Comment by KennyBlanken

The US workers are almost certainly limited to people who are low to mid level techs who don't know anything useful. Everyone with actual cutting edge knowledge is from Taiwan and almost certainly under the tightest of NDAs and NCAs.

Even high level people in the plant still aren't that useful. What's useful are the insanely expensive, insanely complicated extreme-ultraviolet lithography equipment from ASML. Nobody in the world makes the stuff they do. At least, that we know of. It wouldn't surprise me if the NSA has funded designing and building an EUV lithography system, or just stole the designs from ASML. We know they do a lot of their own ultra-miniature silicon, so they have a strong interest in this sort of tech.