Actually, this is true. The big question is what's going on behind the scenes. China has been busy building up its own supply chain after the U.S. closed off shipments of any U.S.-based R&D to Huawei last summer. It also has made statements that Taiwan is part of China since then, which has left the U.S. without an advanced-node fab. Intel is at least a node behind both Samsung and TSMC, and the U.S. has no trusted foundry on U.S. soil capable of 7nm volume production, let alone 5nm or 3nm.
For the U.S., this is a potential disaster. If China marches into Taiwan, the U.S. will be left with no advanced-node manufacturing and it will have lost the technology race. It would take at least four to six years to recover, and by that time China would own the market. This is very scary for the U.S., which needs to develop AI chips at the most advanced nodes because density equals more accelerators and other types of processing elements. Even that isn't enough, which is why companies developing AI chips are stitching together chips that are larger than a single reticle. (https://semiengineering.com/the-risk-of-two-supply-chains/)
It goes further than that, too. The DoD needs AI chips, too. In the past, the DoD relied on older nodes. That's changed because it needs transistor density for AI. More MACs equals more performance. On top of all of this, TSMC owns the bulk of the fabless market. So this will happen. The big question is who's funding this move.
China marching into Taiwan would be a losing move. Never mind the civil unrest, the entire world would bail out of China. Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand + India would be even more alerted than they are right now with HK situation. The narrative in these countries is quickly evolving. CCP is over playing their hand by engaging in asymetrical trade.
> Never mind the civil unrest, the entire world would bail out of China.
That is not clear.. at all. Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand -- the non-US western allies -- have all known exactly what China's end goal is and have down jack diddly squat to put pressure on them.
The only thing preventing China from taking out Taiwan is the United States. Europe and the rest of the world is too cowardly to even do anything, which is really unfortunate.
It's definitely true for Europe being absolutely spineless when push comes to shove.
The EU couldn't even put pressure on Erdogan let alone on Xi.
China has been buying influence here for years, especially through the poorer countries that were alienated by the strict austerity measures imposed by the bigger powers.
The nature of the EU politics where a single country has the power to veto the rest is a massive loophole that China is happily exploiting.
The fact that every EU country has different interests and agendas is a huge problem that results to the union never aligning on anything critical.
Just look how the refugee crisis was handled. Affected countries were crying for help and the others were like "sucks for you bro".
I am not saying it is obvious that the US would confront China militarily if it was to invade Taiwan. But Europe did let a friendly country at its immediate border get invaded and didn’t even stop buying the main resource the invader relies on (oil and gas). Let alone have any military involvement.
> The memorandum was originally signed by three nuclear powers: the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States.... included security assurances against threats or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Nothing - but Crimea is right on the EU's doorstep. Both Ukraine and Russia share borders with EU member states.
If we EU member states didn't get involved when we saw a fight right in front of us, the threat of us getting involved in a fight thousands of miles away isn't very credible as a deterrent.
More broadly, when I look at Taiwan I don't see the EU or US recognising Taiwan as a nation - let alone any tripwire forces or foreign airbases or nuclear sharing or NATO membership or joint training exercises which signal the fully fledged protection of a great power.
> Nothing - but Crimea is right on the EU's doorstep.
So it's no further from US bases than EU bases.
> Both Ukraine and Russia share borders with EU member states.
And Russia is a two mile walkable ice bridge from the US in winter.
> If we EU member states didn't get involved when we saw a fight right in front of us, the threat of us getting involved in a fight thousands of miles away isn't very credible as a deterrent.
Distance isn't the issue. EU countries/NATO will bomb any puny country armed with obsolete weapons, wherever it is.
What the US and EU will never do is get into a fight with a nuclear armed superpower.
umm Russia isn't a super power. But the US and EU will avoid directly fighting any nuclear armed country... Well yea duh, the nuke doesn't need to hit us to kill the planet.
True, although Crimea was pretty much testcase-scale - not many people live there, and its economic value is pretty low. Taiwan is much much more populous, and has a much higher economic value.
Russia took crimea without any issue. Do you really think anything will happen if china took taiwan by force? It's a matter of time before china takes taiwan.
Another aspect of Russia taking crimea is that the people living there to a large extent welcomed it.
There are some that are pro-unification in Taiwan, but it's a minority. Most people are pro status quo, and the number that are for declaring independence is growing. The ruling party is very pro-independence (ideologically speaking, in practice they have to move slowly and maintain status quo to some degree), meaning releasing their claim over mainland China, changing name from "Republic of China" or "China" to Taiwan, seeking UN membership etc.
The other big difference is that Taiwan is quite capable of defending itself to some extent. China will win eventually, but not without devastating the island. This will affect everyone economically. China and the world. If TSMCs factories in Taiwan are destroyed, it'd have an enormous impact on world economy. The production of high-tech electronics would be stunted for years. Russia annexing crimea had absolutely no practical effect on the world.
The fact is that everyone, China included, is relatively happy with the status quo. The CCP has to make a scene now and then to appease the fragile ego of a large portion of the mainland chinese. But I really don't think they actually care that much about invading Taiwan.
I have visited Crimea last year as a tourist and talked with Crimeans personally (in Massandra and Alushta). Where do you get your information? In my experience people are mostly happy with the Russian rule and with changes it brings (simply compare investments before 2014 and after). Of course, those who work in IT, have to virtually reallocate via VPNs to circumvent western sanctions, but they don't blame Russia for that (and VPN is a must-have either way for tech savy due to the Roskompozor). One common complaint was somewhat higher prices, but situation got a bit better after the Crimean bridge got put into operation. Also another complaint which I heard is that new government is much stricter about tax collection and preventing illegal business. Yes, Crimean Tatars a bit less happy with the Russian rule on average compared to ethnic Russians, but I think it mostly can be attributed to the lost profits from illegal businesses, significant amount of which was traditionally operated by tatars (see the issue of illegal construction). But it's important to note that they got much more freedom in respect of cultural autonomy than they had in Ukraine (their language is now official republican language on par with Russian and Ukranian). Only after Ukraine lost Crimea they have started to talk about an autonomy for Tatars, which is quite pathetic in my opinion.
> Crimean Tatars a bit less happy with the Russian rule on average compared to ethnic Russians, but I think it mostly can be attributed to the lost profits from illegal businesses
It’s a bit more complicated than that. The historical and relatively recent mass starvation, persecution, mass murder and forcing into gulags is likely relevant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Tatars
Note that not only Tatars have died from mass starvation in 30s and 40s. It hit equally hard Russians, Ukrainians and other ethnic groups (e.g. it had consequences as far as in the Volga region), so Tatars (as well as Ukrainians) weren't an exclusive target here. AFAIK Tatars weren't forced into Gulags without proofs of collaboration with Nazi forces (the number is estimated around 15k, which is only approximately 5% of the total Tatar population). And while the deportation is indeed should be condemned, as the significant death toll which was a consequence of it (though I wouldn't call it a "mass murder"), I don't think it's correct to attribute Soviet deeds to the modern Russia, especially considering the Russian rehabilitation law specifically targeting Crimean Tatars.
While I will not deny that a certain amount of bad blood still exists due to the deportation, I think most Tatars more concerned about their current livelihood (though I have talked only with 2 tatars, so my sample size is quite small).
The Wikipedia article states that 191,044-423,100 Tarters were deported, depending on which source is used (this doesn’t mean they all went to Gulags, but hard labour in Uzbekistan was what most did). It’s described as ethnic cleansing and mentioning the Tarters was banned. Baria and Stalin’s actions killed 34,000 to 109,956 Tarters during this time and 80,000 homes and farms lay empty.
I had an ethnically Russian co-worker from Donetsk at a previous job right around the time Russia started "supporting" the rebels there (i.e. sending in a large number of their own troops as "tourists" etc.) and while he personally hated Russia, he lamented that the vast majority of his extended family back in the Donetsk region supported and welcomed the Russians
I got the impression Putin used social media, e.g. VK, to manipulate people's opinions, eg untrue "news" about people from Russia being harassed and worse.
Seemed like successful psyops by Putin to me. I guess if Ukraine had blocked VK sooner, not many people had been particularly much pro Putin.
Of course now Putin continues with psyops via Facebook but that's harder for him than via VK.
It's quite well known if you venture outside the mainstream media.
For example there were opinion polls done by western polling orgs in Crimea where the vast majority supported unification with Russia. It's not hard to understand. Salaries in Russia are ~10x what they are in Ukraine for the same job. Economically they're not comparable, and that's before you get to the whole conflict in Ukraine starting because the government was overthrown by rebels supporting a new government that amongst its first acts, banned the Russian language.
Remember that Ukraine's response to the peaceful annexation was to cut off Crimea's entire electricity supply. That's hardly the work of a friendly government trying to help its loved citizens. Russia had to send in generator ships, if I recall correctly.
I'm from Moscow and I have relatives in Crimea. I've visited them in 90s and then in 2000s. Most of Crimea citizens are 'soviet' pro-russian people. They are happy to get russian pension and all that infrastructure porjects money cause Russia is a really rich country compared to Ukraine.
So if more than 50% of population haven't welcomed Russians, then Crimea now has twice less population, right?
It's very easy to attribute such disappearances to the evil KGB to promote political agenda, while there are far more probable explanations. It brings to mind the "Heavenly Hundred", a significant number of those people haven't even died on Maidan, but to promote the political agenda they have been promoted to national heroes, even though their "heroism" is dubious at best.
And don't tell me that's organic that suddenly bunch of big guy "civilians" appear and start using force. We have heard about green little men. So there are gray little civilians also.
And Crimea does not need to loose 50% population that does not agree. It's enough to "disappear" few more prominent activists to scare the rest.
Severe repression for some and a welcoming majority are not mutually exclusive. This is why politics are complicated, especially in regions that were passed around for decades or centuries and have very mixed population.
As much as I like the Ukrainian people, no one cared about Crimea because it was of absolutely no strategic importance to anyone but Russia. Taiwan is critically important to the US. The US _will_ go to war to defend it, and China knows this.
The whole point of US Taiwan policy and the wording of US-Taiwan Relations Act is to make it sure that the US can refuse to war against China if it attacks Taiwan.
US has treaties with South Korea and Japan that make it it clear that the US will defend them if they are under attack. The Taiwan treaty is worded in a way that US may provide assistance or limited support in a war.
The explicit wording states that in case violent action they would seek immediate Security Council action. That is toothless assurance when Russia is permanent member of security council.
They've waited seventy years for the right president. How many more decades will they wait and how will they react when they discover the military can probably force any president's hand?
>It is only since Xi became president, that China feels confident to have a more assertive foreign policy.
How so? There hasn't been a sharp rise in military spending, they haven't invaded anywhere, and they've largely maintained their same course on most of the disputed territories.
In comparison to when Mao was around and China was invading Vietnam or funding communist groups across the third world in the 70s, China today is quite tame.
In comparison with China of the 90s and 00s, China of the 10s has definitely been more aggressive. In 1990s when the Philippines grounded an old navy ship on Scarborough Shoal in the south China sea to reinforce their claims, there was barely a peep from China. By the 2010s though, Chinese coast guard ships were harassing Filipino resupply ships to their outposts and China was making it's own island bases.
People think China's being more aggressive since their point of reference is the 90s and 00s, when China was frankly a pushover on the world stage. Chinese freighter gets accused of smuggling chemical weapons to Iran in 1993 and gets held hostage in the Indian ocean before nothing was found? Not even an apology from the US. Chinese embassy gets bombed by NATO forces in 1999? Nothing but words. A Chinese fighter pilot dies in a mid air collision with an American spy plane off of Hainan in 2001? No reparations for the loss of life and expensive military hardware. Anyone would think China was being more aggressive today if their baseline was that.
