He emphasized that the proposed tariffs would leave companies with no choice but to invest in domestic production facilities to avoid high taxes.
No choice except the obvious: Pass the cost of the Tax into the customer because there’s no way they’re going to spend billions to stand up a US fab plant anytime soon.
More so when these plants take 10 years to build. They will pass along the cost and just wait him out.
Yeah but what corporation is going to think of the obvious solution?
Also, because these investments are long-term when the tariffs are likely to only be short term.
If TSMC doesn’t want to set up shop in the USA, are the USA going to be able to produce chips on par with what TSMC can fab?
they are building a plant in Arizona, but i doubt it’ll ever be as good as Taiwan can do, not just because Taiwan has the skills but if Taiwan doesn’t have this then what’s the point of protecting it? It’s sort of a way to say, if you want to to continue to access the best chips in the world you should protect us from China
Taiwan are very clear about this; they (correctly) consider their monopoly on high end chip manufacturing to be an urgent matter of national defence and it is of the highest priority to them to keep it solely within Taiwan. They will never allow their best processes to be exported.
TSMC have advanced chip fabrication factory in Arizona in the US.
“TSMC will produce 3nm chips in the U.S., and Taiwan has already given TSMC the go-signal to manufacture 2nm chips abroad.”
But it cannot produce the higher end chips. That was explicitly part of the agreement when they built the facility. They’re only willing to fab low end product outside of Taiwan.
I was being very specific when I said “their best processes.”
I wouldn’t say 5nm and 3nm are low end
Sure, “low end” wasn’t a perfectly scientifically accurate way to describe it. I apologize for my terrible lack of academic rigor.
The point is that they’re not going to let their highest end processes be replicated outside of Taiwan. Or, rather, the Taiwanese government is not going to let that happen, because fear of losing access to that technology is their one bargaining chip with the West. Without that, they cease to exist as a country. There just isn’t enough incentive for anyone to risk a war with China otherwise.
Totally agree that it’s a sound strategy to keep their latest and greatest on home soil. At the same time they are starting to implement tooling for important parts of clients designs like
Core chiplets for Ryzen
iPhone SOCs
OK. It is ahistorical and hyperbolic to say they may never do that. They also have their fabs i n Taiwan rigged to self destruct if they get invaded. They are setting up shop in a different country. As fab dies shrink they get harder to make, they are building expertise somewhere else in case.
It’s already fabbing chips
People downvoting you can’t do a quick search:
TSMC is absolutely up and running already in the US.
Yeah I know, talking a lot of blowhard talk. Chip die size was the arbitrary argument, but again, that just takes time. They are hedging their bet with a supposed ally with China being their big threat.
"TSMC will produce 3nm chips in the U.S., and Taiwan has already given TSMC the go-signal to manufacture 2nm chips abroad. "
I believe the plant is operational, as they have bragged about “great production tests”. What I haven’t heard of is any orders placed for that plant’s products.
The US could probably do it… With hundreds of billions of government incentives to rapidly stand up the entire supply chain… Which would still take at least a decade. The machines that TSMC uses are made by ASML and themselves have a global supply chain of over 500 separate companies and are backordered for several years due to their inherent value.
In short, no.
Intel has been trying to get itself into that position for years, with huge amounts of public money being pumped in, and it is struggling so badly the company lost patience and fired the CEO who had the best chance of getting this done. And, as others have said, it doesn’t look like TSMC is about to let its US fabs do the most advanced stuff even if they could.
So this move will just make the best technology less accessible to the USA and tech products more expensive for Americans, for the foreseeable future.
From what I understand one of the things that is protecting Taiwan from China is their fabs. They will fight for their lives to make sure they are protected by this.
As someone with family over in Taiwan, I really want them to be okay. Things are getting depressing globally.
No
So, US is finally getting EU hardware prices
To avoid this, the administration would need to introduce exemptions, just like it did with China-made graphics cards and motherboards years ago.
If that is the approach, it would ensure tech monopoly for 5 years for all of the oligarchy that kisses his diaper.
More major issues with this is that while high end Chip production may be high value manufacturing, motherboards, electronics, and assembly is not, and there would likely be an export of chips to somewhere else to import finished products.
US/Trump explicit hatred for world is likely to get retributive tariffs, that makes chip plants unproductive investments, though Trump is hoping to have high foreign ownership/investment in those plants.
In 2022, the export share of Taiwan integrated circuits to US was just 2.46%, although in early 2024, total (all goods) Taiwan exports had US take lead over China for the first time.
That both US and China are decoupling from Taiwan is going to reduce any geopolitical subservience impulse that provokes a war with China. Taiwan may get closer to China instead of begging for more US “friendship”.
more AI but less compute please make it make sense
But I thought the Tim Apple donation to the trump inauguration was supposed to curry enough favor to avoid this.
ThisIsMySurpisedFace.jpg.
I don’t get the goal here. It’s not just that existing fabs are in Taiwan, I thought it was the knowledge was as well.
I was under the impression that we’d built a couple of fabs here and they’re not productive due to a knowledge deficit. Maybe I’m uninformed.
It seems, to my uninformed self, that if we impose tariffs we’d be strengthening Taiwan/China relations. Wouldn’t China still serve as a middle man?
I don’t see us manufacturing when the dollar is so high relative to foreign currency; add in the lack of knowledge and facilities and I’m not sure what you get.
Awesome! Send them to Canada, we can build data centres and sell the cloud services back to Americans powered by the electricity that we expect to be tarriffed, and cooled by the water we won’t sell.
Maybe it’ll bring chip prices down to Rest of the World™ to clear stock. Thanks Trump!
People hyped for the Nvidia 5000 series better get their cards before prices skyrocket across the board. I guess graphics cards weren’t expensive enough or something.
Really though, no brand is safe from the soon-to-be insane prices if this does go through as a blanket tariff without exceptions. Better to err on the safe side and upgrade soon as you can, if you need to and you’re not too wealthy to care.
world going down faster than ur sister on a Friday night but PC parts go BRRrRRRRRrrrrRRRrRRRR
I say this not to be reactionary or pro trump.
Is there no way to use lesser nodes for wider applications? While there are processes that need as much speed as possible, I feel like what gives Taiwan semiconducting industries such great business is the fact that code optimization isn’t as cost effective as the latest and greatest chips.
I HOPE these tariffs inspire better, more secure code to make less efficient chips more viable. Like a lemon to lemonade situation.
If you optimize code, it will still run faster if the CPU or GPU is 30% faster.
If you make 50% speed improvements with code, you get 65% improvement with code+hardware upgrades. The hardware multiplies your software gains.
Also, half of the gains in recent years have been in energy efficiency, not just speed.
So if the idea is to do more with less, you don’t wanna rely on old power-hungry designs.
