The point here would be that after N years, US workers at the site would gain enough insights to replicate the processes with American companies? Because otherwise what's the point? Will TSMC allow that? Because to just have more internal "normal" jobs in the US is a small gain. There is a big ST site here in Catania, while they produce many chips most of the workers are blue collars.
This redundancy makes me worried that the US will view Taiwanese sovereignty as disposable. While the US has given much for the defence of Ukraine, it’s always been careful to make sure it’s not enough for Ukraine to win but only enough to make it expensive for Russia hopping they’ll reconsider. Russia has won there and I suspect they’ll joe be willing to let China have the islands now too.
Selling the secret sauce to US definitely make Taiwan disposable. But I also bet TSMC doesn't have a choice as whoever in power in US can also impose sanction/tariff or whatever they can to make TSMC to compile.
TSMC is a publicly traded company and like all publicly traded companies it has no allegiance to any country (other than historical legacy and emotions) and will always relocate to where it's most safe and profitable for providing returns to its shareholders, just like how many profitable companies moved to UK, US and Switzerland during WW2 and how many EU companies are doing the same thing today.
If the US will provide TSMC with better deals on all fronts than what the Taiwanese government can, then there's nothing that can stop them from slowly abandoning Taiwan and moving the HQ and vital operations to the US over time, especially that the Taiwanese government is not a major shareholder in TSMC.
Have you heard of Operation Paperclip? The moment China steps in Taiwan, all those vital TSMC engineers will be flown to the US along with the critical IP and given a blank cheque to replicate Taiwan operation on US soil ASAP. TSMC is preemptively building the infrastructure there in preparation for such an event, so it can outlive whatever happens to Taiwan. TSMC has little inventive to tie itself to Taiwan and its people who are not its employees. Every big company thinks and acts like this. Taiwan can't force TSMC to stay there if it doesn't want to.
Reminder that TSMC WANTs to stay in TW... they did not want to expand in US at all. Arizona fab annoucement after months rumormill was big surprise at the time since TSMC did massive TW capex expansion and had no $$$ for US fabs, and it was combination of CHIPS carrots ($$$) and US sticks that got Arizona greenlit. Morris Chang publically said CHIPS would fail to get US semi leadership, that US policy is "doomed" / "futile", that is not the words of someone who wanted to erode TW's silicon shield. IMO TSMC Arizona's current (likely ongoing) dependence on imported TW talent makes it pretty clear TW is keeping tight leash.
>Taiwan can't force TSMC
IIRC TW foreign minister said a few years ago it was pure American wishcasting to expect TSMC employees to be evacuated before TW women and children. Around the same time TW politicians rebuffed the idea that TW would destroy their own fabs. That's TW's leverage, they control who gets on and off the planes and boats. Reality is if PRC makes a move, they'll lock down the airfield and shores, that's PRC's leverage - to control if planes and boats get to leave in the first place. Ultimately, TW politicians knows locking semi talent on the island is leverage, especially if they lose, because most of them won't have a ticket off the island.
Not to mention paperclip is the victors getting the spoils, and US is far from assured any victory or there would be any TSMC employees left to paperclip if motivated PRC wants to deny. Or that TSMC is like 70k people excluding their families. 300k if you include other direct TW semi employment. More if you include indirect (supply chain), and ultimately there's considerable sole source semi suppliers on TW that TSMC US won't be functional just like how ASML can shut down hardware by stopping inputs for maintenance. It's not just packaging and domestic talent that's another bottleneck, TSMC Arizona stops with TW inputs as much as it doesn't without ASML ones. And so far there's no real public plan to reshore that supply chain in US.
I don't see how this is relevant or invalidates my point. You think the US will wait for the end of the war to do that or what?
Also, German scientists who could leave the country were fleeing to the US before the Nazi regime started WW2 and also during the war, before it was a formal operation to gather them as prisoners of war when Germany lost.
How is the US going to extract a whole bunch of Taiwanese citizens from an island which will be under a Chinese naval encirclement?
The point is that Operation Paperclip happened in the aftermath of a total strategic defeat of the German army, where the Allies were the victorious power.
