Comment by turbo_wombat

Comment by turbo_wombat 21 hours ago

1 reply

You are asking why save Intel of all chip manufacturers, and the answer is because there aren't any other major chip manufacturers in the US.

AMD no longer has a fab. TSMC dominates the global market and basically has no competition.

In the event that Taiwan is invaded, the US would suddenly have a huge problem getting access to any kind of high end chips, be they CPUs or GPUs. This would be a major problem economically and militarily for the US.

Some caveats: Due to the chip act, TSMC does now have fabs Arizona, though I'm not sure what their capacity is. TI, and some others building lower end components also have fabs I believe. For x86, high end ARM, and GPU's, virtually all of that is manufactured by TSMC right now, mostly in Taiwan.

internetter 20 hours ago

> TSMC does now have fabs Arizona, though I'm not sure what their capacity is.

180,000 wafers a year. Globally they do 17 million. They announced first profit yesterday.