TSMC begins producing 4-nanometer chips in Arizona
reuters.com
reuters.com
I seem to recall some detail about how they don't do the packaging, and that' still on the mother island.
This suggests that may be the case: https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/04/tsmc_amkor_arizona/
It's a move in the right direction, but not as much as may be needed.
Packaging is extremely low value and commodified, so companies prefer to contract it out to OSATs like Amkor.
Same reason why most companies became fabless - margins are much more competitive this way compared to owning your own fab.
Even Taiwan has largely offshored packaging to ASEAN, China, and India. And Taiwan got packaging because the Japanese manufacturers offshored to there.
The semiconductor industry is multifaceted, and it's very difficult to be competitive in every single segment of it.
For example, Taiwan does great at fabrication, but is horrid at chip design. Israel and India are major chip design hubs but are horrid at fabrication. Malaysia is THE packaging and testing hub, but weak at fabrication and nonexistent in design.
That is not to say NY's semiconductor industry is dead - it's fairly active, but it's largely legacy nodes targeted at commodified usecases such as Automotive.
The US in its history after the 60's would invent a lot of core industrial tech, but then we'd let Japan, Germany, etc. actually commercialize because we didn't want to pick winners.
We invented CNC machining, SMT / pick-n-place for PCBs, industrial robot arms, etc., and these were all American dominated, but foreign countries supported homegrown companies long-term, and those American companies went bust.
*this is an observation from someone who has never bought a new apple product due to their increasingly closed eco-system
perhaps you mean "they provide competition among peers like Samsung and Sony, without which the industry would go slower, perhaps with worse products"?
ah, just noticed that you qualified "bought a new Apple..."
Margins are crucial for this, the driving factor that made US lose its industrial base, is red-tape, red-tape, red-tape, red-tape, political interference, militant unionism (unions are good and fine, militant unions are not), and foolish gov laws which did not make sure that labour standards are consistent for all products in american market, to make sure slave-labour or extremely shoddy labour standard based countries do not erode away great american jobs and its industrial base.
Margins are fine, and good. Unfair competition, rules and red-tape for domestic manufacturers but none for foreign companies, is what killed it.
It’s cheaper for a chinese company to ship to american households than it is for a local american company to an american household… , this is purely because of crazy gov regulations.
Here's one random article I quacked, and this issue has been going on for years it ain't new: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/28/business/china-goods-expo...
China has also devalued its currency to facilitate this dumping spree
Another random quack (more on the how than history, but the impacts are detailed) https://gbtimes.com/how-does-china-devalue-their-currency/
So the narrative that "the US is choking itself with silly regulations and can't compete as a result" is a pure fiction afaict.
No its not fiction, you just said China did this, China did that… Well USA is a country too, why cant it shape policies to advantage the US industrial base ? It can, it chooses not to, out of apathy for the masses.
> not polluting the water or forcing your workers into 40 hours a week of unpaid overtime
Has nothing to do with that, USA has the largest tech ecosystem with silicon valley being at the top, its a huge software ecosystem base, and from end to end, from the beginning to the end, united states governments have carefully co-ordinated to make sure America stays at the top in Software, and it has done so successfully by making one of the most robust and risk-taking investment ecosystem on planet earth.
It could do the same for Manufacturing, polluting water or slave labour taunts are just the boogeyman, the problem is it taking 10 yrs to get enough permits or land allocation for building anything serious industrial, ill-conceived regulations, etc.
People keep mentioning Water Pollution or 40 hour slave labours, yet no one ever mentions the after-math of america’s de-industrialization, the countless rural towns and families in rust-belt who were decimated and completely broken in this process. They resort to drugs just to keep themselves alive, and even that now kills them with overdose with stuff like fetanyl.
Domestic manufacturing stuff does not need slave labour, it needs fair level playing field, which begins with not letting goods made with slave labour or as you said goods made by skirting corners like polluting local water. Americans can perfectly figure out how to scale and optimize things without resorting to slave labour. But they need atleast a level playing field to even be able to survive initially.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/21/foxconn-mostly-abandons-10-b...
I'm not sure I agree microchips are as critical as stable food supply, but I'd be willing to entertain the idea they're close enough to be treated specially.
Final packaging is.
This is basically why the word "rationing" exists in the first place.
What good is being "productive" (whatever your definition of it) if poor people die from lack of access to water because chips need to exist.
