US Says Chinese Seizure of TSMC in Taiwan Would Be 'Absolutely Devastating' | Hacker News Reader

US Says Chinese Seizure of TSMC in Taiwan Would Be 'Absolutely Devastating'

usnews.com

36 pointsbelter27 comments

Article says 92% of leading edge chips are from Taiwan.

What counts as leading edge, and what percentage of lagging edge chips come from China?

Aka what total percentage of chip supply would be disrupted by China invading Taiwan assuming embargoes between the US and China is still an anticipated response to that…

In terms of leading edge, we're talking all AMD CPUs, all of the high end NVIDIA GPUs, all of Apple's M-series chips and iPhone chips, Qualcomm's fastest/most efficient mobile chipsets and more.

Lagging edge chips from China that are commonly used in the west are typically on larger nodes that can be more easily replaced (the tech is easier to replicate, the costs are much lower), stuff like microcontrollers, MEMS sensors, ADCs, DACs etc, stuff that doesn't have to be the absolute fastest it can be, just has to work well and be cheap.

> Aka what total percentage of chip supply

Given what happened during COVID, and how any advanced consumer product contains multiple chips, I suspect you'd see most consumer electronics more complicated than a toaster would become unavailable for months to years, including cars.

It's also highly likely that one of the parties, or even just a rogue Taiwanese nationalist officer, would destroy the fab rather than allow it to be captured.

(Yes, all of this can be moved to different fabs and can be switched to different parts .. but those are time consuming and expensive things to do! Especially when everyone else is trying to do them as well. Expect a "we can't bring up the fab because we can't source PCs" moment.)

Don't forget that if this particular balloon goes up most electronics assembly capacity becomes unavailable as well, because it was in Shenzen.

Turns out hoarding old Xeon CPU's and servers for the homelab has suddenly become a national strategic asset if Taiwan TSMC gets hit

Yeah losing many thousands of young men to capture an island with diminished strategic importance may cause a bit of a continuity problem for the CCP leadership. Sure it’s useful for defending China from eastern invasion, but no one is invading China anytime soon.

Most will probably come from non-major cities and towns so I doubt it will be a problem. CCP knows they can take stuff pretty far. Probably only food production and fossil fuels are their chokepoints.

> Yeah losing many thousands of young men to capture an island

Just like Russia, do not underestimate the level of disinterest by the leadership in how many of their pawns survive.

I’d imagine it would be the bifurcation of the chip market between low and high transistor size scales

You’d be surprised the volume of chips anywhere from the 10s to thousands of nanometers sold even today

For every bleeding edge CPU there are many larger (and hotter) less crucial chips being sold

If you want to get nitpicky you could consider individual PMOS or NMOS transistors as 10 to 20 million nm single transistor chips (or 1-2cms)

It’s exactly the same process after all!

U.S. makes about half of the chips it consumes. But none of them are leading-edge. Which makes me assume that U.S. is about or almost self-sufficient in much older ones. That will hardly help much though. Happily, at least West produces entire set of tools needed to produce the chips. So Taiwan is just a matter of cost. At higher prices, they will be made elsewhere when needed, in some time - there's no barrier to that.

> Taiwan is just a matter of cost

Just because you can manufacture lathes doesn't mean you can turn e.g. a Turner's Cube [1]. (Scalpels: surgeons, et cetera.)

[1] https://www.instructables.com/Turners-Cube-Manual-Machine/

> So Taiwan is just a matter of cost

If that was the case, Intel would have thrown all their $$$ in and won already. Not so simple.

We already got a glimpse during covid. Sky is not going to fall. Looks like they are making noise so China makes some sort of deal with industry, that the spice shall flow come what may.

There used to be a PC brand named Leading Edge. The old farts (including me) could make jokes like we didn't realize they were still in business.

TSMC is already building another fab in Japan and when Intel comes to Germany I can see how we get another fab there too

> TSMC is already building another fab in Japan

It's not leading edge, so same as anything else not in Taiwan...

I wonder if both Taiwan and the US would rather destroy TSMC than let if fall into CCP's hands.

Search for "TSMC explosives" and there are tons of rumors about this scenario.

2020 thread about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24530719

Oh wow, I had no idea about this!

Andy Grove was right

The M4 laptops prices would go parabolic, stock up?

And China has promised to take Taiwan. I’d take them at their word. They even gave their military a deadline of when to be ready.

Link to Chinese source? I'd like to know when the given deadline is.

Also just cuz the CCP said so dosnt mean its true or people believe it. I mean look at how their real estate market took that massive hit and the goverment s official stance was to ignore it at least publicly. It was well know that ever grand was not building houses that people actually lived in for years.

"The Ambitious Dragon - Beijing’s Calculus for Invading Taiwan by 2030" - https://media.defense.gov/2023/Apr/24/2003205865/-1/-1/1/07-...

1. That’s an American source 2. The deadline is implicit based on demographic/economic calculations, not set by China

On a personal note, I don’t see how China is even capable of invading Taiwan. If they do try, it’s probably gonna be a Ukraine style war of attrition with Taiwan backed by the US such that China loses a huge amount of power while the US only gets more powerful

UAVs trash the invasion force. At sea, on the beaches.

So the US sells some bonds, then slips a couple trillion into a brown envelope to buy Baja California from Mexico, then “lease-to-own” it on very favorable terms (0 down, 0% APR, 150 years) to New Taiwan, or Formosa II. Uproot TSMC and an entire culture and move them over, then let China wave the flag over the mound of dirt left behind. Pencil them in to NAFTA and watch the chips flow over to the new iPhone plant outside Mexicali. Tijuana to Ensenada remains Mexico and is a buffer between them and the USA, and the night markets there are the envy of all food-eating people on the planet—-I can’t wait to try the albondigas soup dumplings.

I was under the impression that the US already had plenty of empty wasteland for this type of fantasy project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com