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It doesn't make sense to spend hundreds of billions a year to defend a 30 billion dollar factory. While building a fab is exorbitantly expensive, building a navy to defend it is slower and more expensive.
The Navy isn't there to defend one 30-billion-dollar factory. It's there to defend all the 30-billion-dollar factories, and the capacity to make more of them. Among many other things of course.
The important thing about TSMC is the tradition, not the 30-billion-dollar fabs. The current saga about TSMC seeking exceptions to CHIPS Act Buy American requirements strongly suggests that if America spent 30 billion dollars on a 3nm fab built and run by Americans, they wouldn't end up with a working 3nm fab. And moving the tradition to a non-Chinese-speaking country is hard because of the language barrier - Paul Graham says you could definitely transfer the tradition that makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley by bringing over 10,000 people and you could probably do it with 500 people, but he is thinking about moving it to another English-speaking city. The other problem bringing the tradition to America (although not to a hungry middle-income country like Malaysia) is that America is still too proud to let in 500-10,000 Taiwanese and treat them like authority figures to be learned from - and a political culture dominated by MAGA populism and left-populism optimised as a foil to MAGA populism is even less able to do that.
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