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Comment by koromak | Hacker News Reader

What happens if a war with Taiwan does break out? Who's poised to pick up the slack?

Perhaps Korea or Japan, but in practice nobody, and that's partly by design.

Taiwan being the core producer of the super high end chips is guaranteing them that if a war ever happens, they won't be left as sacrifice to the opponent while the rest of the world goes business as usual.

They critically need to be a strategic and non replaceable producer.

Literally no-one – the majority of high-tech consumer electronics would stop being produced as soon as existing chips run out.

That’s not true - with the exception of the leading edge nodes, there are other fabs.

The question is how easily could they migrate and prioritise the workload?

There's very few of these other fabs outside China. They exist, but aren't able to deliver enough at a global scale. That's what we learned the hard way during the chip shortage a few years ago, where car production for jbstance basically came to a crawl.

This is part of the reason why you're hearing posts about TSMC expanding out of Taiwan. As it stands today it would be a fairly large economic hit to have advanced processors stop production. Building out redundancy seems to be a top priority.

It's also worth noting that in the event of a war the US is very, very likely to bomb the shit out of the TSMC plants.

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-would-destroy-taiwan-semi...

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/14/us_china_tsmc_taiwan/

If that happens, you won't care. You'll be concerned with your personal safety.

It's very unpredictable. It might spill to the whole East Asia and then who knows.

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