It’s worth reading Chris Miller’s “Chip Wars” to clarify some of the muddle in this article. It’s important to understand how the US dug itself into this hole and why it’s a multi decade project to dig ourselves out.The strategic importance of TSMC and thus Taiwan can not be overstated. If TSMC goes offline, the biggest threat being mainland China, firms like Apple, nVidia, AMD will be out of business. The less sophisticated chips that power everything from autos to toasters will be gone, along with 40 years of anti-pollution efforts, EV production, and the US obsession with autos. To a lesser extent, Korea’s Samsung fabs are at risk as well.It’s impossible for the US to catch up in the short run. It’s a multi-decade adventure, not only of infrastructure, but also developing domestic proprietary fab technology. This goes against the grain of US obsession with quarterly profits.TSMC and others are not building their latest and greatest fabs in the US; when they do come online, they’ll be making wafers a generation or two behind the times.In any event, everyone’s wafers still land in mainland China for packaging, test and ultimate assembly into iPhones, etc.It’s good that the US is investing in chip infrastructure, but this needs to be for the long haul and can’t be a pork barrel giveaway like NASA’s SLS.

It’s worth reading Chris Miller’s “Chip Wars” to clarify some of the muddle in this article. It’s important to understand how the US dug itself into this hole and why it’s a multi decade project to dig ourselves out.The strategic importance of TSMC and thus Taiwan can not be overstated. If TSMC goes offline, the biggest threat being mainland China, firms like Apple, nVidia, AMD will be out of business. The less sophisticated chips that power everything from autos to toasters will be gone, along with 40 years of anti-pollution efforts, EV production, and the US obsession with autos. To a lesser extent, Korea’s Samsung fabs are at risk as well.It’s impossible for the US to catch up in the short run. It’s a multi-decade adventure, not only of infrastructure, but also developing domestic proprietary fab technology. This goes against the grain of US obsession with quarterly profits.TSMC and others are not building their latest and greatest fabs in the US; when they do come online, they’ll be making wafers a generation or two behind the times.In any event, everyone’s wafers still land in mainland China for packaging, test and ultimate assembly into iPhones, etc.It’s good that the US is investing in chip infrastructure, but this needs to be for the long haul and can’t be a pork barrel giveaway like NASA’s SLS.

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