Still pretty amazing that there's basically one global top-tier chip supply chain, with hundreds of companies, some of which are sole-source at the scale of 6-12mo+. ASML is as much a bottleneck as TSMC.
Yes, this is _one_ of the reasons I think TSMC is fairly safe from doomsday theories like China trying to cut it off from the world. Because that would risk it being cut of from ASML, and they are unlikely to be anywhere close to making their own machines before grinding to a halt.
Short term, it's mutually assured fabrication destruction; Long term, the world needs more redundancy and competition in both areas.
But... arent they already cut from ASML?
US disallowed ASML to sell advanced tech to China
Edited to specify China as the one who would potentially cut off TSMC from the rest of the world, which would also cut off ASML->TSMC.
But the majority of chips they need can be built on this process if they have it. They don't need ASML if they got here. And they can't have ASML's new stuff.
Doesn't sound like much of a deterrent.
FWIW, that's about where Intel was 14-15 years ago. That's a reasonable process for lots of logic chips, but not for modern mobile devices or datacenter machine learning engines.
ASML is only relevant to them if they need to get to present day GPUs and mobile devices (as you said) and I don't think that's that important for their needs. But even if it is relevant they have no access to ASML tech because ASML only has that because the basic research is US-owned and the USG will enforce their export controls on ASML and will enforce that critical components are made here so playing nice with Taiwan won't get China any closer to EUV lithography.
What /u/tomxor is saying makes no sense.
TSMC under peacetime conditions has issues obtaining acceptable yields on this equipment. In an armed conflict, there will be no operation at all, much less one that requires a Stuxnet-style attack to shut down.
A bigger one, since all of TSMC, Samsung, and Intel rely on ASML. It could be many years, if not decades, before ASML gets some serious competition.
My guess is that US, China, and Taiwan will all have essentially equivalent fabs, Korea and the EU will have what look like cheaper versions until everyone figures out that they don't have the yields the promise and so it's actually more expensive but propped up by .gov money (even more than the first group).
I wouldn't be surprised to see another one shared by Brazil, India, South Africa (and maybe Russia) that kind of works, enough for low volume defense projects.
additionally, I take it as evidence of the perceived value that people gone to great lengths to avoid widespread proliferation of this techniques because scarcity is a value amplifier. so by keeping it scarce its value increases.
so if I'm correct, if/when there are multiple comparable fabs in multiple parts of the world the geopolitical risks should go down in taiwan
finally, having typed it out, I feel my whole argument is wrong...
Taiwan has been a subject to threat of invasion for a long time before TSMC was a thing.
A short while ago Intel had the best fabs and CPU chips. Nobody thought another country invading USA was plausible.
> so if I'm correct, if/when there are multiple comparable fabs in multiple parts of the world the geopolitical risks should go down in taiwan
No. Taiwan has for decades been a point of geopolitical tension between powers around in Pacific (which currently is US and China). The existence of TSMC makes the rest of the world care more (or scared more), but the PRC isn't just going to give up its decades long goal of taking over Taiwan because there's another TSMC somewhere else (or even in mainland China).