>In 1990s when the Philippines grounded an old navy ship on Scarborough Shoal in the south China sea to reinforce their claims, there was barely a peep from China
They engaged in combat with both Vietnam and the Philippines over islands in the 80-90's, and effectively took over Mischief Reef in 94 by building bases on an island. Not to mention what was a huge victory for them in the return of Hong Kong. That was their primary aim for much of those decades.
There probably is some growth in aggression, but nothing like "Xi's waiting for an election before invasion."
Both involve a hostile takeover of disputed territory. One's a more impressive engineering feat, but not drastically different.
edit may have misread your post, unsure if you're comparing or detailing two steps. China has invaded uninhabited islands and built buildings to stake claims for some time. Building the uninhabited island isn't some drastic change.
But Ukraine had a very bad strategic position and outdated military. Taiwan is an island well prepared. Taking it is possible but very costly. Nuking it into oblivion is always an option but the optics of that kind of liberation is bad.
No nuclear powers are backing the Ukraine or Crimea. The US is explicitly backing Taiwan. When the CCP started conducting "exercises" near Taiwan during the Clinton era, the US sent 3 carriers to conduct "exercises" nearby.
And, as others have pointed out, they weren't trying to conquer all of Ukraine, just the parts with a "warm" water port, which also happened to have a lot of ethnic Russians. Limited scope, for a tactical gain (a seaport). The CCP, however, is trying to take all of Taiwan, and enforce their will on people who absolutely do not want it.
With a Nuclear India next door (and Nuclear Pakistan next to them), plus Japan, Vietnam, and a host of other countries that have a reason to be weary of China, it's a risky gambit. It is a good way to kickoff WWIII, for an island that is already, effectively, in the Chinese cultural and economic sphere.
Yes. Given the current administration of the United States and the previous one, yes. I'm not trying to be political, I'm just stating what I think is going to happen if that were to be the case. As it is, the US is the main one antagonizing China after their ridiculous South CHina Sea claims.
Moreover, the US is closer to Asia than Ukraine. I mean that honestly. The West Coast -- and the greater US in general -- has a lot of Taiwanese and Asians who would be upset if China took over Taiwan. Much more Asians than Russians or Ukrainians. It doesn't hit as close to home frankly.
China is working on taking Hong Kong first, before moving onto Taiwan.
I give it between 1-5 years before they move in some way on Taiwan.
One thing I would not bet on is a direct military incursion - that would cause too many foreign headaches. Something messy that's hard to pull apart is better. The current events with social unrest in HK are a good example of creating ambiguity.
The one interesting thing to me is that China normally has a very long time horizon, but now they don't. Trump has effectively made sure that Cold War 2.0 has started, and China is the enemy. The problem for the Chinese in this situation is that a substantial amount of manufacturing will move out of China, weakening their economy. And a weak economy is usually not a good thing for leadership.
There's a pretty interesting part about how Chinese media describes the causes of the unrest in Hong Kong that gives a window into how they think about the world and human nature. That is, the point about how Hong Kong's unrest is due to its education system that gets raised.
Right now, 1 country 2 systems means that PRC can't just dismantle HK's education system and institute their own until 2047. But the comments HK's education system indicate that the PRC thinks if they could just put HK's children through a state-approved education system, in 1-2 generations all the unrest in HK would be over. This is a worldview that people are ultimately malleable, or at least their children are, and that with the right childhood education you can get people to believe anything. Brainwashing, after all, is originally a word from Chinese that became an English loanword. In this worldview, everyone who's gone through schooling is brainwashed in some way to support the state that created the education system. And this worldview applies to any state-sponsored education system in the world. Take a Chinese immigrant family in America, put their 2nd gen kids through the American education system, by the 3rd gen you have Americans that can't imagine themselves as anything other than Americans.
This worldview that people can be molded is probably why China is in no rush to exercise full control over HK and Taiwan. After all, if people's national identities are so easily changed, any discontent in HK and Taiwan today can be brainwashed away in few generations. It's far more important to focus on the physical and economic levers that would allow China to exercise long-term control over those regions than social levers that determine whether people in those regions actually like the prospect. If they don't like it, their children will.
You mean other than the crippling sanctions that were actually working until Trump took office? I think you fail to realize how close Putin was to the precipice on that one - when the oligarchs lose faith, it's tough to keep your hold on power.
It's just so fascinating how this is accepted as truth, yet Crimea having a pro-Russian majority is touted as absolute bollocks, propaganda, brainwashed people.
Pretty much the same situation, completely different reaction from the same people.
I believe both of these to be correct (Falklands pro-UK, Crimea pro-Russian), fwiw.
> It’s kind of like how Spain will occasionally bluster about Gibraltar, despite the overwhelming majority of Gibraltar supporting British rule
Well, I guess that’s what happens when you replace the population of Gibraltar by British settlers. They will probably be pretty happy to be under British rule. Are you going to apply this logic to the areas colonized by Israel too?
> The only thing preventing China from taking out Taiwan is the United States. Europe and the rest of the world is too cowardly to even do anything
As a European, I have to agree. Here in Germany, I am sure the government would do nothing (other than symbolic protest), because it would be bad for German companies (short term).
Sad, but true about EU. Until EU forms an army of its own, that's how it's going to be. Thing is, I'm not sure that's doable with current intra-relationships.
For an effective joint army to happen, it would probably need to be in the interest of majority of the european states. Which it isn't - it is much better for them to stay neutral or part of NATO as is.
It's also worth pointing out that Taiwan is so densely populated and small that it would be hard to invade Taiwan without simultaneously destroying everything of value. It's a fools' errand.
It does not require an invasion unfortunately. It only requires a naval blockade, which would effectively starve the island until they concede to defeat.
China is of no interests to Taiwan in normal times.
The hostile rhetoric towards Taiwan is a CCP relic, it is Mao's legacy to close off civil war, not anything else.
It is like Abortion to GOP, which is all about identity, other than actual purpose of pursuing such ideal.
If occupying Taiwan is worthy of losing global trade and business and tens of millions of Chinese' livelihood, CCP would already act on it. The only reason it hasn't done anything is because it doesn't want/care to.
It is probably true that both China/Taiwan to stay in the status quo, with ever so often mainly symbolic bickering.
I don't know, I guess the entire field of diplomacy and international relations can be characterized as "symbolic bickering" - as opposed to "non-symbolic bickering" - which would involve dropping bombs over the other party's territory.
China won't march into Taiwan until they can win a naval war with the US to keep the US from retaliating. And if China can do that, they won't have to march into Taiwan.
A naval war in 2050? I suspect that in 2050 mach 20 missiles are going to be the norm, not the exception, and point defense is essentially... pointless against those.
It's already inadequate against today's (~mach 5) supersonic missiles. And china has literally tens of thousands with thousands of kilometers range stationed along their coast. A navy that pokes its head out is not going to last long.
China's missile superiority in the (western pacific) region has long been a thorn in the US side, but there's little that can be done given that their territory is there, and the US can at best station some in allied territories nearby or put it on ships, which are easy targets.
So you pretty much have to keep your ships hidden at all times, but being hidden they are going to be pretty much useless except as missile platforms.
The inherent cost effectiveness of missiles is also a problem for China if they want to invade Taiwan. Taiwan has a large arsenal of anti-ship missiles that can be launched from trucks. Combined with naval mines, they can make an invasion by sea very costly.
Certainly not the US. One of the US's greatest geopolitical advantages is that it actually does have all the natural resources it needs in the America's. That's why calls for isolationist policies can be so enticing, because unlike for most countries dependent on oil or metals from international trade, there's no physical barrier to the US taking the option of turtling up. China would suffocate on its lack of oil as it tries to sip what it can through the straws it has to Russian oil fields on the other end of Eurasia if it ever had international oil shipping barred from it.
Right now you are right. But I suspect that a lot of governments are furiously at work right now to figure out to turn back globalization a bit to lower their dependence on products being manufactured far away. So I think that the equation will change to some degree and that in turn lower interdependence of countries and therefore possibly the threshold for conflicts...
I don't think the PRC is in a position to finish off the ROC, and I don't think it would be in their interests, either.
But equally I don't think that the US want to intervene directly should the PRC take over Taiwan. This would be madness. The problem is thus to imagine how the US would manage to politically 'sell' their inaction.
But at the same time, would the PRC dare to take the bet that the US wouldn't intervene?
Taiwan is not much different from Crimea on many aspects, but it is different in one key aspect: It's been given much more international prominence, mostly because it is a pawn to annoy the PRC. But the downside is that it makes non-intervention (which is the reasonable course of action, like in Crimea) more difficult to sell.
Then, should the PRC invade (which is unlikely) while I'm sure that the Taiwanese would put up a good fight they would lose anyway. There would be plenty of grand speeches and maybe sanctions, but the reality is that everyone would just be looking for the right time to recognise the situation and move on (that's what happened with the existence of the PRC itself, and I'm sure is what will happen with Crimea).
Not really. Taiwan really is an internal Chinese issue and Crimea is essentially 'repairing' the issue of a Russian territory (with majority Russian population) that was split from Russia relatively recently. Everyone knows that and thus no-one is going to start a direct war over these territories.
But even if you were contemplating a direct war the issue would be that direct wars against Russia or China are not realistic because they are nuclear powers and, in any case, too big to invade. Any direct war would certainly require a major aggression from these countries against the US themselves, which they obviously won't do in the same way as the US won't directly attack them.
It's all boils down to relative strengths and outcome of a war. There are wars that are never worth starting.
How is Taiwan an internal Chinese issue? There was a civil war that ended in a deadlock. Both societies grew and actually interacted fairly peacefully for 70 years. The people in Taiwan view themselves overwhelmingly as Taiwanese. Using your logic applied to Crimea, should they not obviously be Taiwan then?
The question is, do we want to end this idea of "taking back" things that were "ours" in the past? What even is "ours" and when do you get to call the cutoff time? What is it, 1800 AD, 1200 AD, or 2000 BC?
China itself was made up of smaller civilizations many ages ago... so if I'm a present day decendant of one of them, do I get to claim that part of China as my own?
Also, when did the CCP ever control Taiwan? Never. So how can they take it back?
It is factually an internal issue. There is the Republic of China on one side, the People's Republic of China on the other. This is the same as North v South Korea (the war isn't over in both cases, they are just playing the clock) but with the crucial difference that in China's case one side is too big to be pushed over.
Again, this has been played to annoy the PRC, standard divide-and-conquer tactic, but the reality remains that no country is going to go to war against China over this, or in general.
To use your logic - if there is an internal genocide in an country, there should be no outside interference because it's internal. The stronger party should be able to do what it wants because it's stronger.
It's ridiculous. The whole point is we don't want to have a strength-based order in the world. If so, it will become winner take all and lots of people will die.
If China wants to "finish" a civil war and start the attack then fine, they have the blood of innocents on their hands.
China can almost certainly win a naval war with the US already; or rather, negate the US's naval force projection tool of choice, the aircraft carrier, with anti-ship ballistic missiles.
Every Carrier Battle Group has two ships in it that are essentially devoted to just protecting the carrier whether from missiles or other threats. We've yet to see how effective systems like Aegis are against anti-ship missiles (though I'm sure the DoD has done plenty of tests) but it's far from clear that anti-ship missiles obsolete carriers. And given that China is starting their own carrier fleets I'm guessing they don't think things are so clear cut either.
