Why hasn't Apple just bought TSMC?
The Taiwanese government would block the sale if a sale could even be agreed.
They could annihilate all competition in the market except for them. Every single Android phone would be forced to use subpar manufacturing from there on out.
Why do you think the US or EU would get involved?
Isn't that kind of how it is already?
All this would do would weaken TSMC and strengthen other chip manufacturers for a couple years of absolute chip dominance. But they already have chip dominance, so it is for essentially zero gain.
They become part of apple. With a stranglehold on chips the price of apple products as a whole, or their sales, will skyrocket.
Besides buying a major supplier out and then getting rid of their other customers is value destructive.
Apple doesn't have that amount of capital to even make an offer lol.
They could never achieve it with governments and regulators, however. Like 0.00% chance. Even if the government of Taiwan allowed it, there would be a long line of other governments and regulators blocking it.
Wikipedia seem to put it at a max under $150b[0]
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https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSM
it is $454B
1. Bank loans
2. Apple stocks
Completely doable.
It’s probably not seen as a bad thing internally that other rivals aren’t able to get on 3nm either, which wouldn’t be true if Apple weren’t buying up the supply.
Having said that, it would give them more negotiating leverage against TSMC, since then they would be a monopoly equipment supplier as well as a customer.
Either way, I doubt governments would allow such a purchase. It would be denied on national security grounds and on competition grounds.
But not having a fab means they're flexible to jump ship in the future if someone was ever to outpace TSMC.
Also, consider Intel's fabs, which were stuck on 14nm for years. This probably factored into one of the reasons Apple made the jump over to Apple Silicon.
Yeah, right. As if it is that simple. Just construct a building and put ASML machines inside and off you go.
> it’s simply not worth what would be an eye-watering outlay
Sigh.
(nevermind that modern chips are a hybrid of different feature sizes...)
"Cornering the market" typically refers to controlling supply of a product to restrict supply to the larger market and drive up price.
A TSMC acquisition would only be subject to anti-trust if Apple restricted access to supplies that their competitors currently have access to. Buying/owning the means of supply for your competitors isn't subject to anti-trust. Apple would gladly continue supplying chips with TSMC. Their are fabs created for older features that Apple doesn't use that are core to TSMC's profitability. They're not going to cut that overnight. Especially under a COO-CEO like Cook.
The monopolistic practice of acquisition would be to hamstring your competition. In this case, the acquisition would be based on synergy.
Samsung, a phone competitor and also screen supplier to Apple, controls the OLED market. They are not subject to anti-trust because they supply a fair market.
A more current example would be the Microsoft Activision acquisition. Microsofts defense in that is that they will continue supplying Call Of Duty (and similar high profile games) to competitors.