fabs.
Fellows funded by some suspicious foundations in the West arguing for "we will coax TSMC to build a fab in America, and then we can betray them" are pushing an exact line as Beijing.
First, they are not engineers, and have no idea how the industry functions. Fabs will stall within weeks after running out of consumables from Taiwan.
Second, America cannot "weather the storm." There will be absolutely no arrangement possible how the US can regain access to semi once this is over in any way.
What matters is not revenue, but physical manufacturing, and where it is.
The global industry today is paralysed by lack of nothing more than few cent microcontrollers.
As I said above, restoring working of existing fabs will require rebuilding the entire Asian supply chain for chemicals, spare parts, consumables, and services.
LAM, KLA, Advanced Materials, ASML — their tools are 50%+ foreign parts, and materials.
As I said, we produce a lot of high-end semiconductors in the USA: the supply chains are already there, they are simply more expensive. If consumer semiconductor production had to move back to the states, we would have to repurpose those supply chains, they probably would never be as cheap, but we are talking 10 or 20%, not something horribly crippling to the economy.
Non-fluoropolymer high temperature super low outgassing plastics, and plastic parts used in semi equipment for example. That's an expertise that simply never existed in the West, and will have to be built from scratch, taking precious years.