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Speaking as someone in the chip industry, we most certainly do rely on China.
The Chinese market is massive, and was, until recently, growing at an eye-watering pace. I know of a few companies that took 20%+ off the balance sheets permanently when the Huawei sanctions hit a few years back. Even if the latest sanctions target advanced capabilities and leading-edge chips, these are still the centerpieces of designs with millions of units of volume (particularly in telecom, for 5G deployment and Chinese Android phones sold across the world), and less-advanced companies had many roles in these systems which are now jeopardized. Chinese electronics and electronics-adjacent industries, even those not relying on advanced chips or tools, are no doubt eyeing the latest round of sanctions with concern that their niche will be next. Semiconductor sales volume to China is going to slow down a lot for the next year or two, which is going to do damage to companies whose growth strategy was dependent on the continued growth of that market.
I'm less knowledgeable about the specifics on this part, but I also recall as little as a few years ago that the semiconductor packaging expertise cultivated in China is unrivaled, particularly its ability to scale. The more advanced devices nowadays bond the die to a PCB-like substrate material with extremely fine pitch routing on many layers of high-density film, to
famousfanout the contact points on the die to reasonable pitch and to improve signal/power integrity. While in theory the manufacture of the substrate and the bonding of the die can be done anywhere, China offered an unrivaled combination of rapid turnaround, high volume, and excellent quality (provided you knew where to look). There's a lot more packaging techniques developed and scaled in China, I just picked this as an example I remember; with chiplet designs for processors and chip-stacking technologies for flash memory, packaging is getting more demanding by the day. There's no explicit sanctions on this packaging equipment as far as I can tell - packaging is something the fab can contract out to a third party, and I suspect the sanctions are targeted narrowly on fab companies. Will large US semiconductor companies still need to process their finished dice in China, presenting additional risks for export control? Will the US summon up another round of sanctions to decapitate the packaging industry as well? Perhaps the industry has quietly de-risked itself over the last few years, but I can't find evidence of this with trivial googling.Anyway... we do rely on China, quite a lot, for both market size and post-fab manufacturing. Sanctions aren't doomsday, but definitely more than a haircut.
And that's before considering the possibility of TSMC catching some "errant" missiles in a hypothetical conflict (much less hypothetical than two weeks ago, to boot), knocking over more than half of worldwide advanced semiconductor production.
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