The Exocet was made way back in the early 70's yet carriers and surface fleets in general still aren't obsolete.
Of course a lot of this is self-serving stuff designed to drum up more money to spend, but defence against missiles is fundamentally asymmetric. The defender need to get lucky every time, while the attacker only needs to be lucky once or twice. And MIRV is a big multiplier in favour of the attacker.
Carriers are great against countries or factions without anti-ship missile capability.
Can those ballistic missiles actually hit anything?
They're converted ICBMs, and require some kind of terminal guidance. Something traveling Mach 10+ can't use radar or infrared guidance. How does it hit a maneuvering ship?
Current thinking is drones or some other local surveillance would be used, radio linked to the DF-21. I wonder how well that will work alongside US electronic warfare capabilities?
those are ballistic missiles, can they even hit a moving target? Besides, if it comes to it, after sinking an aircraft carrier the US Congress would have no choice but a full declaration of war. That means SLBMs engaged (ie Tridents) before surrender, it would be the end of the world.
Just broadcast the entire battle on the world stage and we shall watch the show. No human deaths, no civilian casualties, the whole battlefield would be completely remote controlled, streaming in a 128K VR extravaganza. I think the future of war sounds fun.
Indeed. A proxy robot war is just a very expensive game. And if you can settle your differences this way, you may as well do that in Quake 3 Arena for cheaper. And if you can settle your differences with Q3A, you may as well do that over the negotiating table. All of these depend on mutual cooperation; both parties agreeing to respect the outcome of the game.
Real war starts when one party is unhappy about the outcome and unilaterally decides to no longer cooperate.
Also when the two parties misjudge their relative military strength. If both parties were in relative agreement about what the outcome of their war would be they wouldn't have to fight one in order to negotiate changes to the status quo. That's why espionage can be a stabilizing force and the US and USSR had treaties during the latter parts of the cold war allowing each side to fly spy planes into the others territory to count missile sites.
Well, you have to make sure those spies also report that neither side would decisively win. The US and USSR must both have already been confident enough in their own strength to openly allow the other side to see it.
Who will give a shit, really? Russia is marching into all neighboring countries since what, 60s? and nobody raises a voice. Hell, I think they could march into Czech republic and EU would still be debating if they should continue buying Russian gas. Rapid geopolitical shifts between the West and China are unlikely, IMHO.
China is 1.4 billion people. That's more people than the western world combined.
Once China has "acquired" the technology, it doesn't need an export market anymore for economies of scale. China's internal market is more than large enough for that.
That's a bit too simple. People in inland provinces such as gansu or guizhou have much -much- lower purchasing power. I encourage you to have a look at a map of China with GDP numbers and then compare them to the US, Germany or Japan...
No need to look, I lived there long enough and have been to every province. Despite the still existing poverty is the internal market large enough already for many products.
However, China is not quite there yet when it comes to technology (hence the many Chinese students in Western universities), but they are well on the way.
I think the key question is what happens to Taiwan in a US<->China war:
1) Does the US have a base-of-operations off of China's coast? If it independent? Is it Chinese?
2) who gets Taiwan's manufacturing and technology? Does it supply the US military or the Chinese military? War is mostly about supply chains and manufacturing capacity. It's how the US won WWII.
These are big questions. They're not necessarily urgent, but they are big.
> For the U.S., this is a potential disaster. If China marches into Taiwan, the U.S. will be left with no advanced-node manufacturing and it will have lost the technology race.
The real disaster is the loss of untold lives defending an independent nation and full-fledged democracy.
Strong parallels to Europe in the 1930s. Looking back, no one cares much about the technology giants of that era being shut down, but rather the lives that were lost in the invasions, and the mass murder of civilians that followed.
As a bit more context, Huawei recently announced they'll be sending orders for 14nm chips to SMIC's new fab instead of TSMC. 14 nm is about 3 gens behind TSMC's 5nm and was starting to be produced back in 2013.
To add to that, the Kirin 710A that will get produced by SMIC will presumably be very similar to the Kirin 710 from 2018, produced by TSMC with its 16nm/12nm process, so performance-wise this will probably be the same chip but from a different foundry - in mainland China.
> So this will happen. The big question is who's funding this move.
Indeed, hearing this was a shock to me.
$12B would be a double digit of their capex plan for the decade.
Them committing even to basic operation in the Arizona plant would mean to take double digit percentage off their existing 5nm, 3nm plant plans, or having this money come from the outside.
Also take this, their CapEx plan for the decade is entirety committed to the sprint towards 2nm. And even with all those money raised, and after going to bond market, they were already signalling that they have to raise even more money, or the 2nm may not happen.
> If China marches into Taiwan, the U.S. will be left with no advanced-node manufacturing and it will have lost the technology race.
China marching into Taiwan could trigger a global war. They'd have to get Russia on-board. Hong Kong is reasonable as a first target. This would also frighten its SEA neighboring countries. Don't forget that China has lots of enemies (ie: Japan/South Korea).
The TSMC fab in Taiwan is the world's most advanced. There are no other sources for 7nm manufacturing at the moment. Moreover chip designs can't just be immediately re-spun onto older processes: if it were lost to China then basically the rest of the world would completely lose access to a fresh supply of the best chips. Tech would immediately have to roll back a generation of two, hardware wise, and of course software that relied on that performance would also need to roll back, etc.
Various DRM-like schemes can be used to make a chip useless without the software that goes with it.
If TSMC was concerned about the US taking over their factory, they could design lots of elements of the process to require a connection to HQ in Taiwan, and to stop working when that connection is broken.
When every piece of equipment has no working firmware, the factory is pretty much useless, and would probably take years to get running again.
I'm not really following the logic... GP said this (TSMC intending to build a factory in US) was bad for US, because China could march into Taiwan and cut off US ability to make chips.
Wouldn't a TSMC plant in US be good? Since US would have the factory on its own soil? What am I missing?
My understanding of the GP is that the current situation with TSMC only in Taiwan is a disaster. So I think they are actually in agreement with you and I that this is (or could be) a good thing.
Intel's 10nm process does finally exist in a shippable form, but it's not yet mature enough or high-volume enough to handle the entire breadth of their CPU product line. Intel launched new 14nm processors last month, 5.5 years after introducing their first 14nm processors.
Meanwhile, TSMC's 7nm process has been shipping since Q3 2018, and their EUV-based N7+ process is now in mass production. There's no question that TSMC is currently ahead of Intel both nominally and in all the important technical metrics. It's still entirely possible that Intel could re-take the lead if/when they get something post-10nm out the door, but that isn't going to happen this year. Intel's own CFO says it might take two more generations for them to regain the lead: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-process-tech-lag-com...
> Intel launched new 14nm processors last month, 5.5 years after introducing their first 14nm processors.
> Meanwhile, TSMC's 7nm process has been shipping since Q3 2018, and their EUV-based N7+ process is now in mass production
So, to make this an apples-to-apples comparison: when did TSMC stop shipping new products on prior nodes? ;)
You can still go out and buy a new-production Ryzen 1600 AF chip right now, you know. AMD did not even finish releasing their 7nm lineup until basically a few weeks ago, Renoir products just started shipping last month.
Ice Lake actually beat the comparable AMD/TSMC chips to market by like, 8 months or something. They've been around in volume since like, november. I went to Costco before last thanksgiving and almost half the laptops had Ice Lake.
AMD can ship desktop processors sooner because they've architecturally managed to reduce the chiplet to smaller than the size of a phone SOC. Comparing apples to apples, or more specifically monolithic mobile processor vs monolithic mobile processor, TSMC isn't that far ahead.
Or for another data point, TSMC's big-chip 7nm yields are so bad that NVIDIA is disabling 15% of the processor on the Ampere GA100 even for the datacenter market that will be paying $25k a chip or something stupid.
TSMC is ahead, sure, but not as much as people want them to be. The ability to make phone SOCs and 70mm2 chiplets successfully doesn't mean they've got 7nm completely nailed.
You shouldn't ignore the fact that Apple's larger 7nm SoC has the same die size as Ice Lake, and has been shipping a lot longer. To the extent that TSMC's 7nm has been confined to small, low-power chips, Intel's 10nm has the same problem but worse.
Although what you say is technically true, intel’s 10nm is more advanced than TSMCs 7nm — they aren’t using a shared scale. The biggest mistake intel made was probably being too ambitious.
Depends on which Intel 10nm you're talking about, and which TSMC 7nm. Comparing Intel's failed initial 10nm from Cannonlake against something that is in mass production on the TSMC side isn't exactly fair. With respect to the 10nm Intel product that you can actually buy, TechInsights has this to say: "Produced in Intel's new 10 nm 2nd Gen process that should offer comparable performance to TSMC’s 7 nm process"— and that's coming from the pros with electron microscopes who teardown these chips to reverse engineer process tech. Numbers reported elsewhere (eg. WikiChip) indicate that TSMC's 7nm allows for about a 15% smaller SRAM cell, and AMD's Renoir notebook processors seem to have about the same overall transistor density advantage over Intel's Ice Lake notebook processors.
And as far as I can tell, AMD's not even using the EUV 7nm process from TSMC yet.
Only 20,000 wafers per month is between mini- and megafab for TSMC. I suspect the production goes to US defense applications. Pompeo tweeting about it seems to confirm it.
>The U.S. welcomes TSMC’s intention to invest $12B in the most advanced 5-nanometer semiconductor fabrication foundry in the world. This deal bolsters U.S. national security at a time when China is trying to dominate cutting-edge tech and control critical industries.
> I suspect the production goes to US defense applications. Pompeo tweeting about it seems to confirm it.
It doesn't. Just because he referenced "national security" does not mean this fab will be dedicated to producing chips for DOD contractors.
The DOD has been making a shift to COTS processing hardware over the past couple decades. Part of the national security implications of this fab is preventing supply chain disruption in the event something happens with China. This serves to both guarantee the ability to supply COTS hardware to the DOD and to reduce the impact on the overall economy, making it more difficult for China to hold the US over a barrel by threatening its technology industry.
COTS parts are part of defense supply chain management. Only manufacturer of critical components within 200 km from Chinese border is strategic vulnerability, COTS or not.
No, we disagree. I think this fab manufactures almost exclusively to defense even if it manufactures COTS parts. Building small volume fab for 2/3 of the cost of new GIGAFAB makes no sense for commercial purposes.
The cost of the building is minor compared to the cost of the wafer equipment. It is not uncommon to build a Fab but only fill it with a fraction of the equipment capacity. Fabs can be scaled up when demand increases.
The equipment is costly (lithography equipment especially) but everything around them is also very expensive, including building. Huge Class 4 clean rooms, water purification, etc. There are lots of chemicals, acids and their processing involved. There are pipes moving liquid helium, nitrogen etc. Semiconductor fab is essentially a chemical plant.
Seems like the most of the discussion here totally missed that part - that would be no consumer grade chips and likely the prime client would be US military.
20k wafers (perhaps 450mm ones?) with unknown yield (likely 80ish) is quite low. For reference AMD 5700 has die area of ~250mm.
I don't see how that big investment for relative low volume production would make sense for consumer products.
If the fab is located inside the US, AMD and NVIDIA can bid for many US government contracts that would go for Intel. After GlobalFoundries quit the race, US defense contractors have only Intel as supplier for many components.
> I don't see how that big investment for relative low volume production would make sense for consumer products.
If the consumer product is a toy then sure. If it’s a medical device then it could make sense. It’s all about margin.
