Chips and China

stratechery.com

34 points·kaboro··4 comments

"In the long run, meanwhile, the U.S. may have given up what would have been, thanks to the sheer amount of cost and learning curve distance involved, a permanent economic advantage"

US is playing a short game though, as the long game suits China. Precipitation of open conflict within a 10 year time frame would give US the casus belli to Putinize China and permanently cripple its technological and economic development.

In the article it is said:

"China meanwhile, has had good reason to keep TSMC around, even as it built up its own trailing edge fabs: the country needs cutting edge chips, and TSMC makes them. However, if those chips are cut off, then what use is TSMC to China? "

However, it has been just announced that USA has requested that TSMC should no longer make for China state-of-the-art chips designed in China, e.g. their new GPUs (which could replace the NVIDIA and AMD GPUs that are now forbidden for export to China):

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-22/tsmc-said...

This means exactly what the parent article says, that TSMC becomes no longer useful for China, in which case they would no longer care if it would be destroyed during an invasion attempt.

The Communist Party won't take the bait. It took the US decades of neocon foreign policy in the post-Soviet states to manufacture the Ukraine war. It will take much longer in Taiwan because there are no ultranationalists to use like Azov/S14/Svoboda/Right Sector in Ukraine.

Though one can argue there's no shortage of compradors and their color revolutionaries to use among ethnic Chinese in the region, from sunflower revolutions to bobba alliance to umbrella revolution

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