That works out to 0.032¢ per liter. A quarter (25¢) will buy you 760 liters of water, enough to survive for three months. That's about 1000× lower than a price at which even Phoenix's homeless might start dying of thirst due to the cost of water. (Homeless people don't pay the water utility, but they get water from people who do.)
Poor people in the country get their water from wells, which cost money to drill but basically nothing to pump more water from.
Rationing might be a reasonable thing to do to keep the aquifer from being depleted, but it would be likely to hit poor people much harder than rich people, because poor people don't have the political influence to prevent the enactment of regulations that would hurt them badly, such as a requirement for an environmental review before drilling a new drinking-water well.
Rationing could cause poor people to die from lack of access to water. Markets won't, unless you're talking about something like a Mars colony.
Add in some market mechanics and that problem disappears. The only entities left without water are the ones unwilling to pay a small fraction of a cent.
I'm not particularly concerned with the viability of people farming their own food but that seems plenty cheap.
Even desalinated water would be under a thousand dollars, and we could 10x the water supply at that point.
> and again we would predict that rationing measures would favor politically powerful agribusinesses and perhaps the Indian reservations over most small farmers
If the system allocates free water which can then be easily resold, the end result is basically the same as everyone paying but some entities get free money. Anyone expecting to buy their water should be no worse off.
"[The Saudis] used sprinklers to grow alfalfa in La Paz County and exports it to feed dairy cattle in Saudi Arabia. The company did not pay for the water it used under the old agreement."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-arabia-water-access-arizo...
Just because people don't like what the water is used for doesn't mean the water isn't priced appropriately. You'll still get farmers growing thirsty / pricey crops in the desert if it covers the cost of irrigation.
The modern canal that runs through Phoenix is built on top of ruins of a much older canal built by indigenous people for farming.
It both is and isn't. Have you seen PETA footage from inside factory farms? It's hellish in that special way only the industrial revolution could produce.
Agriculture is largely practiced with industrial methods now, but it's been around a lot longer before proto-industrial methods (water and wind mills). For example, Egypt, as a civilization, benefited from the natural flooding and silt of the Nile. It's been the bread basket for empires for several thousand years. They were not using industrial methods two or three thousand years ago.
There are also other forms of agriculture that is not easily recognized by the narrow lens we have today -- such as perennial food forests, hidden in the ruins of Amazonian jungles, or the Pacific Northwest, or the forest that used to cover the lands between the Appalachia and the Mississippi river. Those were not organized with the concept of employment, and it is distinctively low-tech.
TLDR: America has spent a whole lot of money trying to make land more productive for farming, including land where it probably doesn't make much economic sense once you account for the infrastructure costs.
That canal became the basis for Phoenix, and eventually, the big canal that transport water long range through the state.
The other is that, with sufficient water, you can grow year round.
Not that I think industrial ag is good for society.
Phoenix itself is a metro area whose primary economic driver is real estate speculation. Many older citrus orchards has been surrounded, and sometimes bought and redeveloped.
California is a desert too.
From what I understand, the area is more seismically stable, so the special building structures and equipment for more seismically active places are not needed.
There is the presence of ASU. The ASU president had been hired a while back to implement a very different kind of university system focused on broadening (not gate keeping) higher education and building up innovation. This includes both improving graduation rates in the traditional tracks and expanding non-traditional educational tracks. I don’t know if all those were considered by TSMC; they like hiring engineers straight out of college and training them in their methods.
The biggest problem seems to be parochial NIMBYs. People don't like that TSMC needed to bring in Taiwanese workers to staff up the plant. They are currently posting AI generated renderings of factories with billowing smoke stacks when talking about the proposed Amkor semiconductor packaging plant in Peoria.
This is also why I laugh when people in wet areas talk crap about my state's water problem. My state's problem is your problem too buddy.
Predictions are all over the place but the average prediction seems to say that at least half the US gets more water.
If you've seen otherwise and have references, I'm interested. I'm thinking about where to live next.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth103/sites/www.e-educati...
These are the ones that showed up first.
Drying in the southwest is more likely than in the northwest, probably. The specifics are all over. But the bigger distinctions tend to be north versus south.
I get your point, but not all farms are created equal. Is it really so bad to shut down farms that grow feed for Arab race horses to produce computer chips?