> After GlobalFoundries quit the race, US defense contractors have only Intel as supplier for many components.
Maybe. If you want millions of chips a quarter then sure. But if you want 1000s a quarter then there are many options, depending on the node I guess. I’m not going to Google a complete list but one obvious example is Texas Instruments.
I mean the article is about them building a 5nm fab in Arizona, so i assume they do need it if they want to build fast AI chips that compete with China should it invade Taiwan.
What process node Google uses for TPU, one possibility for an AI chip, is not in the public domain since v1 but it’s very unlikely this chip is on the bleeding edge. Cost/benefit is likely not there for this use case. But only Google knows for sure since they run the cloud and get to define “benefit”.
As I understand it there are reasons you want to not be behind in process technology as it makes your chips much faster. If your economy wants to keep pace I think this is a clever decision by the US government to entice TSMC to build a 5nm fab in the US.
It'll be 300mm wafers. No one is doing 450mm wafers because cost-benefit doesn't make sense. Given it's low volume, they're going to reuse tooling that's already available, which means 300mm.
This seems like something China might treat as an act of aggression by Taiwan..right? Like, now they are giving China good reason to see Taiwan as hostile, esp. with all their efforts to snuff out Taiwan.
I am sure China likes this. If TSCM is scared of a PRC takeover and trying to move investment out of the country, Well China's messaging is working.
Maybe before Taiwan was sufficiently richer per capita that taking it over had something to do with its wealth, but now it's a almost exclusively a matter of pride and nationalism. If they get control of a deindustrialized husk, they can say "Look at all the US boot-lickers we chased out".
The annexation of Taiwan is about access to the pacific ocean, or to be precise, about minimizing the risk of a blockade and about strategic depth on their eastern border. The communist party is literally playing grand strategy and from their perspective, they are surrounded by enemies. This is not nationalist pride, it is nationalist paranoia.
How much software depends on Apple, AMD, Nvidia, or Qualcomm chips? TSMC is an indispensable part of our industry's supply chain.
Most of its chips are produced in Taiwan and over 75% are sold to customers in either the USA or (mainland) China, so TSMC understandably tries to remain neutral in trade disputes between the two. Tim Culpan at Bloomberg recently predicted that this neutrality may not hold for long, and TSMC will be forced to move some production to the USA. [1]
Especially if Intel continues to decline, increased investment by TSMC could be good news for American chip fabs and the communities that depend on them. On the other hand, the factory isn't built yet.
The capital requirements for the creation of a modern high-speed semiconductor fabrication facility, and the corresponding integrated circuit design make ‘open hardware’, or large number of interchangeable competitors unlikely.
How and why should software be decoupled from hardware when there are so few hardware suppliers?
I work with (consumer) internet gateways and the like.
In Broadcom's SoCs the main chip is ARM. They have been moving away from MIPS for a number of years.
I'm less familiar with other vendors but I briefly worked with a Qualcomm-based device a few years ago and that was also ARM.
There might be some dedicated cores in those SoCs or devices for e.g. accelerators or Wi-Fi handling. I've seen ARC there but I have the feeling these are also moving to ARM.
I think that was only true a few years ago. Everything now, from router, NAS to other appliance are moving towards ARM.
MIPS and PPC are still being used only because of cost ( vendors selling other chips ). The replacement cycles is very very slow, but the trend is pretty clear.
Could be, but I've been shocked by some of the products I've seen that have a full blown ARM in them these days. My friend bought a mouse with a full 32 ARM MCU in it.
I think the only piece of software I use that’s tied to x86 is the discord native client (which is pretty dumb since it’s an electron app.) This is something I’m (hopefully) not using anymore after quarantine.
Personally I have plenty of arm machines. Part of the reason I switched from fvwm to cwm was because I couldn’t build fvwm on one machine and move it to the other.
In college they asked for x86 windows binaries for lots of the assignments and I always cross compiled from an arm machine (because that’s where I had the toolchain set up and didn’t feel like duplicating it on my x86 laptop.) If you feel stuck on x86 use more FOSS.
Taiwan's official position is that there is only one China and Taiwan is the one.
>[Taiwan] considers "one China" to mean the Republic of China (ROC), founded in 1912 and with de jure sovereignty over all of China. The modern-day ROC, however, has jurisdiction only over Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu. Taiwan is part of China, and the Chinese mainland is part of China as well.
Taiwan is de facto independent, not formally independent. Formally there is still unsettled civil war going on where each side claims the whole China.
Taiwan satisfies three of the four requirements of statehood at international law as stated in the Montevideo Convention.
There was just a proposed amendment which would change that. But it was withdrawn. Probably because they're worried about upsetting China too much.
The current government is very pro (formal) independence. But it's a bit hard to declare China and Taiwan to be seperate when China is threatening with invasion.
Has been under discussion for some time: "Mark Liu, the chairman of TSMC, said he had recently discussed options for a new factory in the United States with the Commerce Department. The stumbling block was money; major subsidies would be required, he said, as it is more expensive to operate in America than Taiwan." (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/technology/pentagon-taiwa...)
Having to ship the raw material halfway across the world. More stringent environmental protections--fabs generate many tons of hazardous waste. Higher healthcare costs for the workers. Plus they use lots of water which is more expensive in Arizona.
Considering how the low cost of shipping enabled globalization I doubt the shipping costs matter much. I'm also not sure if environmental protections are that much more stringent in the US than in Taiwan. Higher healthcare costs and water might make sense, but the bulk of the water cost in semiconductor manufacturing is probably due to the purification processes required than the volume of water used.
Shipping costs matter some when you go from being right next to the factory that makes your raw silicon wafers to having them be halfway around the world. In general it sounds like a big factor is cost - you've got to get talent that just doesn't exist (or isn't as widely available) in the US.
This is correct. Taiwan has a huge pool of silicon engineers and their salaries have roughly stayed stable over the years. Interestingly, because of this, a lot of engineers have been moving to China to seek greener pastures (make more money) [1].
This would be an interesting turn of events if it came to pass. It would certainly add good data to the argument that TSMC chips are cheaper because of the economics of east Asia.
The geopolitical aspects are, to me at least, a bit over blown. Yes there has been growing concern about the integrity of the supply chain for critical resources, but that is the whole globalization problem in a nutshell. I find the calls to re-vertically-integrate the US to not be very persuasive in terms of practicality. Maybe if Canada and Mexico join the US in an economic union similar to the EU? Chips are just one part of a much larger puzzle and fabs are just one part of a supply chain that includes stops in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam for packaging and testing.
I do think it has been made abundantly clear how interdependent the world is these days. It is possible that the new clarity has caused some powerful forces to reconsider their world view. But has it changed it enough to create real and meaningful policy change? (For context, I see globalization as a means of maximizing profits, not about politics)
To my way of thinking, real change would be the ability to economically stand up a 100mm 5nm fab line profitably. That would allow the production of "jelly bean" chips (general purpose < 100M gates). That would be a pretty seismic change in my opinion.
To be honest the chinese even study its raise up and have a long tv series about it — war is inevitable. Hence the peaceful raise of china is the slogan. They know you do not. Nearly 20 years of sending in students, researchers, 1000 person scheme etc. They win if it is not Xi, you may not even know until too late.
Probably not. The British century was built on the back of dead Germans and Russians containing Napoleonic France. The American century was built on the back of dead Russians and Western European ruins by Nazi Germany. If the third time's the charm, then the next Hegemon would be the faction that successfully minimise its own losses in a WW3, so either India or Europe(an Union).
This is interesting. Right now TSMC seems to provide Taiwan with guaranteed US protection because they are so far ahead technologically. Apple, AMD, and the defense industry have little alternative if they want a cutting edge node. It's unclear how long they will maintain this dominance.
Maybe the long term US-Taiwan ties of factories in the US will make this worth it strategically.
I assume that all R&D will remain in Taiwan. I think this might still be a good move in the long run since it'll give more politicians stake in what happens to Taiwan (Arizona senators, etc).
Imagine how much processing power is needed to analyze radar signals or camera images. If you can process more efficiently, your cooling system and electrical generator can be smaller, which saves mass for more fuel or more payload.
And they can afford to fund NRE costs that would be grossly uneconomic for most other (niche, non-mass market) applications. There aren't many industry sectors where that is the case.
For drones the power consumption isn't the issue, but heat dissipation when landed or hovering often is. Industrial solutions prefer not to have active cooling due to reliability.
Robots that use AI autonomously in the battlefield. Better chips = better and faster inferencing, which means faster reaction times. If both sides have such robots and both robots have similar kinetic weapons then who wins may boil down to how fast a neural network can identify the target and decide what to do.
Nvidia just announced its ampere chip Basically a data centre in one rack mount kit. Now the first customer is ... us defend need ai and those Gpu and ai advanced chip all done there.
People would be posting about that anyway. No discussion colors strictly within the lines of the actual news; it always hops to adjacent questions (which is usually fine) and inevitably to whatever generic themes people associate it with (which is usually not fine: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
Something like that seems to make sense considering the investment is relatively tiny and that the factory is gonna be about 1/5th the size of the usual TSMC factory.
So it does appear like this is intended for a specific chip for a specific purpose.
Excuse the naive question, but what technology does a fab bring to the table? As I understand it, TSMC buys most (all?) of their equipment from ASML (or a competitor), and the chip design is done and owned by their customers. What's left, aside from a giant cleanroom and some specialized operators?
This surreal, and this is a bombshell. TSMC is to build a second 5nm plant outside of their strategic roadmap, and has to get money for it out of the blue.
How will it work out with their investors, only god knows.
And this has ultimately to pass by Taiwanese government, if it didn't already.
Is this going to be a repeat of the Foxconn-Wisconsin debacle where the state pays a company four billion dollars to buy a bunch of empty buildings and employ nobody?
As someone else mentioned in the other thread, it's a bit odd that they're aiming for 5nm production at this fab in 2024 because 3nm should be ready to go by then. You'd sorta think that since they're already breaking ground on their 3nm fab in Taiwan that any other new builds would be 3nm as well.
1. By the time this fab is in major construction a lot of the lessons learned for 5nm will be known and can more readily be implemented in the USA without splitting precious engineering resources to other countries.
2. 3nm will be the most expensive parts and sell at a premium, which will limit demand.
3. This carries some risk, so giving up the bleeding edge tech might not be the best idea.
"tsmc could equip the Arizona foundry with American gear from its existing factories, freeing space in its Taiwanese operations for brand new non-American kit that can freely serve Chinese customers"
At least one component of the "America First" strategy I can fully get behind is bringing manufacturing back to the US mainline. If anything that last few months has taught us, it's that we must not lose our ability to produce quality, vital products. Semiconductors definitely falls into that category.
I don't care how it's accomplished, either carrots (tax incentives) or sticks (tariffs). Do what's necessary to bring the production of these vital components here.
Consider for a moment that less reliance upon foreign supply chains makes {trade, cold, shooting} war more viable.
Right now the world is peaceful and I stand in North America with an iPhone 11 Pro in my pocket and an advanced Nvidia GPU in my workstation. I’m not sure I see a problem with that state of affairs.
Reducing interdependence reduces the downside to stupid, selfish nationalistic moves. I don’t want that at all.
The whole point is that right now China does not depend on us as much as we depend on them for manufacturing. We need to correct the balance, or at least expanding manufacturing in neutral or allied countries.
If a war breaks out now, they are in a better position regarding manufactured goods. Rare earth metals too.
