Putting this facility in Taiwan seems risky, considering the political situation. I heard Warren buffet just pulled his tsmc stocks out of caution over it
In exchange for taking that land mass, their entire international trade business which mainland china is extremely reliant on, would be in jeopardy.
It would almost be political suicide to invade as far as I see it. But I'm no expert.
Conclusion: there no way to know what is inside a head of aging autocrat.
Plenty of experts have been calling it for a decade now... EU/US influence has been slowly creeping east for 30 years. Russia had no other options really - as soon as a pro-west leader was elected to Ukraine, war was inevitable.
And the same will happen in Belarus when the leadership changes there too.
You see children's playgrounds that have a big sign saying 'Proudly sponsored by the USA development fund", or "This bus route is made possible by the EU funding.".
Why would the USA be using US taxpayer money to build children's playgrounds in Azerbaijan?
It's all about a long term battle for hearts and minds... Be the 'good guys' to a 5 year old child now, and in 30 years that child is a voter and you can have influence over the whole country.
Pretty smart moves... But I can see how Russia isn't happy about it.
The whole premise “someone funded a playground in my neighbor’s backyard, I have no other options. Bomb them NOW!” is beyond ridiculous.
They could also fund our playgrounds, if it’s as effective, as you claim. In any case that would be muuuuuch cheaper than starting a war with hundreds of thousands dying, sanctions and all that.
I’m missing the explanation for how this justifies an extremely destructive invasion and war.
They do everything in their power to make you believe that is was inevitable to divert the blame.
Same with Taiwan. It is a choice for China to make - to invade or not.
But yes. US influence snuck up on Russia and tricked those countries into being scared of it. Its all so clear now...
Not to mention, it’s a large landmass that offers a huge buffer between the NATO countries and Russia.
And it’s got another 40 or 50 million people for Russia, which has a population problem.
And it’s got iron & Steel exports…
Taiwan has TSMC. And I suspect the US has a bunch of fueled up C-17’s ready to take all the important infrastructure to the US and plans in place to effectively destroy the rest at a moments notice.
Taking 40M people with the same demographic problems gives you a bigger problem - not a solution...
https://www.populationpyramid.net/russian-federation/2020/
https://www.populationpyramid.net/ukraine/2020/
In 10 years demographic in both countries will be as bad as in Japan.
For some reason people from outside of ex-USSR usually suppose there is at least something rational about this war. But USSR does not exist for 30 years and there are no massive political machine. It's just a autocracy / kleptocracy where all decisions taken by a very small groups of incompetent people whos only goal is to preserve their power.
Neither there is any real ideology in Russia. Putin is a much closer to The Dictator movie than to Stalin or Hitler. He care of his giant palaces and yachts far more than about gaining 42M extra subjects to rule. This whole war is just a presidental PR campaign 2024 gone wrong.
PS: Yeah, that's it. It's not some great powerplay to control the world. Not a war with NATO or US. Not even a war over reasources or territory. It's just aging kleptocracy that stumbled and now is killing 100,000s in pointless war.
The deal is: neither Putin nor population of Russia give a damn about this territory control. If Ukraine will free Donetsk and Luhansk tomorrow and Crimea in a year no one in Russia will care about it. Except of course people living on occupied territories, but FSB will shut them up.
On 30 September 2022 they announced annexiation of Kherson. Claimed it's will be part of Russia forever. Just a bit more than month later on 9th November 2022 it stopped being part of Russia and no one cared about it since. And too talkative members of occupation government just died under strage circumstances.
Please don’t invade any countries even if they’re smaller and inconvenient to your stories.
* because they could (or so they thought)
* because there’s a lot of important resources in the ground
* because they want to lay down the border between NATO and Russia and preferably not at the border of Russia but on someone else’s turf
People need to take a much, much broader mindset. China views Taiwan as part of China, and that's that.
I personally don't, and the Taiwanese population ought to chose what they want without material interference, and 'we' should respect that by recognizing their sovereignty and statehood if that's what they want, much like at this point we ought to be recognizing Palestine as a state, if that's what they want.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is pure classical Imperialism, Ukraine is a 'sub Russian vassal' and Russian Imperialism is part of the Russian identity - it was 'secularized' during the time of USSR, now it's just old school.
If you look at geopolitics from the 19th century it's all very clear.
That said, it is odd Apple would do this in Taiwan, and, it's a much bigger jump than people think.
This is a bold move and will reshape what Apple is, and maybe what a true international megacorp of the future looks like.
It could also make them more fragile and if they start to falter, it could really fall apart. You need a lot to work well for this to be pulled off.
This. If an enemy is invading your country and looks likely to succeed, then the important thing for you as a citizen isn't defending your homeland - it is making sure you have a future in the new country under new governance. That might well involve being the guy with all the knowledge to get the chip fab going again.
The US hasn't lost many wars in their homeland, so most citizens haven't really thought of their options...