That, I agree. I noticed a sibling comment also mentioned that. If the farms in question are of that kind, it is reasonable. I'd just like to object to the creation of a general sense of sacrificing farms for fabs.
If you're concerned about food security, subsidize actual food that could go to people in some way, but let water hit a real market price.
Else, we end up subsidizing water for clever export and other uses we don't really want, and we remove any incentive for efficiency in water use.
"I was wrong, but I think my comment was still right based on vibes, so I wasn't wrong after all."
Until recently Saudi Arabia was using these laws to grow alfalfa in the desert.
In California, water intensive crops like almond trees get free water.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-ara...
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewar...
The report has a graph showing their farms consume more water then all LA homes.
"Forget it Jake. It's Chinatown."Maybe another big player in the system would even help build momentum to get these laws changed permanently…
Who needs logic and reason when you have false dichotomy?
* humor
See #15 here[0]
Looks like the fab requires about 40,000 acre-ft/yr of water. If they really do start running out of water, adding desal of AZ's brackish aquifers would cost the fab about $20m/year. Not really worth it for farming, but completely fine for a fab.
... is "acre feet" a common measurement of volume in the USA?
In other words, the fab requires about 20,000 swimming pools of water every year... or equivalently, 1 swimming pool every 27 minutes.
> The acre-foot is a non-SI unit of volume equal to about 1,233 m3 commonly used in the United States in reference to large-scale water resources, such as reservoirs, aqueducts, canals, sewer flow capacity, irrigation water,[1] and river flows.
Seems to be.
So, it's the unit that gets used when discussing irrigation. Or water usage that competes with irrigation. :P
We measure our land in acres and water is the limiting resource for using it. Water requirements for crops are expressed in feet/year (or inches/day). Combine the two and you get acre-feet.
m^3 would be a less useful unit in terms of calculating water needs out here, the metric equivalent would be hectare-meters (10,000 m^3).
(1 football field = 91.44 meters)
By? Which football? The real football, or the football played mostly with hands?
Maybe not the kind of progress or initiative that gets headlines, but neither is it trying to push as far as what Intel has been trying to do for the past few years.
This means you're getting the lowest industry margins, meaning less profits, less money for R&D, less wages and also less geopolitical leverage. This is nothing to celebrate but should be an alarm clock for our elected leader to wake the f up.
A lot of semi research is done in the EU, like at IMEC in Belgium, but few of it ends up commercialized by EU companies, so EU taxpayer money gets spent but other nations get to reap the rewards.
Edit to answer @ looofooo0: EUV tech comes from Sandia Labs research that ASML licensed, and the EUV light sources (there's no such thing as an EUV laser, the Trmpf is a regular laser firing into tin droplets for EUV generation) are made by Cymer in the US which ASML integrates them into their stepper which is a relative commodity item in comparison to the light-source.
Moreover, most of the tech stems from the European-funded EUCLIDES (Extreme UV Concept Lithography Development System) project.
ASML is massive, no?
Maybe some things shouldn't be about bragging but about getting the job done, and cutting edge isn't the only way to do it. If anything, the problem here isn't that it's "just" 16nm but that the EU isn't developing a end-to-end (research to manufacturing) true home grown industry and still relies a lot on external partners like Intel to do it from the outside.
But a good first step to develop enough talent locally that can later flow into domestic alternatives.
Be interesting to see if there's integration with research environments within the EU.. otherwise it could fizzle in terms of it's true potential positive impact.
Speaking of the leading edge, though: while industrial policy, like other kinds of investment, is easier with the benefit of hindsight, there must be some regret at having let Global Foundries drop out of the peloton.
In case of semiconductors with frontier processes (last few generations) NRE is extremely high and machine time rates are expensive. Doubling or tripling energy costs would have negligible effects.
Getting dragging in to an East China unification war because you can't squeeze lighting in to rocks on time is a tragedy.
Are you from China? I find this phraseology very odd
The ROC has not had any formal military alliance with the United States since 1979. TSMC was not founded until 1987, didn't start producing chips until 1993. It was not even publicly traded until 1994 (and that was only on the Taiwanese stock exchange; it was listed on the NYSE in 1997).
The reason the PRC hasn't done it is because it would make no sense politically or economically. They have a lot more to lose and a lot less to gain than Russia did in 2014 (Sevastopol was/is seen as integral to the Russian navy...there is no parallel with Taiwan as the PRC has plenty of excellent ports on the mainland).