In this scenario, if your adversary produced or had control over your entire military supply chain, do you think that would give them less leverage or more leverage? Would it make them less hostile, or more hostile? Leverage is everything, in trade, war, and peace.
The problem is, what do you do when the other guy is doing that? It's basically an antitrust violation with a foreign state playing the role of the trust. They can subsidize their industry to sell below cost until yours goes out of business and then have a monopoly. China has been doing this for decades.
Not responding is a competitive disadvantage, so it has to be either subsidies or tariffs and sanctions.
Unlike bank bailouts, we'll have a semiconductor fab, supply chain and jobs to show for it. Put the reserve currency to good use while it's still a reserve currency.
Boosting US domestic manufacturing will help ensure the USD remains the reserve currency.
There's zero threat currently to that status and only China is capable of even plausibly posing a challenge in the next ~30 years. The Euro, Yen and Bitcoin pose no realistic challenge to USD dominance. It leaves only the Yuan, which still has no global position at all and isn't regarded as a currency you can trust. China will obviously do anything they can to alter that equation.
We're going into, at a minimum, a cold war with China that will last decades. There is no scenario where that is avoided. The US should become wildly aggressive about bringing manufacturing back, or otherwise pushing it out of China (including convincing allies to do the same), pulling every lever necessary.
AZ has been a semiconductor hub for decades. Intel, Motorola, ON and many others produce chips there. There is huge infrastructure and talent base for semiconductor manufacturing. Geographically, Chandler as a suburb of Phoenix has consistent weather, relatively cheap land, and access to water - as counter-intuitive as it sounds. I did my PhD in semiconductors at ASU and there might has well been a bus direct from the University to Intel.
Keep in mind, we're talking about PRODUCTION, not R&D. R&D happens elsewhere, this is just where the big plants go.
During the 80s & 90s, one of my besties worked on building fabs in and around PHX. Really exotic stuff that I didn't really understand. He'd joke that he had a PhD in welding.
He claimed at the time that fabs were migrating from California to PHX and ABX to avoid environmental regulation (enforcement) and cheaper water. While he was concerned about building future superfund sites, he also knew he'd never make that kind of money doing any other kind of work.
If you don't mind, I'd really appreciate your take. I still have family in Phoenix.
I've always been concerned about toxins (air and water). And I'm also grumpy about megacorps guzzling all the water at discount prices.
So while I'd love for TSMC to build their fabs in the USA, I'm worried about the downsides too.
Semiconductor plants use a ridiculous amount of potentially harmful chemicals as part of the manufacturing process. Most of the material is recaptured and never makes it into the local environment. Intel uses probably close to 10M gallons of water a DAY and recycles the vast majority.
Before water enters a fab it goes through a water purification plant to eliminate any impurities. As the water leaves the fab it goes through another process to decontaminate and recycle it. The process of purifying water is expensive and consumes energy so they try and recycle as much as possible. The number 96% sticks out in my mind but that is an old number.
Simply stated, I do not worry about local pollution from semiconductor manufacturing in the United States due to all the regulations. I would live next door to the Chandler plant happily. Pull open Google Maps Satellite View, type in "Intel Chandler Soccer Field" Look at all the green area around the plant, that's where the 4% that isn't recycled goes. You will also see a beautiful golf course and nice houses just east of the plant.
Side note: as I understand it, plants moved to AZ/NM because they wanted to eliminate process variance. Weather and water are a major source of variance. So they want places that reduce variance while simultaneously being favorable business environments.
A question is - what do they do with the waste from treatment. One former superfund site near the house I grew up in in South San Jose wasn't because they dumped toxic chemicals or water directly in the ground, but that they sealed them on site and the containment mechanism failed and they ended up leaking into the groundwater.
I could only assume they have much better monitoring of these situations nowadays.
> question is - what do they do with the waste from treatment.
System reliability is a big question.
> wasn't because they dumped toxic chemicals or water directly in the ground, but that [...] mechanism failed
It's not an isolated incident, leaks is actually the most common cause. Many fabs became superfunds not because the owners are evil, but because many safeguards, industrial or regulatory, were simply not in place at that time.
Let me repost an older comment.
I'd say early inexperience on semiconductor manufacturing was another major factor responsible for the pollution, many safeguards, industrial or regulatory, were simply not in place at that time. For example, many plants had storage tanks as parts of the production process, a common practice in the industry - most ended up having a massive leak, releasing various harmful chemical pollutants, including highly toxic TCE. And it seems the companies weren't doing it deliberately to save costs, many pollution events were "just" industrial accidents, and few foresaw the consequences of leaking tanks, not to say that some leaks were only discovered years later.
Now the companies are doing the cleanup under the supervision of the EPA, I think it's fortunate in a sense that these companies are the world's most powerful ones and they have the ability to pay, not some non-existent companies that already declared bankruptcy. And unfortunately, the price we are paying now for being ignorant in the early days is that the pollution still requires many years, or even many decades, of work to achieve even a basic, minimum level of cleanup. Some cleanup efforts have been active since the late 80s, and was still being continued working on in the 2010s.
Some examples:
* COMMODORE SEMICONDUCTOR GROUP
(Yes, the plant that produced MOS 6502 that we knew and love, and it was a pioneer for making the first widely-used microprocessor for personal computers, and also a pioneer for having a massive leak of TCE storage tank...)
> Background: Waste solvents were stored in an underground concrete storage tank on site until 1975, when it was taken out of service. An unlined steel tank was installed next to the concrete one in 1975. Inspections conducted by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) indicated that both tanks leaked.
> Cleanup: In 1981, Commodore excavated soils and pumped water from a contaminated well, then sprayed it onto surrounding fields. The volatile organic compounds (VOCs) dissipated into the air. Since 1984, air strippers have been in use to remove solvents from the groundwater.[...] Construction of the groundwater extraction and treatment system began in the Fall of 1999. In February 2000, pipelines and underground wiring were installed, pumps were installed at each of the extraction wells, and the groundwater treatment building was constructed. The treatment process equipment was installed in May 2000. Preliminary start-up and testing of the system began in August 2000.
* ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES, INC.
> Background: Two below-ground acid neutralization system (ANS) tank vaults were located at the northern and southern ends of the 901 and 902 Thompson Place buildings, respectively. Leaks from these ANS tanks appears to be the primary on-site source of VOCs to groundwater in this area.
> Cleanup: After the two acid neutralization tanks were removed, AMD excavated and disposed of soil impacted with VOCs, and installed a groundwater extraction and treatment system. Extracted groundwater was treated with air stripping technology followed by carbon adsorption. [...] The groundwater extraction and treatment system began operating in 1983 and continued through 2002, when it was discontinued with State approval to allow for an in-situ bioremediation (ISB) pilot test. The full-scale ISB system, which was initially pilot-tested from 2002 through 2004, and then expanded in 2005, includes groundwater treatment by carbon filtration and injection of an organic carbon source to stimulate the growth of naturally-occurring microbes that break down target VOCs into environmentally-benign end products.
* INTEL CORP. (MOUNTAIN VIEW PLANT)
> Background: The site is one of three Superfund or National Priorities List (NPL) sites that are being cleaned up simultaneously. The other two Superfund sites are the Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. (Mountain View Plant) site and the Raytheon site. The three sites are located in the Middlefield-Ellis-Whisman (MEW) Study Area. Site investigations at several of these facilities during 1981 and 1982 revealed significant soil and groundwater contamination by toxic chemicals, primarily volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
> Cleanup: Under EPA’s direction and oversight, Intel has implemented the soil and groundwater cleanup program at the former Intel facility. The soil cleanup has been completed at the site and all the former MEW facilities.
> Background: The 56-acre former Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. (Mountain View) site is located in Mountain View, California. A facility on site manufactured semiconductors. The site is one of three Superfund National Priorities List (NPL) sites that are being cleaned up simultaneously.
> Cleanup Activities: Under EPA’s direction and oversight, [...] Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. [...] implemented soil and groundwater cleanup programs that have included soil excavation and treatment, installation of four slurry walls, soil vapor extraction and treatment systems, and groundwater extraction and treatment systems. The soil cleanup by soil vapor extraction and excavation and aeration has been completed at all the former MEW facilities, including the former Fairchild facilities. Groundwater cleanup will continue to operate for many decades in order to meet the trichloroethene (TCE) groundwater cleanup standard of 5 parts per billion. The MEW site groundwater remedy has removed over 76,000 pounds of contaminants, and has reduced contaminant concentrations throughout the multiple aquifer zones.
> HEWLETT-PACKARD (620-640 PAGE MILL ROAD)
> Cleanup: Extensive investigation and cleanup at the HP Site has been conducted since discovery of a release from a 1,000-gallon underground waste solvent tank in 1981. Interim remedial measures included excavation and off-site disposal between 1987 and 1992 of approximately 10,700 cubic yards of soil, construction and operation (beginning in 1994) of a soil vapor extraction and treatment (SVET) system; and groundwater extraction and treatment beginning in 1987 and continuing to the present day.
> NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR CORP.
> Background: The National Semiconductor Corporation (National Semiconductor) previously manufactured electronic equipment at this 50-acre site. Underground storage tanks, sumps, and pipes are the suspected sources for contaminated groundwater and soil in Sunnyvale underneath the site.
> Cleanup: Beginning in 1982, contaminated soils, leaking tanks and equipment were removed. Subsequently, National Semiconductor initiated a program of pumping and treating the groundwater to contain the contaminated plume while further site studies were underway. In 1989, National Semiconductor began investigating the type and extent of contamination at the site. The investigation was completed in 1991, and the EPA selected the final remedy for the site. Construction of the remedy began in 1991. The final cleanup remedy, which includes soil vapor extraction and operation of the groundwater extraction and treatment system, is ongoing.
Other Fabs are already located in the area, and in general the state has been good towards businesses. Also ASU is nearby so they have a talent pool of new engineers to pull from.
Anecdote, since I've moved to AZ myself 5 years ago I've noticed massive growth in tech businesses in Phoenix and the surrounding areas. Cost of living for people here is also cheaper compared to to other cities I've lived in, and many people I've met who moved from California have told me how its cheaper here. Commuting is not too bad depending on where you live, and there are options which promote commuting or carpooling such as HOV lanes, Bike Lanes, and the light-rail system (the light rail is hit or miss depending on who you ask).
Intel has a big AZ presence, I wonder why AZ specifically. Maybe climate? Maybe so TSMC can poach some talent? It's a really great question and if anyone has specifics I hope they chime in.
Probably also a pretty good existing ecosystem of 3rd party contractors and suppliers that support the Intel fabs and would be happy to do business with TSMC as well.
edit: also, a minor quibble: I wish we'd get away from calling it "poaching", as if there is anything illegal or immoral about employers competing for employees.
If you are asking about Intel ones, and ones owned by the defence hardware industry, it is the same reason why China is building their fabs as far inland as Xian, and other obscure and scattered across places: they are harder to bomb there.
What is the environmental footprint of a typical fab? From what I understand, modern chips are free of conflict materials, but are there toxic byproducts which would cause trouble with the EPA?
A memorable description of one chemical used in fabs:
[Chlorine trifluoride] is apparently about the most vigorous fluorinating agent known, and is much more difficult to handle than fluorine gas. That’s one of those statements you don’t get to hear very often, and it should be enough to make any sensible chemist turn around smartly and head down the hall in the other direction.
The compound also a stronger oxidizing agent than oxygen itself, which also puts it into rare territory. That means that it can potentially go on to “burn” things that you would normally consider already burnt to hell and gone, and a practical consequence of that is that it’ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile. It’s been used in the semiconductor industry to clean oxides off of surfaces, at which activity it no doubt excels.