I guess they could raise a few yuan by selling the DUV and EUV machines on eBay. "Removed from a working environment." That'd be about all they could do with it.
The US could even bomb the factories to deny the resource.
The thing is most of the world is also pretty reliant on international trade business with mainland China.
The question is really about how willing the world is to disrupt their own economies in order to disrupt China's.
Trade barriers against North Korea and Cuba are basically free for the other country, restricting access to energy imports from Iran or Russia imposes a real cost on the country raising the barriers, but even after decades of grumbling it's hard to find a supply chain for manufactured products that doesn't have a significant dependency on China. That makes it hard to fight a war with China, trade or otherwise.
You don't ban those products, you put big tariffs on them. That way, anyone who has the option to source stuff elsewhere does so.
And you deliberately act erratically with tariffs - adding and removing them at short notice - so that lots of companies think it is just too risky to trade with China, and move manufacturing elsewhere as insurance.
This playbook has been done before...
The Kuomintang took huge amounts of priceless Chinese artifacts when they fled to Taiwan, which are now in the National Palace Museum[1]. There's a case to be made that the CCP was on an iconoclastic spree and there was good reason to take the artifacts to Taiwan for safekeeping, but the fact remains that vast amounts of priceless Chinese relics are now in Taiwan. China would like them back and is willing to do more than ask politely. Taiwan can blow up the fabs, sure, but they're probably not going to blow up the relics. Chinese leadership would gain a historic amount of face by bringing them home.
> During the 1960s and 1970s, the National Palace Museum was used by the Kuomintang to support its claim that the Republic of China was the sole legitimate government of all China, in that it was the sole preserver of traditional Chinese culture amid social change and the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, and tended to emphasize Chinese nationalism.
Even though, if you read further down in the article, there's not as much acrimony about it in recent years. Still, China has had dreams to invade Taiwan for decades, mostly for nationalist reasons, and this is likely one of the reasons that's higher in the list.
One thing people miss with the china/taiwan discussion is that China doesn't need to make a single violent move towards Taiwan to subdue it. A naval blockade would force Taiwan's capitulation in almost no time at all.
Even a forceful blockade wouldn't be totally necessary, if China just passed any sort of sanction stopping the export of materials or food to Taiwan, prices would immediately become unsustainable on the island and it would also have to capitulate.
China has no access to the open ocean. The US has bases and strong allies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Singapore) surrounding it.
As far as a casus belli it is a stretch at best. The kind of thing you have to put forward because the population at large wouldn't accept your real reason.
It has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with ideology and projecting power.
If they de-risk by doing this in the US or India, what are they going to use the screens for?
The world is definitely a lot different than it was 50 years ago.
Taking an island 100 miles offshore is definitely doable
Everybody suffers massively if there's hot war in the strait. The main point is that unless supply chains are unwound from both countries, it doesn't matter that much where you put a new screen factory.
Then there’s the other danger…
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-destroy-taiwans-semiconduc...
The US could not intervene other than destroying all the semiconductor factories.
Arguing over US strategic ambiguity is probably too off topic for this thread. I live in Taiwan, so I guess I've put my money where my mouth is.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/06/tsmc-to-up-arizona-investmen...
“Since the beginning of the 2020s, TSMC has expanded its operations outside of the island of Taiwan, opening new fabs in Japan and the United States, with further plans for expansion into Germany”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#:~:text=Four%20200%20mm%2...
More fabs coming to the US too:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/new-us-fabs-everything-we-...
Now, would building the only plant that makes your displays in a potential war zone increase your risk? Common sense is all you need to answer the question.
(1) Invasion is very unlikely
(2) If there is an invasion, it's very likely that the US and Japan have something to say about it.
Anyway, I wonder if there's other reasons for it to be in Taiwan. The article isn't very substantive, but it links to another one that says:
"European company ams OSRAM will be the primary supplier of microLED chips for Apple, but there is potential for Taiwanese suppliers like Epistar to become additional suppliers of microLED chips by 2026-2027..."
Maybe there are some partnerships aside from TSMC that are driving the decision. The article says the process will be developed in Longtan (Taoyuan), which happens to be where at least one other company is setting up microLED production:
Says some person on the Internet.
“(2)...”
But if that person is wrong, they believe…
Remember when Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons because it thought they would be protected?
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1082124528/ukraine-russia-put...
Ukraine had the third largest nuclear weapons arsenal. Now they are fighting for survival.
What the US, and how much the US, will do, with respect to Taiwan depends on politicians in Washington D.C., public sentiment, etc. and that changes over time.
There is only one scenario where the invasion of Taiwan isn't a long and drawn out affair that costs the Chinese hundreds of thousands to millions of troops, and that's the one where they start off by nuking it flat in a massive surprise attack and end up winning only a radioactive wasteland for their troubles.
China is in much better of a position both economically and militarily to invade Taiwan today than it was in 1992, 1971, and 1949.