And the continued existence of Taiwan gives the PRC a convenient excuse to sabre-rattle.
No? I'm from the UK if it matters but i have no particular allegiance to east, west or chip manufacturing facilities.
East China / West Taiwan is for lack of a better word, a meme. Unification war i guess i dredged up from 40k
Either way my point stands. Every country that has supported Tiawan is scrambling to get chips online domestically because they don't need to get involved in the start of WW3. To claim otherwise is just disingenuous.
If we assume everyone can make their own hardware at home.
Loosing Taiwan is tantamount to accepting Chinese military hegemony in SEA and East Asia. No need to export ideology, it's more like if I put up tariffs against Chinese goods to protect domestic business and then a few PLAN warships park up right next to my trade corridors.
https://www.defensepriorities.org/explainers/challenges-to-c...
Yes. It’s called “semiconductor shield”. As long as China cannot manufacture chips like those made in Taiwan, it will thread carefully.
EU finds out the hard way that not having had energy independence plus a weak/non-existent military relying mostly on the US, has costly second order externalities that voters never think about or factor in their decisions(I'm European).
The best way to have peace is to always be ready for war. Being a non-armed hippie pacifist nation sounds good in some utopic fantasy world like the Smurfs, but in reality it only invites aggression from powerful despots like Putin and Xi and even your strong ally, the US, can exploit your moment of weakness and security dependence on it, to push its own agenda and trade terms on you.
After all, whenever EU falters, America gains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE-E1lQunm0
Secondly, America's defense is way more expensive than it needs to be due to a lot of high level corruption and lobbying from the military industrial complex profiteering when it comes to purchasing decisions, where a 10$ bag of bolts is bought by the military for 50K$, shovelings taxpayer money into the right private industry pockets. EU can achieve similar results with way less cost if it wanted to by minimizing this style of corruption but that's easier said than done. The only one rivaling America's military inefficiency is Germany who spends more than France, a nuclear power with aircraft carriers, but can't afford to issue underwear and dog tags to new conscripts.
Thirdly, America's lack of social services is not due to its powerful military, but due to political choices and inefficiencies. It could easily have better welfare if it wanted to since it can afford it with the world's largest GDP, but it chooses not to, since the current status quo is enriching a lot of private enterprises and parasites, while the concept of even more welfare is usually not a popular topic with the US voters which see welfare recipients as lazy and an unnecessary money sink funded by higher taxes on the middle class which they don't want. So their issue is social and political, not economical.
Would you consider most European countries to actually have an effective military deterrent?
By troop count, munitions stock, or the number if tanks and jets I don't see anyone as having a particularly impressive military in Europe. That doesn't mean they couldn't organize one if needed, but that's a different issue.
> Thirdly, America's lack of social services is not due to its powerful military, but due to political choices and inefficiencies.
You're missing a big factor here, cultural differences. America was built on the idea of people making a way for themselves and living or dying by their own successes or failures. We've moved pretty far away from that and do now have social programs and safety nets, smaller than many European countries' nets, but the expectation of making a way for yourself is still under the surface. Many people simply don't want the level of welfare programs seen in other countries.
compared to what? Who does Europe need to fight who has more ammo, tanks, jets and nukes? Russia has proven itself unable to take on Ukraine with half-assed support by the west, China and India are far away.
Shall Europe prepare to fight the US for Greenland?
I'd strongly recommend you not underestimate Russian ability by assuming Ukraine is the best they could do. That doesn't mean they are going to invade further into Europe, but we're talking about military size and deterrence here.
Sounds like we just have different expectations of how stretched the Russians are today, nothing wrong with especially as I'm assuming neither of us have access to the most meaningful field assessment reports.
My view on how the Russians have handled the war, since losing their chance at a quick sweep, has been that they are doing only enough to keep pressure and roughly maintain the front line gains they made. Sure that line has moved, and Ukraine did a pretty impressive job capturing some Russian territory which I don't think was expected by many, but the Russians seem to be balancing a lot more than just a single goal of victory.
I'm curious where you are getting reliable Intel on the Russians current stockpile of munitions, I haven't come across anything meaningful there publicly beyond potentially politically motivated statements and reporting regurgitating those same claims.