While still an issue, many of the really bad offenders leaked chemicals for instance doesn't happen much anymore. Mostly because fab materials are expensive to get and purify. Simply dumping them is wasteful, so anything that can be salvaged and used on the next batch is big savings.
the problem with environment footprint is that moving it to other country solves nothing and often makes matters worse (due to more relaxed standards). We all live on the same planet.
Modern chips are free of conflict materials? How do you even start to come up with a basis for the statement? I also don't understand the connection between "conflict materials" and toxic substances. I thought it was common knowledge that making chips involves lots of extremely toxic chemicals though.
It would make a lot more sense than UBI if the US would chip in part of the salary, ie (cost of American worker - cost of Taiwanese worker), so that this sort of factory would no longer be disincentivized just because of the cost of American labor.
This is an excellent strategy if you want to decimate the talent pool of your competitors and simultaneously ramp production without having to build local staff from zero. With some aggressive incentives, they could probably snipe a lot of talent from across town.
Worst case, they will just fly in hundreds of existing, trained employees from Taiwan until the local workforce is stabilized. This is how Samsung bootstrapped their ATX factory.
Next we need a proper embassy. No more erasure of the true Chinese Republic with actual human rights, freedom, and prosperity for the many and not the connected few of the few.
*With extreme automation and minimal employees. Modern Fabs have very few assembly line employee's. They use positive pressure rooms, overhead rail car system, robotic arms, and machines drop down from the fab floor to a maintenance floor when a human is actually needed.
The US has lots of advanced fabs already. This isn't the part of the supply chain we're missing. This does nothing to reduce our dependence on China for manufacturing.
Edit: and this isn't actually a cutting edge fab. By the time it opens in 2024 the cutting edge process will be 3nm or beyond.
Any marketers know what happens once the 1nm name is taken? Dose it go negative, go to decimals, start counting back up or just a new naming convention?
I think we started speaking of nanometers around the 100nm point. Before that we had eg .25, .13 microns cpus. And that is of course where the microcomputer got its name, initially ICs had features of a few microns.
Of course, the angstrom being the size that it is (.1nm), makes it unlikely there ever will be another scale. Whatever is next, it won't be silicon.
I wouldn't shed any tears for the industry if some lawsuits got filed against misleading claims regarding transistor feature sizes. That probably won't happen because feature size isn't a spec requirement for anyone per se, but it would be nice to see on principle.
I understand, but fabs are realm of competition with China and their 2025 plan.
I am big fanboy of Robert Lighthizer, and with Phase 1 effectively ripped we are going to see a lot of moving things. May not happen immediately, first it will be slow then sudden.
Fabs aren't really a realm of competition with China. Leading fabs are in Germany (GlobalFoundaries in Dresden), Taiwan (TSMC's primary fabs), South Korea (Samsung) and even the US (GlobalFoundaries) and Singapore (GlobalFoundaries).
GlobalFoundries isn't really "leading"; they got out of that race a while ago and are now focusing all their R&D on niche fabrication technologies that aren't in competition for building CPUs, GPUs, or smartphone SoCs. And you didn't mention Intel, which is the only serious competition to TSMC when it comes to advanced fab technology for those kinds of chips.
Yeah, I didn't mention Intel, I know they have fabs domestically but they're also moving to TSMC after 10nm [1] so I figured they were getting out of the game.
That's a bullshit rumor from a bullshit site that you're misinterpreting anyways. Intel might plausibly use outside fabs for their new discrete GPU product line, but they are absolutely not getting out of the fab game in any meaningful way. They are capacity-constrained at the moment and don't really have room to make big GPUs in-house without subtracting from their manufacturing capacity for their well-established CPU product line.
Having worked in the semiconductor industry, manufacturing specifically, I can attest that this is a false statement - US technology in semiconductor manufacturing is not simply from running the fabs, but building fabrication equiment that fabs purchase to process and package wafers. The US (Teredyn, Applied Materials, Entegris, KLA Tencor, Lam Research), Netherlands (ASML) and Japan (Daifuku, Hitachi, TEL, Advantest) are the top leaders of the semiconductor equipment [1]. The ones I just listed account for over 90% of the semiconductor equipment.
Most of the deep tech in a fab is the equipment. The rest of the stuff is a giant box that's super clean and maintains that clealiness.
All of these Fabs[2] buy their equipment from the aforementioned companies.
Here is what an example supply chain looks like:
NVidia(US) has the IP and "soft" tech, they use software tooling(US) to make layouts, then contracts out the manufacturing to TSMC(Taiwan) who then buys their equipment from KLA/AMAT/LAM/TEL/ASML. TSMC(Taiwan) processes the wafers which are packaged at OSATS(OSATS are a collection of many companies[3]). The final product such as a graphics card is then further made accessible by writing insanely deep software driver stack (CUDA drivers for example) that are all developed by NVIDIA(US). For CPUs, there would be ISA and other "soft" tech involved which is Intel(US), AMD (US), ARM(UK, owned by Softbank(Japan)), Qualcomm, Broadcom, Microchip and Apple (all US, its a long list). I didn't even touch storage/memory. In addition to US, a lot of software and hardware talent and manufacturing comes from the EU, Germany in particular. I used to get on the call with a German company in the late morning and the Germans would be working their ass off at 9pm in Germany. We had an amazing team. It is not uncommon to pay $20k for a motor made in germany.
Somewhere in the middle to low end of the supply chain (motors, wires, connectors, may be even steel, copper, precious metals, chemicals) probably has Chinese involvement. You can imagine how a graphics card's supply chain gets very complex and deep.
Back to the central point - Semiconductor is a massive industry with complex supply chain. Depends on the level we are talking about. Also Global Foundries is not considered as among top dogs when it comes to semicon tech, although that's also debatable.
Is there a document (or a book) somewhere that details who all these semiconductor equipment manufacturers are, and their history? I'm extremely interested in this space and would love to learn more about it.
From the press release: "In the United States, TSMC currently operates a fab in Camas, Washington and design centers in both Austin, Texas and San Jose, California. The Arizona facility would be TSMC’s second manufacturing site in the United States."
> You have earned a friend for life.
What a bizarre comment. If they leave, are they your enemy for life then?
> What a bizarre comment. If they leave, are they your enemy for life then?
I'm not sure that's fair. There's a lot of room between friend and enemy, here. When breaking up in a relationship under typical circumstances, the other person doesn't normally become an enemy, unless a person is not well adjusted mentally.
> If they leave, are they your enemy for life then?
(New) Relationship with strangers can be in one of the 3 categories:
- Neutral
- Friend
- Enemy
OP is moving the company into Friend category (from Neutral). I don't know what he'd do if they decide to move back, but if they declare the company as an "enemy" then that creates a perverse incentive where people in Neutral category would refrain from becoming friend because that risks them becoming enemy.
So to be prudent OP must move the company into 'Neutral' category again otherwise they won't get future 'Friends'
If you know anything about the geopolitics behind this, this was a forced move which TSMC wouldn't have otherwise done. If TSMC didn't do it, then US State Department would have funded Intel to produce their 5nm fabs here.
So yeah, educate yourself and then behave reasonably.
> If you know anything about the geopolitics behind this, this was a forced move which TSMC wouldn't have otherwise done. If you know anything about the geopolitics behind this, this was a forced move which TSMC wouldn't have otherwise done.
I know. Where in my comment did I say otherwise?
> So yeah, educate yourself and then behave reasonably.
Okay, thanks?
Did you by any chance respond to the wrong comment? Such bizarre comments in this thread.
> Remember when Trump floated withdrawing from NATO?
I remember when Trump took no actions at all toward pulling the US out of NATO, and did nothing other than use it as a rather dumb prop to try to coax NATO allies into meeting their spending obligations.
> Remember when Trump stopped funding the WHO in the middle of the worst pandemic of the past 100 years?
I remember when the WHO cooperated with China to knowingly lie about the pandemic, including trying to forestall borders from being closed, trying to forestall the isolation of China, lying about the nature of the virus including the risk that it posed, and committed global genocide in the process.
And the previous president had already got the Europeans to commit to meeting their obligations over a period of a certain number of years which they were moving towards. Trumps nonsense achieved nothing other than making the Europeans and the rest of the world recognize that the US has become deeply unreliable and move further towards China.
European defense spending targets are laughably low, and their spending has been an embarrassment for decades.
A stopped clock is right twice a day, and sometimes an idiot gets an answer right. There is zero reason for any US troops to be in Europe or the US to remain in NATO. We’ve been burning our wealth for 70 years subsidizing European defense, and their economies.
>> Remember when Trump floated withdrawing from NATO?
> I remember when Trump took no actions at all toward pulling the US out of NATO
In times of peace, alliances exist only in rhetoric. NATO has strength only insofar as people believe that member states will come to each other's aid. Trump called his commitment to the treaty into question, and in so doing made the alliance less strong. Surely you see this.
>> Remember when Trump stopped funding the WHO in the middle of the worst pandemic of the past 100 years?
> I remember when the WHO cooperated with China to knowingly lie about the pandemic, including trying to forestall borders from being closed, trying to forestall the isolation of China, lying about the nature of the virus including the risk that it posed, and committed global genocide in the process.
I mean, if lying abut the nature of the virus or the risks it imposed was grounds for dissolving an organization, then surely the federal government and many state governments should be dissolved by now.
But for the sake of argument, let's stipulate that what you wrote was 100% correct.
The WHO does lots of things. Apparently one of them is facilitating
"global genocide" (kind of harsh?). Another one is helping countries, rich and poor alike, survive this very disease we're stipulating it brought into being.
Is America or the world safer today because the WHO lost its biggest funder? What replaces it?
If we don't want the WHO being unduly influenced by China, how does defunding it advance that cause?
I don't really agree with any of the sentiment here...
> You have earned a friend for life.
The Trump administration has shown that "friend for life" means "for as long as I'm getting exactly what I want, or think I am, and otherwise you can see yourself out."
> For the doubters, this is just the beginning of Re-industrilization of America.
What benefit is there really? This fab will have about 5 jobs, and a bunch of robots who could be anywhere on earth.
I'm not sure this provides any more national security than a stockpile would.
AMD does make chips in the US via their spun off Global Foundries, and so does Intel. AMD switched some production to TSMC because they had much better defect rates at 7nm. You can buy US made AMD today if you want it just won't be the latest GPU's.
> AMD switched some production to TSMC because they had much better defect rates at 7nm.
GloFo outright canceled their 7nm and smaller processes, back in 2018. All of AMD's leading-edge processors are now using TSMC 7nm, though the server and most desktop processors also incorporate a 12nm IO die. The days of AMD using GloFo are numbered.
Really, though, at this point it's easier to list what leading-edge chips aren't using TSMC: Intel's CPUs and FPGAs. All the other latest-and-greatest CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and smartphone SoCs are made at TSMC. There's more diversity for memory manufacturing, and logic that doesn't need to be on a leading-edge process (eg. low-end smartphone SoCs, motherboard chipsets, SSD controllers).
Someday I would really love to buy an iPhone that says "designed and built by Apple in California"
Stuff like this is just one step closer to that. I would happily pay a premium for it. Excellent news.
And to all of you currently looking at your rent in SF and wondering if you should stay there now that you can work remote: AZ is a pretty awesome place, and more and more it's looking like it actually could become a hardware hub in the US.