Taiwanese scientists and engineers are currently living happily in Taiwan, which is not a fascist regime cracking down on civil liberties. So they're not going to flee before the war, and once the war starts "extract significant numbers of educated personnel" is literally identical in military complexity to "fight and defeat the Chinese naval blockade".
In the game betwen China and the US, the legal status and 'allegiance' of TSMC is not relevant. What is relevant is who controls the fabs, i.e. where the fabs are physically located.
It is also naive to think that governments (US and especially ROC/Taiwan) do not have influence over TSMC. This sort of thing is not necessarily measured by level of shareholding.
Short of nuclear weapons, I'm not sure what would allow Ukraine to "win". Even given all the hardware, Ukraine doesn't have the staff or experience to field a full NATO air wing and integrate it to fight according to NATO combined arms doctrine -- if that even WOULD produce a "win" (there is an untested assumption that a NATO-standard military could trounce Russia)
Ukraine needs to hold the line, keep Russia sanctioned and let it burn itself out economically...or wait for Putin to die.
The Russian economy is grinding to dust right now, and the Soviet vehicle inheritance evaporating.
At some point, they stop being able to pay workers and troops, and while martial law can keep things moving, it's all getting much more expensive after that.
Putin has been very careful to try and keep the war awaybfrom his Moscow powerbase...so it's clear he recognises his authority and position is far from unlimited.
I agree with all that, but none of that translates to a traditional battlefield triumph. Maybe providing more long-range weapons would enable symbolic strikes near Moscow or on oligarchs' dachas, but that's the only case I can think of where materiel might help with that strategy.
Ukraine needs more soldiers, hard without full conscription, with the pool of heroic volunteers already committed, and it needs more artillery shells, that NATO can't readily supply because NATO never imagined playing quartermaster this kind of warfare in the 21st century.
Ukraine can't even properly equip the soldiers it already has. Supporting countries could dig a lot deeper in their supplies, they will have ample time to rearm.
TSMC being 2-4 years ahead of Samsung/Intel has nothing to do whether US would be willing to go on a nuclear war and move the entire world decades if not millenias back. No one can go on a direct war with a country with nukes unless they are ready for mutually assured destruction.
>As of September 30, 2024, the U.S. Ukraine response funding totals nearly $183 billion
>Russia's official 2022 military budget is expected to be 4.7 trillion rubles ($75bn), or higher, and about $84bn for 2023
And it did. US could do very very significant harm to Russia's military if nuclear retaliation wasn't a threat. And probably that would be cheaper than the weapons/training that they are giving to Ukraine.
the current regime will make choices based on what's profitable for the companies involved. It's unlikely that losing TSMC will improve profits for American companies, so having this redundancy is for short term applications.
The business interests _are_ the political landscape today.
> they’ll be willing to let China have the islands now too
The islands are Chinese. The US back Taiwan as an anti-communist and anti-China (divide and conquer) tactic, including because its location. If the communists had lost the civil war, the mainland and Taiwan would all have remained under ROC control and it would have been interesting to see what the US would have come up with, instead (academic and thought experiment but interesting to imagine nonetheless).
In Ukraine the US don't want to be dragged in a war against Russia and things have played well for them so far (really the US are the only winners so far).
"In June 2008, a TVBS poll found that 68% of the respondents identify themselves as "Taiwanese" while 18% would call themselves "Chinese".[33] In 2015, a poll conducted by the Taiwan Braintrust showed that about 90 percent of the population would identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.[34]" [1]
1. CCP took over California by force
2. CCP killed everyone who resists
3. CCP leaved, but built a puppet regime
4. The puppet regime rewrite schoolbook, taught everyone they're not American
5. 100 years later, a poll found that 68% of the respondents identify themselves as Californians
I must admit this is a bad thought experiment because Americans lives in a stolen land, it's not same as Taiwan
Taiwan has an aboriginal population as well, there are very few countries where the original settlers are recognizable as the current population without squinting. China is one of the worst offenders, with the westward expansion of the Qing Empire contemporary with American westward expansion. Moreover, when America started serious decolonizing in the 20th Century (Philippines) and ending residential schools, China invaded Tibet and continues to pursue aggressive assimilation in its Western regions.
