How hard would it be to move to 3nm or 2nm in Arizona if something happened in Taiwan? Genuine question because I don't know much about these plants.
https://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=...
It’s one of the reasons intel never got the yields tsmc were getting with the same asml machines. They didn’t have the same supply chain (in fact their insistence on liquid pellicles or no pellicle hurt them a lot).
Here’s a thought though. Is the Arizona fab just importing the supply chain from Taiwan? If so it’s not really helping high end silicon independence as much as you’d hope.
If it turns out that TSMC can only do what they do where they do it because of a bunch of external factors, then no one is going to be putting their billion dollar business here. Especially if they can save a few million by doing it in Taiwan.
The bigger problem might be that a whole lot of the rest of the supply chain is in China, and if something happened in Taiwan, the US would fuck up US-China relations and wreck that supply chain.