Wait, I'm not sure if I follow. TSMC builds a fab in US soil, guaranteeing American autonomy on chip production. Supposedly the DoD would also require training for American technicians and more critical parts of the supply chain there. This makes Taiwan LESS strategic, not more, for US security, because now the US can build its own chips and isn't vulnerable to a Chinese invasion on Taiwan.
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It makes Taiwan less strategic in time. It makes Taiwan more strategic now, because the US is still dependent on TSMC.
If China has hostile intent it also increases the risk of Chinese action, because - dependent on stockpiles and security - Taiwan is a resource choke point which could potentially decapitate the entire US military machine.
This is a terrible situation for the US to be in.
As the US replaces that capability on its home turf Taiwan's strategic value wanes, which paradoxically makes an attack less likely because China can get what it wants from Taiwan by conventional economic and political means.
The question is... how lucky/aggressive does China feel? And how just-in-time is the US military supply chain?
I doubt all the defense critical military electronics are fabbed over there on 10 nm
They're increasingly into ML inference at the edge, which benefits from (and sometime requires) smaller nodes.
You and I like smaller nodes because they are more cost effective.
The military doesn't really worry much about price.
Sort of. At the gate counts we're talking, it doesn't take long until you can't even fit the chip on a whole wafer of an older node. IIRC, an Nvidia GA100 doesn't fit on a 300mm 65nm wafer (to say nothing of being able to clock it at a viable speed even if you were to cut it down). Going off chip destroys perf for a lot of designs too.
It's not just a price component, but a performance and viability of new designs one, at a time where the DoD internally is pushing ML hard as a major pillar of investment in weapons technology.
It's not just the military supply chain. Imagine the economic shockwaves if we weren't able to buy new computers in the US, just for a short time.
The US consumes 50% of chip supply while only making 10% of the chips. American leadership on both isles have decided that access to chips is a national security issue.
If you're TSMC or Samsung you probably had a conversation with US officials along the lines of: Build fabs in the US, or we will tariff and tax our way back to a mostly domestic, American owned industry. 60% of TSMC's sales are to the US customers. There's not much of a choice there.
The stateside TSMC fab, even with trained technicians, cannot be instantly/effortlessly/losslessly decoupled from the Taiwan fab. That would be a monumental undertaking. Manufacturing is much more complex than that, the site is far more than some technicians, a building, and some machines inside it.
Instead, this move ties the success of the American facility and the Taiwanese facility together, building a bond and interdependence.
> This makes Taiwan LESS strategic, not more, for US security, because now the US can build its own chips and isn't vulnerable to a Chinese invasion on Taiwan
Sort of.
TSMC's interests do not perfectly align with Taiwan's. TSMC putting fabs in the well-defended territory of its customers makes sense.
That said, China being able to credibly threaten a critical supply line is a security issue for America. It constrains U.S. response options to an invasion, threatened or acted upon. Removing that constraint does make Taiwan a bit less critical to America. But U.S.-Taiwanese relations predate TSMC. On the net, these plants free America to be more aggressive with China, which is broadly in Taiwan's interest.
Why now? In a word: automation. Semiconductor manufacturing has become far less labor intensive since TSMC was founded in 1987. That makes the American labor premium less material.
>This makes Taiwan LESS strategic, not more, for US security, because now the US can build its own chips and isn't vulnerable to a Chinese invasion on Taiwan.
I think you're failing to take into account a number of things. First and foremost the very foundation of the US is based on respecting IP law given we're almost entirely an "information" society. If we suddenly steal TSMC's business secrets because it's convenient, what's preventing Europe and our allies from taking ours? Why would they respect IP law if we don't?
Second, regardless of the technical reliance we have on Taiwan, there's no planet on which the US wants China expanding and taking over other countries in Asia for political reasons.
The factories in the US ensure that the US keeps sending business to TSMC.
Putting aside for a minute whether TSMC's interests and Taiwan's are the same, does Taiwan really want to be strategic to US security?
It probably comes with some benefits, but I doubt volunteering to be a potential hotspot for WW3 is really worth those benefits.
Taiwan being caught between US and People's Republic of China is less of a worry than Taiwan's existing concern of being caught between People's Republic of China and Republic of China (aka "Taiwan")
But it also makes the threat of economic sanctions in response to an invasion more credible, because the US and its allies in such an effort would have alternative sources of critical components.
A working, competitive fab isn't just a turnkey operation. There's engineers needed to address the yield issue of the day. Those engineers are based in Taiwan.
Taiwan is less safe when the US depends upon Taiwanese production and lacks alternatives, because China uses it as a pressure point and a vulnerable US is a reactive US.
This got me wondering as well. Maybe it's a quid pro quo type of arrangement.