To be clear on my point about rent in Phoenix, btw: I am currently sitting about 400 yards from ASU (I live across the street from campus). I rented this house for about 10 years for <$1000/mo (2br, 1ba, now I own it), and there are still apartments/condos in this neighborhood for that price. We don't have an ocean, but we have some of the most beautiful hiking in the world, the city is extremely cycle friendly, and almost every biome you could want is a few hours drive max from here. It's really a great city.
Is Sweden using an unsustainable amount of heaters to fight against deadly winter temperatures? Air conditioning is much more efficient than a heater. Arizona will usually only get more than 15 degrees warmer than a comfortable indoor temperature. In places with cold winters, sometimes temperatures will get more than 25 degrees cooler than a comfortable indoor temperature.
Globalization has put millions of people in the West into poverty. Globalization is a scheme by corporations to get cheaper labor and have the whole world compete against each other while destroying a healthy societal coherence.
That's a domestic issue in the United States. US GDP has grown steadily during the last 30 years. The corporate earnings of the s&p 500 has went up by multiple folds. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, Nike , McDonald, Johnson & Johnson etc are earnings more money from around the world then ever before. The record levels of s&p stock buybacks tells you that companies have more money than they know what to do with it. So the US is earning a lot more money from all of globalization. Yet all of this earning is not benefited the lower class Americans. It should have been distributed better internally within the US. Yet, the politics within the US is preventing that from happening. But have you thought about what other countries feels about US dominating in so many industries? Other countries need income as well. They have people to feed. From a equality stand point, they should also enjoy similar quality of life that developed countries are enjoying. If you have visited a developing country, you would know that life is so much different there than here in US. Globalization lifted hundreds of millions of people out of proverty around the world, not only in China, but also in Philippines, Thailand, vitenem, etc. Then these people have more money to spend on more expensive US goods, iPhones, computers, Starbucks etc. Globalization didn't put millions in the developed world in poverty, uneven tax system, economic distribution system, government that doesn't invest in the lower class population did. In the US for example, you have record jobs creation, yet a lot of companies say they can't hire the right talent. They have to hire h1bs. From a personal experience, a lot of companies would love to hire locally yet they can't because there is no talent available. The fundamental issue is that the education system does not produce enough talents needed by the job market.
Government needs to direct some of the fruits of globalization to invest in America. Individual large companies, even if big, do not have the incentive to invest in long-term and nebulous things like education for America.
> In and of itself, what value does raising the living standard of millions of poor Chinese provide to Americans?
Rising living standard means more consumers that can buy American goods, and it also means that the likelihood of civil war/uprisings due to poverty goes down, which in turn reduces the potential for wars.
Assuming a vacuum, the larger market is always fair, but I don’t see how it’s at all possible to value the presence or absence of conflict without a context.
> but I don’t see how it’s at all possible to value the presence or absence of conflict without a context.
Taking into account how much the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts have cost the US in money, how much lives and potential was lost, is actually easy.
Don't get me wrong, it was a good intention to get rid of the Taliban and Saddam, but the execution failed horribly. And that were backyard 3rd world countries. A conflict involving China would be an utter bloodshed, especially if it devolves into nuclear war, and it would totally destroy the US and probably EU economy.
We're seeing how much we depend on China now with the 'rona crisis, and that is a "China does their best effort to fulfill Western orders for anything from toys to medical PPE" scenario and not a "China is at war with the US and doesn't deliver anything to them and their allies" scenario. Politicians have also realized this but renationalizing even parts of what was outsourced to China will take decades. Until that happens China has the Western states by the balls, figuratively - and given how they acted with delivering PPE "donations" to Italy and other states that the EU left to fend alone they know this and are absolutely willing to use this as leverage to keep the US and EU from interfering in their eradications of Uighur Muslims and Tibetan people.
at what environmental cost though? Say what you will about the US, it does a decent enough job at protecting the environment from business. If we poison the planet in the process of bringing millions out of poverty I think that's a net loss.
Regardless off any opinions about Trump, the imposition of tarrifs and his incendiary rhetoric seem to be causing manufacturing operations to hedge their bets. So maybe a some higher skill jobs have shifted to the US (not sure if that really helps Trumps voter base), but Tesla smartly started operations in China.
Hard to speculate on the counterfactuals, but this increases redundancy, which can add new jobs, but the tarrifs can also rout other parts of the economy - and possibly impact Trump's own voter base more than others.
Using HN for nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, regardless of which nation you're for or against. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit, which is curious conversation.
Apart from your being wrong on the central fact, which other commenters have pointed out, I want to add that taking a thread into nationalistic flamewar this way is not ok on HN, even when you're right about which country is which.
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines by posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait, and even personal attacks, in multiple places recently. We ban accounts that do that, so definitely do please stick to the rules from now on.
This isn't being brought back from China, TSMC is Taiwanese and operates the overwhelming majority of their fabs in Taiwan. They have a fab in Shanghai and Nanjing which I believe is both not their leading-edge process and to supply the mainland market. [1]
From what I've heard they have no interest in moving their closely guarded leading-edge processes out of Taiwan, and this is probably a domestic fab for supplying the military with on US soil.
It's in the best interest of Taiwan to keep their 2nd highest GDP producing industry inside their own country. If a war breaks out between China and US, TSMC factories in Taiwan are going to be the safest place on Earth. No country wants to loose what TSMC has to offer, including Taiwan itself.
I think the point is that PRC considers Taiwan as part of broader China, and this move makes that statement less likely to be taken seriously. Which is good.
Xi's views are of limited relevance to you and me, perhaps, but they are not of limited relevance to how PRC operates. Of course they're relevant, and then by extension that makes them relevant for how global politics plays out.
>Taiwan is a sovereign country boasting a military alliance with America.
Yep, this is certainly true, and part of maintaining that military alliance will be further entangling things like high tech manufacturing.
>But safeguarding global assets in Taiwan from Beijing pulling a Falklands is also savvy.
I actually don't know as much as I should about the Falkland Islands War, other than the UK took a decent amount of losses surprisingly. I think PRC actually invading Taiwan is extremely unlikely, given the terrain and weather aspects of how that war would go, but doing something like launching some missiles is definitely within the realm of possibility.
> I actually don't know as much as I should about the Falkland Islands War, other than the UK took a decent amount of losses surprisingly.
Good summary, actually! :)
Argentina and Britain lost about the same number of ships, with Britain having an edge on the air war. British troops marched into Port Stanley with dysentery from drinking bog water, but defeated the Argentine conscripts.
Ignoring Argentine military and etiquette lapses, the modern war lessons were:
1) Although subsonic, Harriers were ok ish for defending the fleet against an inferior force.
2) Argentine pilots used terrain masking (fly in on the deck at the bow, similar to "crossing the T") to sink some ships, so good tactics are always in style:
3) Without first-rate satellite intelligence, the British tried and failed to find and sink Argentine's aircraft carrier using subs. (Argentina withdrew their carrier to preserve it, after the traumatic sinking of the Belgrano. So tactically the British achieved the same result, but there's always uncertainty with a ship that's still floating.)
4) A British troop carrier was bombed at anchor with the soldiers ordered to remain onboard. That was a command mistake on par with US amphibious landing mistakes in the WW2 Italy campaign. Anzio, anybody?
5) Aluminum ships burn, like the Sheffield.
Having said that, the result could have been very different considering how few Harriers Britain had, or if Argentina had 10 more Exocet missiles.
(Little-known fact: An Exocet destroyed one British ship without the warhead even detonating, just the rocket fuel. The watch saw it coming, and couldn't do anything about it.)
You can watch a few videos on Youtube and piece things together.
The most fascinating interviews are with the Argentine mechanics, who because of the French embargo, mounted the Exocets on hand-made launch rails, and the Argentine pilots who used them to devastating effect.
Some subjects:
0. The failed diplomatic effort to avoid war (the Argentine diplomats were too busy drinking cocktails to negotiate with the British diplomats. Very macho!)
> Xi's views are of limited relevance to you and me, perhaps, but they are not of limited relevance to how PRC operates
Fair enough. I amend my earlier statement to Xi’s messaging on Taiwan is of limited relevance to American economic, foreign and military policy. He’s playing to a domestic audience.
It could become more relevant in the future. But for day to day policymaking, it can usually be ignored.
> China's government can't be so easily be dismissed as illegitimate
I believe the U.S. government is legitimate. That doesn’t mean I believe its every view is so.
Xi’s government’s legitimacy can exist alongside his statements on Taiwan being ridiculous. (I’ll note, too, that Xi and the CPC are outsiderS to Taiwan’s affairs.)
My point isn't on whether or not all his views are legitimate—that's a pointless argument to make. My point is that quite a lot of people (probably the majority of Chinese) are on his side regarding his viewpoints on that.
> I think the point is that PRC considers Taiwan as part of broader China, and this move makes that statement less likely to be taken seriously. Which is good.
Well, you should tell that to the US government, who believes there's One China and the capital is Beijing.
When Trump got elected he actually took a congratulatory call from Tsai Ing-wen (president of Taiwan) which utterly incensed the PRC. That aside, it's been the position of America since 1972.
For what it's worth Taiwan also believes there's One China, including all territory claimed by the PRC and that the capital is in fact Taipei.
With that all in mind, any major world power has been paying lip service to One China and practically ignoring it, but the PRC exerts its influence over smaller/weaker countries such as recently flipping Sao Tome and Principe in violation of the no-poaching agreement in the One China accords. In reality, no big power believes they're one country, and operates accordingly. No small power does either, but substantially all back the PRC because the West has largely ceded its influence over smaller nations to the PRC.
Someone should really say something to the US military. They’ve been selling top tier military equipment to and coordinating with illegitimate rebels for decades!
Politically yes, Taiwan is de facto independent, but economically they are deeply intertwined; although they have their own currency, stock exchange etc., a lot of major companies operating in China are under Taiwanese ownership (Foxconn and Pegatron for example) and the commerce between China and Taiwan is significant; China is Taiwan's largest trading partner at 30% of Taiwan's total trade.
By contrast, China is the US' third largest trading partner (after Canada and Mexico) at 10% of US trade. Taiwan is much more intertwined with China economically. Which makes sense given the geographic proximity and linguistic and cultural ties.
> It is also a gesture of good faith because supporting a dictatorship that actively imprisons over a million people in concentration camps and uses them for organ harvesting should, at the very least, be punished economically.
The US isn't China bad, but it hasn't exactly been stellar on the human rights front lately either.
I'm not sure that the decision is A xor B. Further supporting a fiercely nationalist permanent-warmongering country that also has a long-term track record of abusing human rights, also operates concentration camps, also operates torture prisons, also has a 5x higher per-capita population imprisoned based on ethnicity than China does is not that much of an upgrade in my view.
It's great news that TSMC is making more cutting-edge process fabs on more continents, and will benefit all/most of humanity no matter which country they're in. Having more sites with this production ability/capacity is simply a good thing, no matter what happens with China, Taiwan, the US, China/Taiwan, or China/US. Hopefully they open more in further countries, so that this can stop being a strategic bargaining chip (no pun intended) for the warmongers, and can just be a steady and available supply of fast, low-power chips for anyone who needs or wants them.
The anti-X, anti-Y politicization and nationalistic bluster that comes along with these sorts of things isn't super relevant, interesting, or even that on topic.
I'd be taking bets on how quickly this is going to turn out poorly, but my last tiny ember of faith in any corporate actor being capable of rational thought just got extinguished, so I could be really wrong!
