America and Europe need to start making these kinds of advanced chips themselves as soon as possible. Taiwan is now the only place where this is possible.
It boils down to education and economical structure differences with US and JP.
To be on the cutting edge requires extreme scale and multidisciplinary talent. Europe, despite being in the front lines of the innovation, falls off as the European industries and military don't create the demand at scale required to keep up with the Americans.
It's probably a similar story with the US today. China is 5X the population and they do all the manufacturing, they have amazing talent which vanished from the west with de-industrialisation.
It was way more profitable to design stuff in California and make it in China. If everything is made in China and you demand fat margins, why would you have large scale cutting edge chip manufacturing in EU or USA?
This become problem only after the break down of the supply chains and increase in political conflicts.
But as the rest of the world catches up with IP and R&D, the manufacturing is bound to come back to the west. When you can do so much with a laptop and brains and China and India having so much from those, the West will have to start doing the low margin "uncool" stuff like producing physical goods.
Given the lithography equipment used by TSMC is built by a single European company, I think it’s disingenuous to exclude Europe from the production chain.
I think the reality is fairly complex and the entire world is involved in the end to end production. Further, TSMC is working to diversify their production facilities to meet some of the onshorinf demands rising from the pandemic chip shortage fiasco. Additionally the instability between China and Taiwan is driving regional diversification. China has made itself such an undesirable business partner there’s enormous pressure top to bottom across all industries to find alternatives for sourcing. Margins in China have gotten worse due to a rising labor movement and improved general prosperity. Finally, there are other semiconductor manufacturers (global foundries, etc) that are striving to catch up - and it’s the nature of things that someone will. So, I agree, the world will start diversifying production out of China for many reasons. This will be better for everyone, even, IMO, China.
We like it or not, the world is global. Still, overspecialisation is proving dangerous when not all parties are open democracies because they can act in economically unwise but ideologically coherent ways to keep the political class in power.
Because they have vastly more incentive to have them made on the island, then anyone else would have on their territory.
And the Taiwanese employees have more external motivation then anyone could feasibly have in the U.S. or Europe.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/wzqtd1/chinese_it...
Apple make iPhone that everyone love. Apple is the Shield that protect USA or maybe Google, Facebook? how about Ukraine is the food basket of Europe or perhaps even the world since Ukraine is a big exporter of grains. surely no one will attack Ukraine because the food price will soar and possible world wide famine.
Some might consider it unlikely that we actually would show up, but they are a small island off the shore of a superpower, so they are playing the hand they were dealt as well as they can. And, a small chance of the US showing up is still a pretty big disincentive to starting an invasion.
China needs to deactivate or sabotage the explosives before any invasion. Even in that case, I am sure there is a plan B to nuke the factories.
Not only that, it's very dependent on the skills and hard work of its staff. Which is one of the things that makes TSMC so hard to replicate.
If you speak to anyone not generally interested in the field, they are oblivious despite being profoundly impacted by it.
“Can” is always a funny phrase in these sorts of conversations. I mean it is clearly possible to make these chips because they make them in Taiwan. We’d just need a fundamentally different economy and long term investments, including a different labor force, probably different education system to get it…
Now it's just Intel 7 (currently in use), Intel 4 (successor to Intel 7 for internal use) and Intel 3 (based off Intel 4 for their foundry services).
There is still some chance for Europe to come back into it but I have doubts they'll find the will to do it.
The US also makes a lot of the chemicals and EDA software packages. The US pretty much controls and owns advance chips. What they needed from taiwan was just a highly skilled sweat shop workers. Just look at the difference between the workload between TSMC workers in the US and on Taiwan.
That is why US sanctions are so effective they are like an octopus and have their tentacles all over the place controlling key nodes which can disrupt or destroy complete supply lines.
This is what following the tech war has kind of thought me.