Is it 1940 France?

[Jolly]

Most of the world wouldn't care if China invaded Taiwan this morning.

Oh, you'd have the usual eyewash and handwringing, but that would be about it.

[taiwan_girl]

@Jolly said in Is it 1940 France?:

Most of the world wouldn't care if China invaded Taiwan this morning.

Oh, you'd have the usual eyewash and handwringing, but that would be about it.

I am not sure about that.

The other thread about TSMC and the making of semi conductors is a pretty good reason the above would hopefully not happen.

There was stuff in the local Taiwan papers about how TMSC has booby traps in all their factories so if there is an invasion, they will not allow the technology to be usable by the mainland Chinese.

[Mik]

I wondered if they might do that. Make the island useless to CCP.

[Renauda]

@taiwan_girl

The 21st Century equivalent to scuttling your ships or spiking your guns.

The Germans did similar to their factories and infrastructure In 1945 as the Red Army advanced into Germany.

[xenon]

Yeah - besides the whole international tech sector burning to the ground, no one would care about Taiwan getting invaded.

[Jolly]

You don't think the Chinese would:

A. Capture the factories intact.
B. Already possess the intellectual property.
C. Possibly already have a factory built.

Never assume your opponent is stupid.

[xenon]

American workers - who work in silicon manufacturing - are not nearly as productive as Taiwanese workers in the same space.

Handing a silicon factory over to rando chinese silicon workers is like handing me a space shuttle.

A single cutting edge factory can cost 12 figures. There was a famous case of a parking lot repaint in an American fab that messed up yields inside the fab.

These things are insanely complex. These are the machines that make the most complicated machines we have.

The cycle time to set up new silicon capacity and nodes is years. The supply chain disruption of covid will look like child's play next to this. That's assuming the Chinese could somehow salvage and work the factories.

[Jolly]

Forced labor at the end of a bayonet work?

[xenon]

And Apple, nvidia, qualcomm and AMD will continue to push through orders to them and work with their engineers day in day out with the bayonets visible in the zoom calls?

[Jolly]

You think the Chinese are that stupid?

[xenon]

I'm obviously being tongue in cheek.

TSMC makes chips pretty much exclusively for American companies - at least for the important stuff. Do you think that would actually continue even if by some miracle the Chinese could keep operations going?

There is also no universe in which it doesn't take less than 5 years to decouple from TSMC (that's assuming there existed a viable alternative today - Intel ain't it yet - all the engineers started porting over to that toolset, and ground breaks on new fabs).

Again - it looks like economic suicide for all involved to me. But maybe you think China gets to invade Taiwan and American companies would hand over our most advanced semiconductor IP to them.

[Jolly]

If the Chinese will weld their own people into buildings and tell them breathe or die, I suspect they wouldn't bat an eyelash at a little economic turmoil.