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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

Now imagine TSMC being controlled by China. While I think it's fairly low probability, the imagination does create some pretty dystopian scenarios.

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I don't think that "China is evil" (or at least more evil than US) is reasonable position to hold nowadays.

China would probably want to increase production and export more? What are you worried about specifically

they don't price gouge on other stuff from shenzhen really do

Either the factories are gone or China controls them and takes most of the output for themselves. They've already been excluded from a good amount of the output!

How would that work? They can't take the fabs (single door opened and dust makes it all useless) and even if they could they can't run ASML machines with their support. So... labor camp fabs on unmaintained STOA hardware from a single company everybody relies on? I can't imagine that scenario. Either they manage to redeploy the whole value chain (not saying it's impossible but doesn't seem to be the case at scale for now) or taking Taiwan by force is mostly a political show, not a technological one.

If TSMC were to simply disappear, it would be a great day for Samsung/Intel but a godawful catastrophe for most HPC applications and consumer hardware. People aren't afraid of a fab takeover, they're afraid of TSMC disappearing altogether.

It's the point of my question, I don't see how TSMC could not disappear if Taiwan becomes part of China.

China is working hard on getting their own fabs. Then the have no need to keep TSMC operational.

As I said China is indeed already working on their entire value chain. They have been doing that for a while and they have made significant progress. Still so far they don't have the precision, scale and economical competitiveness than TSMC. If they get there then it will be a totally different scenario but that's not the case for now.

It's not a if it's when. ASML doesn't pay fuck you money to their employees just to keep China from hiring them away.

Eventually ASML will get in same boat as all of the Western industries from shipbuilding and car manufacturing to everything else.

It may take one year or twenty, but law if it's a matter of national security for them, eventually they will get ahead.

Wouldn't the rest of the world encourage ASML to keep supporting the fab because they want the chips to keep coming?

Which rest of the World? ASML already has restrictions on China from Netherlands (where they are based) and the US (which provides some core IP).

My argument is that they would add an exception for TSMC in the event that Taiwan fell under Chinese control. The alternative would be an extreme supply shock to the industry that's responsible for most stock market and GDP growth in America.

They need regular chemical deliveries from japan as well.

Simple, they invade and TSMC blows up their factories. Or, the invasion is successful and they control the factories.

I didn't say it was likely, but one of these two outcomes is possible.

If China has proven one thing, they can just rebuild the factories, sure it will be 5-8 years of depression but afterwards they will control a dominate player.

That's assuming ASML and co would even supply the required tech should that happen.

They’re literally worlds’ factory but that’s where things would turn bad?

In that case my retro hardware collection will be worth even more. (Note: that my current hardware will likely be retro faster than I assume it would have been)

I also found out recently my matched, working 3d hardware from the '90s was worth more than my actual year-old medium-high end video card, so who knows!

/s for obvious reasons, except the rise in prices of 3dfx cards ffs (wtaf).

China, who keeps undercutting ai prices and producing things efficiently?

I don't have to imagine what it would be like under communism in order to see what it's already like under capitalism.

> China, who keeps undercutting ai prices (by training on model output) and producing things efficiently (with slave labor)?

Yeah, things are going great over there

Dystopian scenarios... Like even more expensive steam decks.

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