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doxa.substack.com/p/why-a-chinese-invasion-of-taiwan
In short, the market for advanced microchips fits together like this:
The equipment and tooling for making leading-edge chip fabrication plants comes from the US and Europe
The two leading-edge fab makers, who have the proprietary know-how to turn that equipment and tooling into fabs that turn out chips more advanced than anyone else’s, are in Taiwan (TSMC) and South Korea (Samsung).
The customers for the outputs of those leading-edge fabs are global, including in the US and Europe.
Porting a chip design from one company’s fab process to another is costly and painful. It’s not like you send an email with some files to a different address and a few days later identical chips come off a new production line in a different factory. No, customers are tied to specific companies’ fabs, and suddenly losing access to that fab means suddenly no more chips until you complete a lengthy, costly re-targeting process.
So fab equipment goes from the west into Taiwan, where TSMC puts all the parts together into fabs that can turn raw materials into advanced chips, and the chips then go back out to the west and rest of the world.
Thus the semiconductor market in 2021 is a fully baked cake. You can’t just swap some ingredients out in response to a one-off military invasion, and then keep trucking along. No, we’ll have to bake a whole new cake if TSMC goes bye-bye. And that will be painful for everyone, everywhere.
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