Edit: its worth noting there are other reason the North Koreans may have sent troops. If the country is feels the military needs actual combat experience for whatever reason, for example, they could send troops regardless of whether it actually helps the Russian effort.
almost all their functional BMDs
~4/5ths of their functional BMPs
almost all of their MTLBs and MTLbus
~2/3rds of their big artillery
~1/3rd of their small artillery (because they are short on ammo)
all of their mortars
~4/5ths of their towed artillery (that isn't from WW2)
~9/10ths of their rocket artillery
Furthermore, these numbers have been cross correlated with visually confirmed loss data https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum..., .
NATO-without-USA has more aircraft, tanks, and watercrafts than Russia. Less stored ammo for sure, and probably not as effective, but on the other hand: nukes.
It sure seems to me like NATO is largely built on the assumption of US involvement, but I could be biased there.
Please. People want to be taken care of. America was built by people escaping famine and people escaping poor living/working conditions.
In other words, it was built by people trying to make a better living for themselves. Living or dying by your success or failure wasn't a desirable feature, it was an incidental side effect of colonizing a new land.
Ask a person if they would prefer to be taken care of when sick and of course the answer would be yes. It isn't that simple.
Welfare programs require taxes to fund them and larger government bureaucracy to manage them. Not everyone agrees with that, and not every government is actually trustworthy to manage the programs well.
Thanks for the laugh
I doubt the other budget line items would see an increase with defence cuts, but we certainly don't need the entire defence budget for just our own sake. America doesn't need 11 nuclear aircraft carriers or nearly 2500 F-35s, among other excesses.
Also: Attitudes like yours sincerely make me want to see America First pushed more literally to the point of leaving those who don't appreciate us to fend for themselves. Japan, EU, and so on.
Obama already declared we aren't the world police anymore, for better or worse.
It takes all nine of the top 10 countries besides America (#1) to finally match and exceed the American defence budget. Of those nine, only two (Germany and France) are EU members.
In a word, the American defence budget is fucking massive and we certainly don't need anywhere even remotely most of it for ourselves.
Edit: yes my bad, I was meaning this comment for another poster in the thread.
Seriously. You just more or less repeated what I've been saying, minus the potentially spiteful sentiment.
From my original comment:
>The reason the US defence budget is so sky-fucking-high is because we effectively pay for everyone's military, though.
Yes, but don't act like that is some kind of selfless act. In the end, it benefits the US more if they do that and have military bases and influence all over the place, than not doing that. If that also protects their allies, even better, since then it can be used to better justify the international meddling (as you're doing now).
The US has never gone through the stage of being "ready for war" and instead went for the "living from one war to the next"
The open seas is a myth. It is the American seas unless you have a lot of nuclear weapons.
> that come at a great cost to Americans in reduced social services like health insurance and higher education
But also brought lots of business and investment too. On total it's positive, otherwise the US would not do it. *I am not saying the distribution of the incoming wealth was equal.
I think that's not the case. you can make a case that Russia's "shadow fleet" is being treated with some bias, but then again...
some country didn't spend as much even almost downscale its military and you expect the same benefit while didn't want any cost associated with it, how it make sense and fair for everyone???
Fail.
Sold the fundamental industries out to Philips who sold it to the Chinese.
Although the US held just 12% of the world's total semiconductor manufacturing capacity in 2021, US-based companies held approximately 46.3 percent of the total semiconductor market share. This seeming discrepancy can be explained by both the dollar value of imported US semiconductors, outlined above, and the fact that many US-based companies own and operate semiconductor fabrication plants in other countries, such as Japan. In such cases, the manufacturing capacity is added to that country's capacity rather than the capacity of the US, but the profits typically count as part of the US economy.
To be fair, the USA does have many of the key companies and technologies that make these ICs possible in first place so it's not exactly like that but in the case of TSMC it kind of is.
1 Taiwan
2 South Korea
3 Japan
4 United States
5 China
Germany has 22
France has 5
Spain has 1
UK has 16
Ireland has 3
Italy has 2
Sweden has 1
Finland has 1
This one in USA is for political reasons and likely will be feasible only if US manages to preserve the global political order.
Maybe Europe could have had force having a latest node FAB by banning exports of EUV machines and have factories built in Europe through flying Taiwanese engineers to build and operate it and call it huge success like USA is doing now.
I don't know if its worth the cost though. Sure it is good to have it bu in USA's case they even haven't built the industry around it, they will produce the chips in USA, call it "Made in America", collect the political points and ship the chips to the other side of the planet for further processing.
