U.S. considers cutting Huawei off from global chip suppliers
reuters.com
reuters.com
TSMC has way more bargaining power than Huawei. The US won't be able to bully it around that easily. They could easily find enough buyers for their wafers in Asia and Europe.
Any tarif would be directly passed onto TSMC's clients too, so it'd be straight up taxing 80% of the things that have silicon in them. I don't see what leverage the US govt has on an entity with as much global relevance and few competitors as TSMC.
Its a Taiwanese company. The US is pretty much the only country that helps Taiwan to continue to exist as an independent country (not officially, but in practice). If the US tells Taiwan to stop supplying Huawei, that's what they will do.
I an still not sure though what the motives if the US are in bashing on Huawei so much.
Perhaps Huawei refused to put backdoors for the CIA?
Huawei basically admitted to backdoors except they claim it can't be abused without people noticing. I question the motives of you and the parent commentor you replied to.
To China this is no different than the US demanding a Tibetan village stop trading with China.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-wi...
China doesn't care if half its army comes back home in body bags. Their country is built on extreme nationalism and Taiwan going off script is an existential threat to their model. Could the US population tolerate a casualty rate much much higher than Vietnam, especially over an economic dispute?
Nobody is disputing the US would beat China in a war.
TSMC is part owned by the Taiwanese goverment. The US is literally asking the Taiwanese people to throw away their only bargaining chip as a sovereign nation. The moment TSMC opens a factory in the US/Europe, both of those countries stakes in the sovereignty of Taiwan drop down to 0. If china takes over Taiwan the US will simply nationalize the American factory and be done with it.
TSMC would probably rather lose the whole American market and live off SEA/Europe, than having their government overthrown by China.
https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2019/12/18/a-lo...
As I understand things, part of the reason for encouraging international trade (esp. post-WW2) was/is to tie different countries together so that it would disincentivize conflict between them.
Intel, UMC, GlobalFoundries don't make your list??
> 30 facilities planned, including 10/7nm processes, but trade war and economic factors could slow progress.
* https://semiengineering.com/chinas-foundry-biz-takes-big-lea...
* https://www.eetasia.com/news/article/China-to-Become-Worlds-...
* https://www.eetimes.com/chinas-chip-fab-capacity-rising-fast...
Given past experience the result will of course be a domestic Chinese fab industry that out competes the rest of the world .... when what we want is real competition in this space
You can take the morality out of it. This is simply two adversaries in a power play.
Edit:
To clarify my own opinions, I'd be really happy for a trade war if it's objective was to change China's policies. If China grows unimpeded with the same human rights, and lack of enforcement of IP laws, it means the whole world would have to compete on the same terms. This would mean a degradation of human rights in first-world countries in the long run.
Its going to be an interesting fight to watch, but I suspect that by the time this ends the US will have lost more than it will have gained.
Is there anything about recent US trade policy that suggests to you a well thought out, long-term strategy?
'You guys work on commission, huh? So I went elsewhere!!'
'Big mistake! Big!! HUUGGE!!!'
When you say 'But there is no elsewhere.' you're right. FOR TODAY!!
Tomorrow, China will now have to produce its own chips. And those chips will be cheaper and put the US's chip manufacturers out of business. (Just like the US paper manufacturers, and the furniture manufacturers, and the small-item manufacturers, and the tools manufacturers, and the clothing manufacturers, and the ... but you get the point.)
Blocking TSMC from selling to Huawei, might very well kill TSMC. I don’t know the specifics, but TSMC rely on the sales from Huawei to sustain their R&D and manufacturing investments. This is why it is economical for Apple and Qualcomm to use a contract manufacturer, since only they (TSMC) can sustain the economy of scale. If TSMC falls apart, then where is Apple and Qualcomm going to manufacture their chips?
By doing this, Trump has now painted a target on every other Chinese company: DJI, One Plus, Xiaomi, Lenovo, Alibaba. Although I am sure they have already drafted up contingency plans.
At some point, if it hasn’t happened already, these companies are going to band together, and create their own platforms and technologies. The Chinese market is massive enough to sustain these companies internally, while they mature and build out their technology, for later export to the rest of the developing world.
The key tool here is the photolithography machines from ASML. Once China’s scientists builds a replacement, then there is no further dependence. So if Trump wants to get the maximum effect, then he should pull the trigger on this, right now.
Five years ago, a lot of pundits kept saying that Chinese tech companies were only competitive because they had the China government backing them up, and blocking the Chinese market from American domination by Google and Facebook. Well, today, that decision seems prescient. Nobody back then, ever thought that an American President would do such a thing, but today, here we are.
There's major demand for CPU fabs right now due to a combination of cloud hardware needs and poor execution from Intel on 10nm. If Huawei doesn't get to sit at the table, TSMC'll take a hit temporarily but eventually find someone else to take up the dormant fab capacity. I don't agree with the people who say TSMC will be burnt to a crisp if it turns its back on Huawei; that would hurt all the other Chinese companies that do business with TSMC, and give the US a compelling reason to establish a military base in Taiwan.
The best answer to DJI would be US investment in a major quadcopter-based drone program done by a private company, potentially to police the southern border or some other big-ticket national project. DJI's real advantage is in its efficiency and dynamics, which is more a challenge of mechanical engineering and controls than a semiconductor issue.
EUV is expensive and there's a backlog of demand for that kind of machinery, but ASML has a lot of institutional knowledge and they also know exactly where all of their machines are bolted to the ground. Not exactly the easiest thing to reverse engineer. It appears that SMIC tried to buy an EUV machine and that was blocked, although ASML has not confirmed the identity of the company.
Chinese tech companies skirt IP law, steal trade secrets, and have the Chinese government backing them up. It's about time the U.S. government backed up American silicon companies.
Now this is just crazy talk. This is just begging for WW3. You might as well launch the nukes right now, and see who survives afterwards to pick up the pieces.
I don’t think the fine people of San Francisco or New York City wants to be in the crosshairs of a thermonuclear ICBM. Some people are going to have a very bad sunburn on that day. Although it would make for a great Instagram selfie: Check out that #mushroomcloud behind me!
The point being, is that we need to walk a fine line here, and not risk escalating this to something kinetic. Because once those bullets and missiles start flying, then both sides are going to look deep into the abyss, and not see the bottom.
In the past, wiser men have avoided starting a war between the two countries. Today, we need those sensible leadership more than ever.
Um. NO. They either continue to sell Smartphone using chips from TSMC, or they retreat the Smartphone market where other maker will continue to use TSMC's chip.
The problem the US has is that it has blatantly conflated national security with economic interest. Now we've got no idea whether Huawei is a genuine threat or whether America would just prefer you buy American. The UK was a great example - even one of the US's closest allies isn't excluding Huawei from 5G infrastructure.
If there was actually a clear national security threat and the US was acting reasonably, its allies would be backing it and we might actually see a unified resistance to potential Chinese espionage. Instead the world is pretty much unified in seeing this as another one of Donald Trump's fantastic negotiating ploys where he alienates all his allies, sacrifices key objectives needlessly and then claims victory anyway.