When the Chips are Down | Hacker News Reader

When the Chips are Down

scopeofwork.net

47 pointstim_sw11 comments

Just finished this last week. Great read. Truly fascinating in understanding the complexity and sheer breadth of what's involved in getting these out there at scale. Recomended.

Agreed, read it on the suggestion of a comment here on HN and found it fascinating.

From the perspective of economic and defense strategy related to chips, keep an eye on TSMC's efforts to expand cutting edge process development beyond Taiwan. They are building new leading-edge fabs in Phoenix (@ 5nm) and Kumamoto (specialty processes). 2-3nm R&D will stay in Taiwan[0], but I'd expect TSMC has plans in place to rapidly evacuate their technical teams to the US and Japan if the political kitchen got too hot.

[0] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2022/08/31/200...

The Phoenix fab is extremely likely to be a disaster. Even besides the cost of labor and incompatible work culture, the whole idea was a political concession to the US to begin with rather than genuine interest on TSMC's part. You can already easily find reports of discontent and setbacks, and that's just what's available in English.

And I suspect you would be sorely disappointed with how many would be interested in packing up shop for the US, if it came to that. SMIC and others already have success luring engineers to the mainland.

I highly doubt Taiwan would let TSMC evacuate their technical teams in the event of a possible conflict. TSMC's IP is one of Taiwan's biggest assets that keeps them from being taken over and I don't think Taiwan would let TSMC remove it from the playing field.

They can't just hold to TSMC forever, they will eventually lose this "shield" anyhow.

Those fabs are already so expensive and even their foundations are so deep and exotic to prevent any vibration. Maybe the whole building is secretly constructed to be able to lift off at a moment's notice! Suddenly it's a fab zeppelin and it's floating through the air towards amnesty in Guam.

Like Terran buildings in StarCraft.

I would say something about mutalisks here but I'm not actually anti China so I don't want to make some kind of terran versus zerg analogy.

Miller also recently did a great interview with Ezra Klein: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...

Chris Miller is making the rounds. He did a very long, in-depth interview with Stratechery a couple weeks ago that was really excellent. I’m not a subscriber to Scope of Work but from what I can see the Stratechery interview is much more in-depth.

As a famous philosopher once said “when the chips go down ya better be ready”

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