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Comment by pylua | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, U.S. citizens are not likely to sacrifice their bodies and life to an entity that can cut them off at will. That sort of dedication comes at an extremely high premium in the us.

Honestly, it is just business. The companies need to adapt and stop complaining.

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They are adapting by getting subsidies from the US government, which implies that US based manufacturing will never be cost effective. When the money flow turns off, these fabs might fade away.

It’s never going to be cost effective if you can outsource to a country that has less stringent laws and regulations.

The government has other levers it can pull, such as tariffs.

It also looks like the Taiwan employees are reluctant to transfer domain knowledge, based on the article. They don’t want to have to compete with U.S. workers.

The USG is starting to understand that fab capacity is an aspect of defense, and in the US the flow of money into the defense budget never turns off.

The US cannot afford the risk of having virtually ALL advanced semi produced in a territory as exposed as Taiwan. At least until the threat against Taiwan is gone, they have to make sure a large percentage (>50%) of such strategic products happen outside Taiwan/China, meaning they have to continue subsidies (or switch to tariffs) until the threat is gone.

Anyway, just because TSMC puts Taiwan in a position similar to Japan in the 1980's, doesn't mean they retain that advantage into the future

Can you elaborate on what you mean with „the threat is gone“ please?

At some point in the future, it's likely that invading Taiwan militarily will not longer be part of the Chinese agenda. There are multiple ways for this to happen:

1) China could have a regime change. This could either lead to voluntary reunification or at least to military action becoming irrelevant.

2) Xi could die, and the successor might have other priorities.

3) China could lose the ability or confidence to invade, for instance if their economy is destroyed by corruption or they stop investing in their armed forces.

4) Taiwan could develop their own nukes in secret, and be too scary to invade.

5) The threat could become reality (and thus no longer a threat). China may proceed to either win or lose such a war. In such a scenario, it's hard to say what remains of TSMC's capacity after.

The status quo can go on indefinitely. Taiwan gains almost nothing from actual independence. Chinese people don't seem to think of Taiwan unless it's brought up; they've already declared themselves the winner of the civil war and the whole world legally agrees. In dynastic times, China had many tributary states who acknowledged the power of China but otherwise went about their own business, and the current status quo is not far from that.

1-4 are unrealistic. 5 is the likely outcome and Taiwanese production is no more.

In my view it’s not a China Taiwan conflict more a US China one.

Edit: China is trying to get hold of Taiwan politically not necessarily militarily and if I’m not mistaken the US said they will not tolerate this either.

I'm sure a lot of people inside Taiwan see this as a Taiwan China conflict, with the US being an ally that has shared interests with Taiwan.

From what I've been reading, the support for reunification within the Taiwanese population has been going down for a long time. The current talk of invasion could reflect Xi giving up on that possibility.

As for what would happen if some day the majority in Taiwan actually supported a peaceful reunification, the US wouldn't like it, but it wouldn't be easy for the US to defend attempts to stop it militarily.

Now, that wouldn't completely rule out some kind of covert support for a military coup or something. But if the support for reunification is large enough, the US would probably have to accept it.

Edit: Also, 1-4 are not that unrealistic, if you give it enough time. In fact, if enough time passes with no invasion (or peaceful reunification with the CCP still in power), one of them is likely to happen I would say.

It could take 30 years though, and we could be deep into some kind of singularity event before it happens. For instance, TSMC could end up building the largest AI on the planet using their own chips, and by using that become more powerful in all ways than China itself. (Possibly at the cost of human extinction).

Reunification is desired and could happen but unlikely on the basis of a regime change in China. It’s also very difficult because of the strategic position the island has for the US military in the broader US China conflict view. Looking at the map the US is surrounding China from the east like the Nato is surrounding Russia from the west.

As soon as the west is more independent from China again the conflict will enter into the next phase. Any military activity in and around Taiwan will brain drain the country very quickly and most of the talent will go to western companies.

30 years is a hell lot of time these days.

Invasion by CCP followed by full ceasing of chip shipments.

These are military assets, the Pentagon gets what it wants.

That’s why CHIPS was passed, the brass told Congress to get them some fancy new fabs, and like all requests the Pentagon makes, they got it.

Long term it doesn’t matter if these fabs are hugely profitable relative to other locales, we’ll find a way to keep them producing.

As long as the US government can afford to run with trillion dollar deficits. Once the budget cuts take place and the defense budget gets cut by half, all bets are off.

To appropriate a quote “you’ll take my guns from my cold dead hands”.

There’s only one thing the agree on in DC: defense spending is the most important line item, and everything else is secondary.

Also, turns out when you have the ability to take virtually anything by force the concept of “deficits” is a bit fungible.

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