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IMHO, the reality of Taiwan being invaded and/or blockaded and reintegrated into China is so nightmarish, everyone is instinctively recoiling from thinking seriously about it at all. Some people are probably just ignorant at how crucial TSMC is to the global economy, but everyone else is just sleepwalking or engaging in magical thinking. There is no world that exist where China doesn't at least try to assert control over Taiwan in the next 10 years. And the trying will likely be disastrous for industry as well.
I mean, why'd Chinese blow TSMC up ? By that point they'll have a better chip industry of their own, probably somewhat closer to state of the art than now but, but are unlikely to have caught up.
Americans would be due to massive loss of prestige probably unable to stop TSMC's non-US suppliers for working with it. And I don't think Chinese are the kind of die-hard scorched earth fanatics that they'd destroy TSMC rather than go on grinding out chips as before, with a new set of bosses.
Unless China takes over without a fight, TSMC seems certain to be damaged in the fighting.
Why?
I mean, Taiwan has a couple of weeks of fuel for its power plants. A naval blockade would be the simplest task. Taiwanese navy isn't up to deterring it, and it could be enforced purely by airpower if needed anyway.
I really don't see Taiwanese as doing a Japanese-style doomed last stand. Totally different culture, ethos and all that.
Bloomberg: ASML and TSMC Can Disable Chip Machines If China Invades Taiwan
It's unclear how irreversably they can remotely disable the machines, but they are by all accounts extremely delicate (as expected for something operating on a nanometer scale) so it's possible they would be difficult or impossible to repair. Spare parts for the machines, like the machines themselves, are only manufactured in the Netherlands.
They would also be trivial to destroy for those on-site of course - I saw a suggestion that spraying them with a powder fire-extinguisher would do it, as would a bit of smashing stuff with a heavy object. Even if Taiwan gives up without a fight, and TSMC doesn't decide to destroy them, and ASML in the Netherlands can't or won't do it remotely, and the U.S. decides not to do it openly, and none of the TSMC employees decide to do it on their own, U.S. intelligence might have at least one TSMC employee ready with a plan on how best to destroy them before fleeing. And even undamaged they require the expertise of TSMC employees who might flee the country, and a whole supply chain reliant on various western countries.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying that Chinese are generally pragmatic people who wouldn't cause billions of $ of damage, for what? To spite other Chinese, on behalf of a foreign country that doesn't give a fuck about them because they're 'functionally' whites ?
ASML is Dutch, not Chinese. Though I guess if TSMC higher-ups were sufficiently dedicated to protecting the machinery in case of invasion (contrary to their public statements) they might decide to cut them off from the internet before ASML decides to trigger the remote killswitch.
If a minority of people are capable of doing something, "generally" isn't good enough to ensure it doesn't happen. We're talking equipment so delicate that 1 TSMC employee with physical access could do hundreds of millions of dollars of damages in a matter of seconds, and many billions in a matter of minutes. If one or more employees flip out and the reason the others don't is because of "pragmatism", are they willing to get hit by a fire-extinguisher for the sake of limiting the damage? There's presumably also plenty of stuff they could do more covertly by messing with configurations.
Even without anyone deciding to do it organically, given the known geopolitical importance the U.S. could easily be paying a couple TSMC employees in case of such an eventuality. Or some random guys who live in the area and have guns stashed away. I remember when the invasion of Ukraine started Russia had people planting devices that shot green lasers at the sky to help with targeting. It doesn't seem like a stretch that even if the U.S. was completely unwilling to confront China openly, it could easily destroy the fabs covertly and blame Taiwanese patriots deciding to do it on their own. The Nord Stream pipelines weren't even being used and they still got sabotaged.
Even completely intact equipment is reliant on a complicated supply chain scattered across western countries that would be near-impossible to replicate in case of sanctions. The machines themselves and their spare parts from the Netherlands, ultra-pure quartz that is nearly all from Spruce Pine, North Carolina, etc.
I know. But ASML is prevented from doing business with Chinese on order of the US.
Chinese people aren't stupid, I presume they're very tightly keeping people to the stuff they know because if you're dealing with a highly delicate process you don't want anyone poking without asking. It's also a military-style management culture.
Yeah, and how do these employees expect to ..leave Taiwan to collect their bribe for betraying the rest of the company?
Yeah, sure. You can work around these things, Chinese are doing it since they were cut off from western suppliers. And guess what - people can reverse engineer and learn to make do. It gave a big boost to Chinese chip industry startups. Which, in many cases, have TSMC veterans working in them, because it's easier to fly high in a new company.
see this interview: https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/huawei-and-the-us-china-chip-war-44/transcript
Chinese have a higher supply of STEM grads of the appropriate intellectual level than the entire West, so 'catching up' for them is only a matter of will and investment. I mean, they'd even without the spying.
And, most critically, time. EUV took decades to get to the state where it could barely be called working. Remember the mythical man-month? China's supply of STEM grads is sufficient to undertake nation-state scientific giga projects, yes, but they will be rediscovering the required physics and engineering for years. And until they figure it out, they're stuck at quad-patterning DUV yields (which aren't great below 14nm), or even worse yields on even more multipatterning. And that means more subsidies the government has to pay to top chip manufacturers to produce otherwise unprofitable chips. I know you linked to a guy who says they got the yields up above 50% and they can probably improve it, and that this could be profitable if their devices sold for comparable prices to next-gen TSMC tech, but this comes at considerable cost to power efficiency, places intense demands on the fab to customize process to fit design issues, and sucks money and time away from longer-term research to pivot away from DUV. They would spend the next ten years on the same trajectory as Intel 14nm, where they keep squeezing minor miracles out of the chip design in exchange for increasing power consumption and overspecialization. They'd keep getting tiny improvements, for years; meanwhile, Western EUV will also be improving, yields will also be slowly catching up, and costs will start falling off as the EUV nodes mature (look at TSMC wafer prices for 7nm at start vs today). The whole reason the major players are transitioning to EUV now is because they all recognize that, long-term, the future of DUV is unsustainable, and EUV is going to be less costly. Chinese fabs also know this. If China manages to stay competitive against EUV, they will be required to pay dearly for it. Lay-journo interpretations notwithstanding, this is, and has always been, the aim of sanctions - to penalize and slow access to cutting-edge technology.
I suspect that an invasion of Taiwan in which the outcome appears dire would result in the EUV machines being rendered into indistinguishable welded slag and scraps, at least in the molten tin UV source. Several hundred billion dollars and decades of research and development is tied up in the design and manufacturing of these machines. The critical trade secrets are going to be unrecognizably destroyed. If TSMC doesn't destroy their machinery, and ASML can't, the US will, covertly if possible, overtly if unavoidable. China will eventually get access to domestic EUV with enough will and investment; but without intact examples of working EUV machines to study, they're stuck on the long, slow grind of figuring it out themselves. How many years of progress will be made in western chip fabrication while the Chinese are busy re-solving EUV?
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