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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

If you’re predicting a major decline of globalism, then betting on a domestic firm in an extremely economically important sector that is currently extremely reliant on globalism doesn’t sound that crazy.

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What stops the Americans from simply stealing (or buying) TSMC or Samsung or whatever technology with how deep their fingers are into those companies and starting up fabs as needed? Even if the world "Deglobalizes" overall does that really mean that America maintaining its influence over countries like Taiwan and Japan and South Korea is not an option if the issue is important enough? America also has AMD/Nvidia for the chip design side of the business.

Intel could be valuable to America but the problem is the damned word could and it's not essential.

There are many reasons why Koreans are angry with the US, and some are related to semiconductors.

After Intel sold its NAND division to SK Hynix, South Koreans were upset because the US government was trying to impose sanctions on Chinese chip factories. Koreans believe that Intel sold it to South Korea after consulting with the US government, knowing that Intel's Dalian fab in China would be affected. It is some kind of insider trading or fraud.

Then passing the IRA and pressuring Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to build semiconductor factories on US soil is not an allied attitude.

My understanding is that the semiconductor supply chain is hyper-globalized with many steps in the process being so enormously capital-intensive that only a single firm can produce them at scale, the firms producing these various steps are widely distributed geographically, and each step is nearly useless if any step is missing.

And I wouldn’t just be worried about something simple and direct like “the United States losing influence over Taiwan’s semiconductor industry.” The concern is more like “the United States losing its global influence and thus its ability to almost unilaterally enforce a particular global order including (among other things) relatively safe global ocean freight.”

Sounds like you read Peter Zeihan too. :-)

As a matter of fact, he published a video today talking about this topic in some detail. You can find it on YT with the title "Semiconductors: China's the Odd Man Out".

Multinationals have no loyalty to any country anyway. Giving TSMC big tax breaks to build top fabs in the US to make AMD chips is equally as good as having Intel be a success from a national security perspective.

That's a wishfully pessimistic and cynical point of view. Multinationals are made of people and like people, some of them have more less turncoat attitudes. TSMC would probably not abandon Taiwan, it knows it's essential to its defense.

Nothing about my comment implies they’d have to. The US just wants supply chain security and availability. That can be done by TSMC factories in the US regardless of where else they have factories.

not really. the US cares a lot more about Taiwan if they are making the chips for the US. a sizable part of Taiwan's national defense strategy is to have a benevolent monopoly on cutting edge chip production so their allies think it's worth it to fight a war with China if necessary.

Yes, that is the current state. I was entertaining a future scenario above. TSMC is currently building more capacity outside of Taiwan, and the US is making investments that will likely continue this.

But they're not doing investments that will entirely replace Taiwan's relevance. The bulk of their top tier technology will remain in Taiwan, and I would be very surprised to see that change. Moving some production to the US to alleviate worst-case scenarios for Washington, yes, but moving enough that Taiwan's defense becomes irrelevant? I really don't think so.

I mean, if you were TSMC's CEO/Board, knowing full well that your country of birth is highly dependent on your presence for its defense posture, would you do allow this to change?

I had high hopes that Gelsinger would be able to pull it off. But seeing this makes me think that he's getting too much pushback from other factions within Intel and the institutional investors.

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