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Comment by steelstraw | Hacker News Reader

> Anyone who wants to "catch-up" is now stuck with the daunting prospect of spending ~100 billion dollars to re-create a commodity business.

Is this cause for concern given the risk of China taking Taiwan?

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No, $100B is a tiny, single digit fraction of NATO military spending. I’m more concerned about the time and knowledge to spin up more manufacturing capacity.

We can't spin it up until we build more fabs. And we need infrastructure for energy, water, and logistics before we can simply build a bunch of fabs.

> No, $100B is a tiny, single digit fraction of NATO military spending

Are you sure about that math? Total NATO spending is 1.2T.

$100B is ~8% of $1.2T. Single digit, yes. Tiny - guess that's more subjective than I thought.

I’ve heard it’s less of a concern because by the time troops got to the fabs they’d be useless to the Chinese.

sure but you still get the people while denying/disrupting your war enemy since the US and China may likely be in a shooting war if that were to happen

The problem is that they would also be useless to NATO countries.

I think it's safe to assume there's a plan to exfiltrate the critical information to reproduce what TSMC has accomplished in Taiwan

i doubt information is the only critical component in reproducing the plants.

Critical equipment, which are difficult to manufacture, is a huge part of the equation.

An interesting amount of that knowledge is inside various folks' heads.

There are methods to exfiltrate that knowledge too.

Are there? The US could not even exfiltrate the knowledge of where Osama Bin Laden was.

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