What a useless comment. You have no explanation and are just relying on your ill conceived gut feeling, which has been clearly proving wrong, to say this doesn't make sense. Why should anyone trust you?
I am an Internet commentator. You don't have to trust me. That's the beauty of Internet discussion sites!
I have an actual reason, and it's in the thread I linked, and in my reply to another response to this comment.
The above comment was for two reasons: one, to publicly acknowledge that a guess I had made just a small time ago was wrong (that TSMC executives were rational actors, or if nothing else, not drastically short-sighted), and secondly to exclaim that I still believe that this is an incredibly short-sighted and quite frankly stupid decision.
EDIT: changed some words to be more generous to TSMC's executives.
What's in TSMC's best interest is the long-term independence and stability of Taiwan. Taking away a strong source of motivation for an administration that's already shown itself to lean toward "stay out of other countries; America First!" as its official foreign policy stance to keep it independent and stable is so short-sighted that it's practically insane.
Long-term independence and stability of Taiwan is a political goal, not necessarily a corporate one. The political-corporate relationship in Taiwan is definitely different (or of a different flavor) than that in the USA right now, which makes this harder to parse for specific corporate objectives. In the aggregate, this could signal a willingness of the government in Taiwan to make bets (assuming they have to approve of things like this, I'm not 100% sure if that's true) that the long term goal (political independence) is best served by further entangling itself with the US. That's probably where the debate should exist.
Long-term independence and stability of Taiwan is necessary for TSMC to keep existing. It's in its best interest to keep existing.
I'm pretty sure the government doesn't need to approve of this sort of thing; VIA got away with it.
Further entangling itself with the US would be keeping itself for the most part in Taiwan. "We have drastically better tech than you, and your military, intelligence agencies & universities really desperately need these!" is a fantastic incentive. "Here's a factory that allows the US to be pretty much self-sufficient and no longer dependent on us for the next few years while you haphazardly try and get on top of the world again" is not nearly as good of an incentive.
Taiwan gets invaded yesterday, suddenly the US is in a sticky situation. Taiwan gets invaded when this factory is finished? 5nm vs 2-3nm isn't a huge difference.
Good point, on the last part. But I think the likelihood of an actual invasion of Taiwan is extraordinarily low. There's terrain and weather reasons for why any land invasion would be telegraphed well ahead of time and would be a complete bloodbath for any invading force. What is quite possible imo is an air bombardment as an attempt to force the Taiwanese government into capitulation. This would obviously precipitate a response from the US, and potentially other countries (not going to mention NATO here because I'm not really sure how useful that designation is in 2020 and beyond). So, maybe the bet is that US air/drone power is still a decade or so ahead of China's such that we'd still be able to repel any PRC attacks. And because of that, this is a gesture that signals a) they think that kind of attack is likely and b) because of (a) want to make sure they're on good terms with the American government and people. The history of US relations with Taiwan is a lot more cloudy than people really grok today, so that's my theory on why they're doing this.
I suppose that doesn't really address your broader point though, which is a good one, that Taiwan does/did have leverage in this relationship with their higher-tech fabs being located within Taiwan exclusively. R&D will still be in Taipei, I imagine. Very quickly this becomes, in my mind, a human capital question.
Oh, invasion was absolutely lazy shorthand in that case. Mostly agree with you on the front of "this isn't how we should think about and conceptualize this." And fully agree that US-ROC relations have been really interesting over their history.
Human capital creates a problem for Taiwan, because human capital is easy to obtain, and the US is really good at convincing the best and brightest of other countries to come to the land of the free, by coercion or just offers They Can't Refuse. This creates a kind of perverse incentive for certain pieces of the US government to hope the situation in Taiwan gets stickier, so they can offer a one-way ticket out of it for scientists they're interested in.
>This creates a kind of perverse incentive for certain pieces of the US government to hope the situation in Taiwan gets stickier, so they can offer a one-way ticket out of it for scientists they're interested in.
Hadn't thought of this. Still processing the thought. It reminds me of the US recruiting German scientists for NASA (absolutely not claiming that Taiwanese engineers are comparable to German engineers from Nazi Germany in any way shape or form). I'm expecting the TSMC fab to recruit local talent for operations, but I think you're right it'll definitely require some technical expertise that has to fly in from Taipei.
Agreed on the point that an amphibious invasion of Taiwan could quickly become more chaotic than the PRC wants. I think the PRC's strategy is probably to build up for a naval battle with the US Navy and use a victory to threaten a multi year blockade of Taiwan like the US did with Cuba. If China can secure naval dominance within the second island chain and a corridor across the Indian ocean to the Middle East and Africa they have all the time in the world to leave Taiwan in a pressure cooker.
Yes, this is a strategy I'd consider. "Invasion of Taiwan" is the wrong way to think about this. Blockade and isolation would be the objective, and then use that as a tax on US military resources to further sap an already overextended country.
>If China can secure naval dominance within the second island chain
Skeptical that they'll be able to do this though, unless it represents a significant change in naval operations and they achieve this via drone or other submarine operations. PLA has had a difficult time getting the aircraft carrier concept to work, even after buying several Soviet era carrier vessels (if my memory serves). It might be a false signal, but that they haven't gotten the aircraft carrier concept to work (which would of course be required for an air bombardment of Taiwan) might mean they're working on other naval hardware that exploits US weaknesses, and thus crippling any US Navy activity via submarine or missile warfare in the Taiwan Straight is the ultimate objective for the above mentioned reasons.
I mostly agree with you (I mentioned elsewhere that "invasion of Taiwan" was just supposed to serve as shorthand), but I think you night be underestimating the US Navy and possibly overestimating the PLA.
See my other reply. I agree with what you're saying here. US Navy is, probably, better situated to handle a conflict there barring a major change in how naval war works.
This new fab capacity will only be a small fraction of TSMC total capacity, and nowhere near enough to serve the US domestic needs. So it won't really change the economic dependency on Taiwan fabs. It will provide some local US support for sensitive military chips however. And it lets TSMC gains goodwill from the US, which they can try to use to continue serving Chinese customers (Huawei is a big client). So overall, not necessarily a bad move for TSMC and Taiwan. Nice balancing of conflicting demands.
Counterpoint: If the PRC takes over now, they own the process technology NVIDIA and AMD depend on. They can tell the Americans to go pound sand, good luck on your next supercomputer project, and dedicate all production to Chinese origin designs - with a helping of industrial espionage for a kick start. That’s a pretty powerful incentive for aggression that would be reduced if TSMC’s operations were more distributed. So it’s somewhat balanced out.
I think the bigger problem is the assumption that Americans can properly safeguard Taiwanese IP. Anything you send over here you might as well cc: Beijing on the email.
China doesn't need that technology very badly, if they can just stay making CPUs they'll be able to figure a GPU architecture eventually. Don't forget that Chinese Kirin CPUs have and will outcompete Qualcomm and Samsung.
I don’t doubt it. There will be a slowing convergence and eventually one curve will overtake the other and one day a Chinese design is the fastest GPU.
What I’m talking about is the capability of instantly kneecapping the US tech industry. A sudden differential advantage created by denying capabilities to your adversary. That’s what makes the current semiconductor situation a geopolitical tinder box.
Counterpoint: If the PRC takes over now, they own the process technology NVIDIA and AMD depend on. They can tell the Americans to go pound sand, good luck on your next supercomputer project, and dedicate all production to Chinese origin designs - with a helping of industrial espionage for a kick start.
This should terrify the US, which is the ideal. The US needs to go to bat for Taiwan, which won't happen when they have less incentive to.
China is willing to take independent countries for lesser and pettier reasons than semiconductors. Look what they've done to Hong Kong. Taiwan's been a thorn in its side for years. Distribute it around, China will still want to take Taiwan, the US has less of a reason to go to bat for it.
Sure, but if they can’t deny US industry the ability to operate that’s one less reason to invade Taiwan. If I’m Taiwanese, I’m probably not confident about surviving a conflict even if the US “goes to bat” for me.
On balance you may be right, because China’s desire to control Taiwan is not exactly the result of a rational strategic calculation. Interesting times...
part of me is curious if this is a way to appease the administration due to high pressure [0] and wait out the next election cycle. They are talking about 2021-2029.
Even if Trump is reelected, I could see them leasing an existing fab and have a ribbon cutting ceremony for Trump to get his photo-op and then just weigh their options with minimal additional expenditure (they've already commented on opening a fab in US won't be economical [1]) with the thinking that a few $million spent on a lease and avoiding antagonizing Trump might all be worthwhile in any kind of tariffs on their business.
TSMC found it won't be economical unless subsidized. My understanding is that TSMC managed to get commitment to subsidy from US federal government and the State of Arizona.
By the time Intel gets anywhere near the 10nm production volume that TSMC does on 7nm right now, TSMC will probably already be moving to 5nm.
Its also difficult to say that "Intel 10nm competes with TSMC's 7nm" because in so many ways, it doesnt. Ice Lake server was supposed to be out this year with a new microarchitechture (the first since Skylake), but still is nowhere to be seen (though it certainly seems likely the big cloud players already have early silicon).
Intel's 10nm as originally planned would have been superior to TSMC's original 7nm, if Intel's 10nm had actually been functional. But it didn't work and got cancelled and what they're calling 10nm now is what would have been called "10nm+" if they hadn't renamed their entire roadmap to cover up the failure. I'm not sure how close Intel's shipping 10nm comes to TSMC's original 7nm, but that's rapidly becoming irrelevant now that TSMC's 7nm+ with EUV is up and running.
agree. AMD 4000 mobile chip already win a lot of praises even tho TSMC 7nm supposed to be inferior compare to Intel 10nm. we are talking about 7nm in production right now compare to Intel still struggling with 10nm and squeezing 14nm forever. its a win for TSMC. by the time Intel 10nm is on mass production, TSMC 5nm or even 3nm will be out.
10nm Intel laptops have been on the market for at least six months now, for example in the XPS 13 2-in-1. The new MacBook Air and Pro 13 also ship with Intel 10nm CPUs. While Intel had a lot of trouble getting 10nm production to work and are still only shipping mobile chips, they are selling useful 10nm chips now.
I can see some American politicians are celebrating this as a blow to (communist) China.
But is this not hurting Taiwan in a major strategic long term way? And risks turning the whole island towards mainland.
And for the ones celebrating "Re-industrilization of America". Is the America you envision really a America which does not have anything of importance produced outside America. Even if outside means traditional allies such as Germany, Japan, Taiwan ... ?
Taiwan is strategic to the US-China battle because it is strategic to China; if Taiwan reunites with China, China will have full access to the Pacific.
The narrative of American politicians, particularly President Trump, against Europeans has not manifested in the general public, especially in the tech industry. Americans and Europeans work together much in the same way, atleast in my personal experience and exposure to both continents. The tech industry is too smart to be manipulated by politicians.
For the U.S., this is a potential disaster. If China marches into Taiwan, the U.S. will be left with no advanced-node manufacturing and it will have lost the technology race. It would take at least four to six years to recover, and by that time China would own the market. This is very scary for the U.S., which needs to develop AI chips at the most advanced nodes because density equals more accelerators and other types of processing elements. Even that isn't enough, which is why companies developing AI chips are stitching together chips that are larger than a single reticle. (https://semiengineering.com/the-risk-of-two-supply-chains/)
It goes further than that, too. The DoD needs AI chips, too. In the past, the DoD relied on older nodes. That's changed because it needs transistor density for AI. More MACs equals more performance. On top of all of this, TSMC owns the bulk of the fabless market. So this will happen. The big question is who's funding this move.