Why would a free taiwan be necessary? I don’t think there ccp would have any qualms about tsmc continuing operation. A chinese company being the indisputed best at the modt advanced industry in the world is a good thing for them. Assuming a bloodless takeover occurred it would be business as usual.
The whole system that supports TSMC will break down in the event of a war.
You can see this with SMIC and their inability to get modern lithography systems from the only leading edge vendor ASML. Sure, you can create your own vendors to replace such companies, but they are unlikely to ever catch up to the leading edge or even be only a generation or two behind the leading edge despite massive investments.
With non-leading edge equipment & processes you have to make compromises like making much larger chips so you can get the same compute in a low power profile. This drives up the initial cost of every device you make and you run into throughput issues like what Huawei has experienced where they cannot produce enough ships to ship their flagship ship phones at a reasonable price and simultaneously keep them in stock.
Instead you get boutique products that sell out practically immediately because there were so few units that were able to be manufactured.
It seems very unlikely to me that between KMT loyalist troops and angry mobs that China would simply be allowed to take Taiwan without violence, and that nobody would decide to use TSMC as a hostage.
See the Swiss strategy, where every bridge and tunnel has its explosives pre-placed when it was built.
Fabs can and do recover from major contamination events. In 2021, Renesas suffered a fire that destroyed about 5% of their N3 building. It took them just under a month to resume production and just over 3 months to reach pre-incident production levels. Fab decontamination is a major task, but ultimately it's just a very, very thorough cleaning process.
Incidentally, they don't operate at BSL3 - that's a standard for biosafety that has more to do with protecting the outside world from the lab rather than vice-versa. Fabs operate in accordance with ISO 14644.
The implication I got from the GP comment is that the U.S. would be reluctant to have CCP manufacturing the processors due to the (proven) risk that they’ll modify and backdoor stuff.
If TSMC over invests in US factories then they could be taken over under imminent domain if Taiwan was no longer independent. So they have to keep a large portion of manufacturing domestic to Taiwan for lessened geopolitical risk.
You underestimate how gobsmackingly dumb this administration is, IMO. They've cancelled extremely important, multi-year or -decade long clinical trials just for funsies.
