We live in really interesting times. Hope this CHIP act stuff and the re-industrialization of US works out.
According to Taiwan, its local TSMC factories is poison-pilled. If China invades, all of ASML's tech gets remote-disabled. Since the US economy strongly depends on these chips, they have no choice but to stand by Taiwan. If, on the other hand, the US has the capability to make these chips on their own, that fundamentally changes the situation.
The US can fab 2nm if they buy the machines from ASML.
China can't have a direct war against the US, either. So, like with Russia it's a calibrated game and proxy conflicts (which is what Taiwan would be)
Even if the machinery is effectively destroyed, the talent pool could be enough to accelerate rebuilding the technology in China, so that scenario is I think damaging to the US/the west to a degree that exceeds the Ukraine conflict many folds.
Look at how HK was destroyed.
What will probably happen is that the smartest and skillets one will flee, most probably to US and Europe, to our advantage. There will be a carnage of repression with abusing jailing and deportation for the one staying to resist to défend freedom.
And China will import mass of Chinese immigrants to replace the majority of the population of the island in a few years. Then it will become just another shitty Chinese island with a weak economy and little activity. But the technology parks will certainly not continue to run like if it was nothing.
In the same way that HK is mostly deserted nowadays.
no, but the newest cutting edge chips can't be manufactured in Arizona right now. US companies can still purchase them. It's a pretty obvious hedge against geopolitical insecurity and support from the US to keep the most advanced manufacturing capacity in Taiwan at any given time.
Though I don't know that that lasts if we pull out of NATO...
However, ASML is a EU company and at this very moment Trump is threatening EU and he said that EU is just as bad as China and will punish the Europeans. What if the relations between US and EU sour to the point that US is cut off from EUV machines and the Europeans cut a deal with Russia and China instead and get the energy and technology in EU? Anti-American forces are on rise in Europe.
Even if US manages to get everything it needs, it will be ~300M people and if Trump manages to alienate enough partners that will be total market size for the fabs and EUV tech as it wouldn't be the only one in town doing it. In these extremely large scale investment stuff, you need to be serving billions of people to make economical sense. Fabs in US with no access to the entire globe is a worse position than Fabs in China with no access to the entire globe simply by the 5x the population difference and with US adopting protectionist stance it doesn't seem like it would be China who doesn't have access to the global markets.
That will not happen. I am an American, I greatly dislike Trump, but fundamentally you have to understand that if Taiwan is a stable enough country to sell EUV machines to, America's money is good enough as well. There is just no chance the EU plays this card, even with NATO threatened as a whole - selling EUV to Russia and China would be actual industry suicide with no tangible benefits besides the scorched-earth policy.
It was known for some longer peroid of time that TSMC is not
going to do leading edge node outside the Taiwan. They want the "Silicon Shield" after all
This announcement seems to be related more to Trump than anything else.
The US might be able to defend Taiwan from being conquered, but nobody can protect the fabs from being shelled.
Thats why US & EU Chips Act are a thing and Intel is building fabs.
This is the "on an infinite timescale" argument I think. It's been decades now that we rely on Taiwan, and the estimate give a few more decades to catch up if we start getting real serious about it right now, assuming Taiwan doesn't keep its lead.
So yes, eventually things might change. But that won't be tomorrow, or the day after.