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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31262 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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From /u/gwern (@gwern ?): analysis on China’s semiconductor industry.

Recent export controls are directly targeting the Chinese ability to fabricate cutting-edge chips. The subsequent effect on electronics prices and the much-maligned supply chain won’t be pleasant—especially for China, and especially if their industry is already slumping. Consequences for the rest of the world are left as an exercise to the reader.

Given the forum, it’s not surprising that the focus is on AI. I’m more interested in the geopolitical outlook. This is an incentive to retaliate, perhaps even against the other regional semiconductor fabricator. And it is suggested that the timing is a calculated insult to Chinese leadership, as they are apparently going through a periodic dog-and-pony show of elections. Gwern suggests that China would otherwise be raising hell.

The counterpart in US domestic politics: crunching semiconductor supply will not mix well with inflation. I don’t think adding $50 to the next iPhone will make or break Democrats, but it seems unlikely to help.

I want to place predictions, but I don’t have a good grasp of the metrics involved. Place your bets, I guess, for:

  • China taking economic action

  • China taking military action

  • Consequences on Chinese industry

  • Tech policy towards China becoming a wedge issue in American politics

Interesting thread on the ssc subreddit from two months ago, which argues that this measures will actually benefit the Beijing regime. Reasoning being that this will create a market free of US competition, ready made for Chinese companies. A measure which China imposed on itself regarding the internet companies, leading to the success of domestic companies such as Alibaba.

Not sure I follow.

The argument is that banning export of a specific product creates a big incentive. That seems reasonable in a free market. But to what extent is the Chinese domestic market free? They could have banned Xeon imports themselves.

China wants, very badly, to have top tier fabrication. The fact that they haven’t gone full protectionist suggests that it isn’t the most efficient way to get what they want, probably because it would stall all the dependent industries in the meantime. I think the Internet was a different story: controlled for social reasons, and the market for Alibaba was a secondary effect.

If China REALLY wants top tier fabrication, they just have to..

..to what? Invade Occupied East China?

That construction is interesting, who would you say is occupying East China?

I was referencing the Chinese claim that Taiwan is part of China, and thus that American presence onshore would be an occupation.

It's impressive occupying the territory with only 29 marines, 2 soldiers, 3 sailors and 5 airmen. Quite the coup.

If that goes as well as they can expect, it gives them only the ruins of top-tier fabrication. They can't literally blitzkreig Taiwan and take it intact.

I get the "just build your own right-wing Twitter / web host / credit card processor" reference, but I don't know if most would.

I meant they could invade Taiwan

I'm pretty hesitant to make any predictions about whether China will or won't invade or blockade Taiwan and what the outcomes are likely to be, except for one thing: if China invades Taiwan and looks likely to prevail at any point, then I am confident that TSMC will not survive the conflict. The West will make sure that it doesn't, if it comes down to it. There's no world where China successfully commandeers TSMC.

Bear with my ignorance for a while.

But wouldn't destroying TSMC be suicidal?

My (ignorant) hypothetical is that China isn't stupid, if they get their hands on TSMC they won't close it off they will probably try to continue selling chips and capturing some of the profits. There's just too much money left on the table otherwise.

Why would The West just rid the world of a majority of semiconductor production just for realpolitik? They will have to bear the (opportunity) cost of that as well. The alternative would probably be just paying more some chips. And China becoming more advanced. But that seems infinitely more desirable than losing 60-80% of the worlds chip manufacturing.

So given that its so undesirable, now that I think of it, that's exactly what they might do being governments.

Yeah, I guess my mental model of US strategic planning is that IF China is going to commit such a massive defection as to seize TSMC by force, THEN we'd much rather no one have it than that China has it and can decide who is allowed to use it and on what terms. The US has struck a major blow against China recently with our semiconductor export restrictions, basically revealing that our goal is to permanently constrain China's advancement into modern ML tech, and I can't imagine that we'd allow China to reverse the gradient of that dynamic through the use of military force. I think we're past the point where we look at China as just another economic player with whom we can achieve a win-win, and we're now well into the politics of great power rivalry, at least with respect to high-powered machine learning chips.

Would destroying TSMC be suicidal? No -- we'd survive without it. We wouldn't have as many nice things for the next ten years, and we'd probably set back our AGI timeline by 5-10 years, and I don't mean to downplay those concerns, but preventing China from pulling even or ahead of the US in this strategic tech frontier is probably an order of magnitude more important by our policymakers' values. IMO.

tsmc doesn’t produce 60% of the world’s chips. They just make a lot of money from being the best design-rule foundry (along with Samsung). Most chips being produced use larger design rules, and are much cheaper. The other two companies that match them technologically don’t make their money from being a foundry.

The west would destroy TSMC in such a case because while there would be a ton of short-term hurt, it would make west-aligned fabs like Samsung and Intel even stronger. Also the west has been making deals with TSMC to build fabs outside of Taiwan (Japan, Arizona) in part so that they have the option to blow the whole fab up in the case of a Chinese invasion.

Exactly. If there are adults running the show they'll have planned where to put the explosives, have aircraft standing by and know the schools key TSMC employees kids will go to.

and know the schools key TSMC employees kids will go to.

What are you suggesting? That they should kill the employees' kids?

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