Global Chip Manufacturing Details

Far deeper than Peter Zeihan goes on these issues.

This twenty minute video from Asianometry says it’s about TSMC, but it provides a LOT of details on chip foundries all over the world and the Biden administration’s CHIPS act.

While there’s a couple orders of magnitude higher resolution on how foundries work in this, the channel does not have the same worst case estimate views of the supply chains behind the production. This is where some diversity in sources is required; it’s a full time job to stay on top of the moves in a broad, important sector like this.

Takeaway:

China can’t just knock over Taiwan and get an entire advanced chip production pipeline. TSMC doesn’t design chips and they don’t run vertically integrated foundries. Their game is assembling all the pieces in the most disciplined fashion so they can manufacture the most complex designs made by companies like Nvidia. Even if they could snap their fingers and neatly acquire Taiwan, the chip business would stumble a bit, but Intel would benefit and TSMC would respawn based in Japan or the U.S.