Is it really that big of a deal to have European machines being operated by the Taiwanese in the USA to print chips that need a visit to China to become useful? If the global world order collapses, will the 330M Americans be able to sustain the FAB? If it doesn't collapse, will that be still a good investment considering that Taiwanese have the good stuff for themselves and integrated into the full chain without flying parts across the world?
Anyone expecting nuclear retaliation for the strikes that have been made inside Russian territory has no grasp on what it really means for a country to use a nuke, or has no confidence in a nuclear power understanding the basic game theory of what would come next. Russia would never use a nuke when a small number of missiles or drones made it past their air defence and cause minor damage on Russian soil.
Wiping out significant portions of their army, navy, and air force for a fraction of a single year’s budget and not a single American death?
The Cold War led to the arms build up it did because of exactly this paradox: on close inspection, it seemed unlikely the US would lose the Eastern seaboard cities just to protect Berlin, for example.
I've wondered if China encouraged Russia to invade Ukraine to weaken them so they can become a Chinese vassal state to supply raw materials.
War crimes are absolute, there's no "if you weren't first, you get one free".
Well... TSMC is definitely a component of Taiwan's national security. It's called the "Silicon Shield" for a reason.
And the US definitely has more reasons to go to war, and more importantly, threaten war to prevent one breaking out, over Taiwan if it knows there will be a massive economic impact.
And China definitely knows that if Taiwan is important for the US, it's almost certain the US would defend it.
Crazy.
Some people are against Biden/Dems.
Some people are clueless about the foreign policy and the geopolitical reality in Asia and take the status quo regional power balance as a given.
Seems like it would be way better off being somewhere in the eastern half of the country or at least not in the Southwest.
Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab (tomshardware.com)
But doubtful, it'll definitely be a premium made-inthe-usa labeling for government & school use.
Just grift grift grift, then graft graft graft.
Or do you have consumers who will pay for the difference?
Ask tradespeople how much they like competition from prisons or, in Germany, subsidised workplaces for the disabled.
If you dont mind dropping the religious aspect i think you already have the rest via the Prison-Industries Act; as cheap as an Asian child but with the strength and intelligence of the US adult prison population.
Hold on im going to write this down.
Stat: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1356957/number-prisoners....
Usually only in pre-sentencing stays such as the drunk tank, pre-arraignment holding, etc. If you're sentenced, you aren't charged for that time. Additionally, it's usually waived during sentencing (if it goes that far) as a part of your Credit-Time-Served conversion.
> there's jails / prisons where prisoners do labor in exchange for very low compensation
Sure, but the work isn't allowed to be for private entities. They're doing government-related busywork in 99% of cases (pressing license plates, printing/cutting papers for the court, working on machinery for the police/courts, working the kitchen, etc.)
More importantly, they're not just paid monetarily but receive reduced sentences for the work.
> Considering you get billed for being jailed, I would personally prefer working than to mount up debt I have no way of managing.
You're conflating two separate systems. Prisons are where you go for long stints and generally worry about Good Time/Work Time. You can't be charged a daily fine for prison time.
Jails are intended for short stays (the drunk tank, transport to court arraignment, etc) and can have daily fines attached, in most states. In cases where county jails are used post sentencing for short-moderate stays, daily fines are generally far more limited/disallowed.
"Minecraft proves that the children yearn for the mines"
Stands to follow that many of their new customers are price-sensitive.
Ever tried to configure storage on anything Apple? The markup is ridiculous, but on the other side, it blows a lot of the competition out of the water.
We also shouldn't beat this horse to death because it's not hard to plug in a USB/Thunderbolt SSD and there's essentially no performance penalty.
Or if you have a MacBook Pro you can get one of these: https://9to5mac.com/2022/05/20/macbook-pro-flush-sd-card-tra...
Not the fastest thing in the world but it gets the job done.
The average manufacturing salary in China is around $13,000 a year, in a country where cost of living is 50% lower than the US and rent is 75% lower.
China is actually a place with relatively high manufacturing labor costs these days, but it's a production center for a lot of industries and holds a lot of the ecosystems and institutional knowledge (not unlike all the automotive parts suppliers in the American Midwest).
https://www.newsweek.com/iowa-bill-relaxing-back-child-labor...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/after-federal-break-appl...
The Russian economy is grinding to dust right now, and the Soviet vehicle inheritance evaporating.
