Can't they just "exfiltrate" or "compromise" or "steal" company secrets and establish their own base in mainland China ?
Genuinely curious as I know nothing of industrial espionage.
They certainly can’t “just” do that, no :-).
Source: see Intel, who have the money, experience, expertise, time, incentive and asml machines to do this and are making a big bet on gaining TSMC parity (at least). If the stock price is any indication, they are unlikely to succeed.
Disclaimer: I work at Intel but in an unrelated area. My information in this area is the same as an interested outsider. I do fiercely want them to succeed in becoming the only tsmc competitor.
This make it sounds like they will invade just because of TSMC, but it is more like using TSMC as an excuse if it really happen.
China wants Taiwan, TSMC or not.
Moore law is losing steam. TSMC itself is probably just 10-20 years behind physical limits. A decade from now TSMC will run out of room to be much ahead anyway.
A cup of coffee dumped in the machinery would destroy most of it beyond all hope of repair, let alone something fragmentary and full of nitrogen bonds.
The only sanction you could perform would be "no chips for anyone, anywhere".
And in such a, uh, kinetic, situation, I'm absolutely sure neither side will allow the other to retain working facilities that don't undergo very unfortunate accidents. Even a sudden power cut can be devastating. A foil balloon was enough to take out multiple fabs in Germany, and Samsung dropped 3.5% of global flash supply on the floor from 30 minutes down.
MAD doesn't come only in nuclear flavor.
And I'd also bet that a translation of Simple Sabotage would be going viral within the week.
I didn't know about that incident; more details here:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/wayward-balloon-c...