this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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this is outdated information, and if you are going to copy-paste it around you should fix and probably adjust it. china has reasons for wanting to "unify" Taiwan and it's not about TSMC, that would be a nice bonus. but it's really not about it and their tech sector is not reliant on it.
their tech sector does not use TSMC chips today, their own chip fabs are actually doing surprisingly well. which is the reason that the US has been trying to build up their own chip manufacturing for a while, china got good and TSMC's future isn't predictable.
the US isn't trying to move TSMC to US soil, they can't move the infrastructure, the majority of the people and (importantly) the location - all of which are what make TSMC special (the lithography machines are from europe and elsewhere). The US just wants options and industry in an unpredictable market where their biggest competitor has made significant ground
There is a lot inaccurate about your response, but I'm going to focus on the most glaring part:
No they are not. And not it is not. For what reason would the US close down all chip manufacturing plants in China if we didn't have something we were keeping from China? They are not doing surprisingly well, they were incredibly dependent on TSMC, which they have been choked off of as of October 2023.
So maybe this comes from a place of ignorance. But America doesn't have anything here. Literally. The machines and optics are designed and made in Europe. The design libraries that are used to build chips out are licensed globally.
TSMC is the leading fab because they constantly invest huge amounts of money in the newest machines and tech (they don't develop) and they have excellent yield working with them thanks to a focus on procedures that prioritize yield over throughput.
There's no secret sauce here, China can and has managed to produce really surprisingly excellent chip fabs in the last few years. They can purchase the asml machines like anyone else can.
Except, they can't. ASML has been banned by the Netherlands from exporting tools to China.