At some point, they stop being able to pay workers and troops, and while martial law can keep things moving, it's all getting much more expensive after that.
Putin has been very careful to try and keep the war awaybfrom his Moscow powerbase...so it's clear he recognises his authority and position is far from unlimited.
Ukraine needs more soldiers, hard without full conscription, with the pool of heroic volunteers already committed, and it needs more artillery shells, that NATO can't readily supply because NATO never imagined playing quartermaster this kind of warfare in the 21st century.
But apparently Ukraine are developing nuclear weapons so we'll see.
If the US will provide TSMC with better deals on all fronts than what the Taiwanese government can, then there's nothing that can stop them from slowly abandoning Taiwan and moving the HQ and vital operations to the US over time, especially that the Taiwanese government is not a major shareholder in TSMC.
Have you heard of Operation Paperclip? The moment China steps in Taiwan, all those vital TSMC engineers will be flown to the US along with the critical IP and given a blank cheque to replicate Taiwan operation on US soil ASAP. TSMC is preemptively building the infrastructure there in preparation for such an event, so it can outlive whatever happens to Taiwan. TSMC has little inventive to tie itself to Taiwan and its people who are not its employees. Every big company thinks and acts like this. Taiwan can't force TSMC to stay there if it doesn't want to.
Also, German scientists who could leave the country were fleeing to the US before the Nazi regime started WW2 and also during the war, before it was a formal operation to gather them as prisoners of war when Germany lost.
The point is that Operation Paperclip happened in the aftermath of a total strategic defeat of the German army, where the Allies were the victorious power.
Taiwanese scientists and engineers are currently living happily in Taiwan, which is not a fascist regime cracking down on civil liberties. So they're not going to flee before the war, and once the war starts "extract significant numbers of educated personnel" is literally identical in military complexity to "fight and defeat the Chinese naval blockade".
>Taiwan can't force TSMC
IIRC TW foreign minister said a few years ago it was pure American wishcasting to expect TSMC employees to be evacuated before TW women and children. Around the same time TW politicians rebuffed the idea that TW would destroy their own fabs. That's TW's leverage, they control who gets on and off the planes and boats. Reality is if PRC makes a move, they'll lock down the airfield and shores, that's PRC's leverage - to control if planes and boats get to leave in the first place. Ultimately, TW politicians knows locking semi talent on the island is leverage, especially if they lose, because most of them won't have a ticket off the island.
Not to mention paperclip is the victors getting the spoils, and US is far from assured any victory or there would be any TSMC employees left to paperclip if motivated PRC wants to deny. Or that TSMC is like 70k people excluding their families. 300k if you include other direct TW semi employment. More if you include indirect (supply chain), and ultimately there's considerable sole source semi suppliers on TW that TSMC US won't be functional just like how ASML can shut down hardware by stopping inputs for maintenance. It's not just packaging and domestic talent that's another bottleneck, TSMC Arizona stops with TW inputs as much as it doesn't without ASML ones. And so far there's no real public plan to reshore that supply chain in US.
It is also naive to think that governments (US and especially ROC/Taiwan) do not have influence over TSMC. This sort of thing is not necessarily measured by level of shareholding.
The islands are Chinese. The US back Taiwan as an anti-communist and anti-China (divide and conquer) tactic, including because its location. If the communists had lost the civil war, the mainland and Taiwan would all have remained under ROC control and it would have been interesting to see what the US would have come up with, instead (academic and thought experiment but interesting to imagine nonetheless).
In Ukraine the US don't want to be dragged in a war against Russia and things have played well for them so far (really the US are the only winners so far).
"In June 2008, a TVBS poll found that 68% of the respondents identify themselves as "Taiwanese" while 18% would call themselves "Chinese".[33] In 2015, a poll conducted by the Taiwan Braintrust showed that about 90 percent of the population would identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.[34]" [1]
I did not expect to be able to seriously discuss geopolitics here, TBH, it never works and it is never possible to dig deeper. Case in point...
let's think
1. CCP took over California by force 2. CCP killed everyone who resists 3. CCP leaved, but built a puppet regime 4. The puppet regime rewrite schoolbook, taught everyone they're not American 5. 100 years later, a poll found that 68% of the respondents identify themselves as Californians
I must admit this is a bad thought experiment because Americans lives in a stolen land, it's not same as Taiwan
BTW, the Qing Empire is rule by a minority ethnic(满族)
And, by race, we are all Asians, can you understand the difference?
