• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    What happened if… purely hypothetically… China develops competitive chip fabrication plants that exports at scales rivalrious to Taiwan.

    And then fear of an invasion provokes detonation of Taiwan’s own facilities.

    Wouldn’t this turn China into a domestically source monopoly of high end chips?

    • nandeEbisu@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      It’s easier said than done. A few key pieces took decades to figure out and even now many can only be produced by one or two companies, like ASML.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 months ago

      well for one, it would take probably 10 or 20 years to get to that point in chinas domestic manufacturing. As well as geopolitical situation.

      They would have very little reason to invade taiwan at that point. So they probably wouldn’t.

      And to foil your plan a little bit, the US has spent billions of dollars in recent years constructing new TSMC and i believe intel fabs in america, there’s a big one in arizona. And idk where the other one is off the top of my head. But we’re already chinas biggest competition in that regard.

      • ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        They would have very little reason to invade taiwan at that point. So they probably wouldn’t.

        Not about actually needing a reason to invade, it’s about the implication

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 months ago

          i guess but even then it would still have massive political implications, including the US, which is incredibly messy. And taiwan itself wouldn’t be very happy about it.

          Extrinsic factors are the most important ones for this kind of stuff, it’s why the vietnam war failed for us.

      • Defaced@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        They already are, Intel is building new foundries in NA with government funding specifically for the purpose of not relying on Taiwan for chips. The problem though is TSMC has the smallest and most efficient chip dies, so everyone wants those chips, Intel still has a ways to catch up.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Israel grants Intel $3.2 billion for new $25 billion chip plant

        But Intel has long since fallen behind the pack of semiconductor manufacturers. If they could just do their own Taiwanese foundry, they’d have done it by now and reaped comparable boosts in revenue.

        As it stands, China is the majority manufacturer of semiconductors - responsible for more than half of all chips produced - because they’re building foundries far faster and at higher quality than their American peers at Intel.

        Taiwan is the only country keeping pace with China. Losing them would only strengthen the Chinese export market.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 months ago

          As it stands, China is the majority manufacturer of semiconductors - responsible for more than half of all chips produced - because they’re building foundries far faster and at higher quality than their American peers at Intel.

          the reason why they produce half of all semi conductors, probably has more to do with the type of semi conductors they produce, mainly IC chips. As opposed to things like CPUs and GPUs, they’ve only recently started getting into that space. The intels and TSMCs of the world produce highly optimized designs and fab processes specifically for things like CPUs and GPUs.

          A chip with 8 and gates on it is probably vastly easier to produce than an 8088 cpu, for example.