China is not a single-ethnicity country. For thousands of years, most of the time, the majority and minority ethnic groups have lived together on this land. There have been wars and integrations thousands times and thousans years. this must be hard for you to understand, right? I can understand that you might unconsciously use your own history to comprehend the history of Asia. In addition, all forms of ethnic separatism have the support of the United States. But I think you already know this.
BTW, the Qing Empire is rule by a minority ethnic(满族)
And, by race, we are all Asians, can you understand the difference?
You are like comparing the genocide of Native Americans to a war between two Native American tribes.
1. native american tribes took each others land, in the end, it became a single national country - Amerikka, for hundreds years
2. CPC came, colonized Amerikka, when it leaves, it splited California, did things I listed above
still, a bad thought experiment, because
> We wouldn't let native american tribes take each others land nowadays either
you've already took all their land, so they can not take each others land anymore
as i said it's hard for you to understand such things, you are in the totally different history background, you're in the colonizers' view, colonized America has became the status quo to you
If the US is currently in a state of division, with one part being a puppet regime under CPC (or Russians) control, you would find it easier to understand this problem.
Change of subject? Russia's main aim in Ukraine was/is regime change ('main' because they obviously do want to annex the Donbas), a bit like what happened in Iraq in 2003...
I did not expect to be able to seriously discuss geopolitics here, TBH, it never works and it is never possible to dig deeper. Case in point...
Actually I agree with you - if Russia's main aim in Ukraine was changing the regime, that would have turned Ukraine into something like Belarus, which I don't really consider independent...
The proper word is "reunite", as it was agreed with the US
It sure gonna hurt the US Military industrial complex, no war = no money
"1982 U.S.-PRC Joint Communiqué/Six Assurances
As they negotiated establishment of diplomatic relations,
the U.S. and PRC governments agreed to set aside the
contentious issue of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. They took
up that issue in the 1982 August 17 Communiqué, in which
the PRC states “a fundamental policy of striving for
peaceful reunification” with Taiwan, and the U.S.
government states it “understands and appreciates” that
policy. The U.S. government states in the 1982
communiqué that with those statements “in mind,” “it does
not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to
Taiwan,” and “intends gradually to reduce its sale of arms
to Taiwan, leading, over a period of time, to a final
resolution.” The U.S. government also declares “no
intention” of “pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas,’” meaning
the PRC and the ROC, “or ‘one China, one Taiwan.’”"
> The proper word is "reunite", as it was agreed with the US
So the US and the PRC had some milquetoast diplomatic correspondence which did not include Taiwan. If the PRC now occupies Taiwan against the will of its people and population, presumably under fire from the Taiwanese army, it' just a "reunification"?
An election result is not a single-issue poll and the current government supports the status quo anyway (just being fundamentally more open to dialogue). A clear majority of the opulation supports de-facto independence (the current status) or even formal independence [0].
But no big party supports reunification with the current Chinese government, at best they have it as a long term goal. The election results do not show what you're claiming.
Very misleading to link to the legislative election results, when the KMT party only won 33% of the Presidential vote. And on top of that the KMT's actions when in power are to preserve the status quo (effectively independent, make money, avoid war), even if their long term vision is peaceful unification with a democratic China.
I know Intel has also opened a site nearby. Rumor is that many of the TSMC staff, having seen the lifestyle of American engineers in Arizona have started quietly applying with Intel.
No that’s not the goal — having the fabs onshore means US intelligence agencies and executive/legislative branch will have access. This is contra to Taiwan where the Taiwanese government oversees this access.
Some people might like the sound of this, some might hate it, but day to day, there are significant portions of the US gov workforce who deal with counter espionage, corporate safety, and of course more publicized are the parts that enforce or “request” compliance with US goals, mandates, projects and so on.
Once a factory is on shore, literally on your sovereign land, you have a lot more say.
No different than wanting your banking managed on networks in your country, or your weapons manufactured in country.
That said, generally states have competed for sites like this, and cities like San Jose, Austin and Portland have benefited from having large silicon industry economic bases. I can’t speculate if TSMC will benefit local industry that much, but I imagine it can’t hurt — it’s extra jobs, and probably a boost for suppliers that are convenient to the foundries.
