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Comment by porkpieshoe | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: I drove past TSMC in Surprise AZ and I counted at least 18 large construction cranes on that single site.

TSMC doesn’t make DRAM though. Their biz model is manufacturing complex logic chips (eg cpus and asics), which doesn’t have the same commodity cycle.

TSMC in the US is a bit of a special case .... wouldn't surprise me at all if they were virtue signalling to the Trump admin more than anything with what they are doing there.

How so? They are diversifying their production chain so that all their eggs aren't in one basket. Taiwan might be threatened one day but their US, Japan, and German plants will much less likely be in the same danger.

That seems wrong to me - the idea of the "Silicon shield of Taiwain" is that alle the critical cutting edge production is all physically in Taiwan & rigged to be destroyed if Taiwan is ever attacked.

If they do diversify, they are compromising a key policy protecting their homeland, it makes no sense!

"Fiduciary duty" of TSMC execs? And can Taiwan government compel them not to build out in the US?

Using tariff threats, Trump forced them to build a plant in the USA because… America First ™

TSMC US federal plant funding was under Biden not Trump (CHIPS act)

Trump did do the initial deal though, but TSMC had to cough the money up for that

TSMC wouldn’t put tens of billons of dollars in irreversible investment just to virtue signal, the scale is too large

You can’t “undo” a fab

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