You are like comparing the genocide of Native Americans to a war between two Native American tribes.
let's go furthur abt this experiment
1. native american tribes took each others land, in the end, it became a single national country - Amerikka, for hundreds years 2. CPC came, colonized Amerikka, when it leaves, it splited California, did things I listed above
still, a bad thought experiment, because
> We wouldn't let native american tribes take each others land nowadays either
you've already took all their land, so they can not take each others land anymore
as i said it's hard for you to understand such things, you are in the totally different history background, you're in the colonizers' view, colonized America has became the status quo to you
If the US is currently in a state of division, with one part being a puppet regime under CPC (or Russians) control, you would find it easier to understand this problem.
At this point it's better to just have that nuclear war instead of the rest of us being pawn of nuclear states. There is no dignity in this.
Your are describing the statu quo as almost no country officially recognizes Taiwan
The business interests _are_ the political landscape today.
The proper word is "reunite", as it was agreed with the US
It sure gonna hurt the US Military industrial complex, no war = no money
"1982 U.S.-PRC Joint Communiqué/Six Assurances
As they negotiated establishment of diplomatic relations, the U.S. and PRC governments agreed to set aside the contentious issue of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. They took up that issue in the 1982 August 17 Communiqué, in which the PRC states “a fundamental policy of striving for peaceful reunification” with Taiwan, and the U.S. government states it “understands and appreciates” that policy. The U.S. government states in the 1982 communiqué that with those statements “in mind,” “it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan,” and “intends gradually to reduce its sale of arms to Taiwan, leading, over a period of time, to a final resolution.” The U.S. government also declares “no intention” of “pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas,’” meaning the PRC and the ROC, “or ‘one China, one Taiwan.’”"
> The proper word is "reunite", as it was agreed with the US
So the US and the PRC had some milquetoast diplomatic correspondence which did not include Taiwan. If the PRC now occupies Taiwan against the will of its people and population, presumably under fire from the Taiwanese army, it' just a "reunification"?
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Taiwan-elections/Taiwan-s-T...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/2024_Leg...
[0] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2023/09/02/...
You are not being objective, a poll is not a vote
In a vote, the registered population gets to vote using official ID
In a poll, only 'god' knows who the respondents are
No blood on my hands!
Some people might like the sound of this, some might hate it, but day to day, there are significant portions of the US gov workforce who deal with counter espionage, corporate safety, and of course more publicized are the parts that enforce or “request” compliance with US goals, mandates, projects and so on.
Once a factory is on shore, literally on your sovereign land, you have a lot more say.
No different than wanting your banking managed on networks in your country, or your weapons manufactured in country.
That said, generally states have competed for sites like this, and cities like San Jose, Austin and Portland have benefited from having large silicon industry economic bases. I can’t speculate if TSMC will benefit local industry that much, but I imagine it can’t hurt — it’s extra jobs, and probably a boost for suppliers that are convenient to the foundries.
With all 6 fabs online, and water reclamation in place, it's expected to be the equivalent of 160,000 homes:
https://www.phonearena.com/news/tsmc-access-to-water-us-fabs...
Now you can and absolutely should (IMO) make the argument that the fabs are far more important than the agricultural use in the area which is far more wasteful. But someone has to step up and do that and none of the politicians in the area seem to have been willing to make a commonsense decision and say: we're done growing crops in the desert when we've got endless better options.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Arizona/Public...
Labour, especially specialized labour, is a lot more expensive in the US.
Also, the US govt has put in a lot of subsidies
> Congress created a $52.7 billion semiconductor manufacturing and research subsidy program in 2022. Commerce convinced all five leading edge semiconductor firms to locate fabs in the United States as part of the program.
> The TSMC award from Commerce also includes up to $5 billion in low-cost government loans.
This is a big deal for the US Gov because chip manufacturing is ground zero for "staying competitive" against global competition, e.g. China, who is eating the US' lunch in most areas
The US has had semiconductor fabs for many years that are still operating. It just so happens that TSMC has the best process, but I don't think that has anything to do with labor costs.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/whos-afraid-of-east-asian-mana...
Point #1 on: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-thin...
It's a chicken and egg problem. Which is why this fab will import worker while local universities put into place pipelines to educate potential candidates and hopefully make the industry self-sufficient.
Rome wasn't built in a day.