US ordered TSMC, not Taiwan the country. The vast majority of sales are made to US based firms so they likely have a lot of sway.
US is the major customer of TSMC, so they can order them, not to mention we protect them with defense pacts, so they might want to actually listen. Pretty sure they make some of our military grade chips as well.
Cutting edge chips are used in cutting edge military hardware. TSMC provides a lot of the chips used in advanced American weapons. Turns out a faster chip in a missile makes the missile better able to make sophisticated split second decisions.
US can order most of its allies to do anything. Remember when the US thought Edward Snowden was on the Bolivian presidential airplane and within the span of like, half a hour, managed to get all of western europe to deny airspace to Bolivia, ground the literal presidential plane and search him like a dirty drug mule? Was pretty awkward after that when Snowden wasn’t even there.
[Cobbled from Reddit thread]
This is a pretty stupid thing to do. They’re guaranteeing chinese chip making.
China is already making chips though? What does this change??
Taiwan is the largest chip maker in the world. One of the reasons that China doesn’t invade is because they’re also dependent on Taiwan chips. Forcing china to double down on their local industry hinders Taiwan’s security. The US knows this. They’re escalating things in a very tense geopolitical area
The vast majority of sales are made to US based firms so they likely have a lot of sway.
The sway is TSMC uses ASML EUV lithography machines and the US holds patents on those because they did foundational research regarding EUV lithography. Also, the EU hasn’t put China on the “it is illegal for EU companies to kowtow to US sanctions” list. Ironically ASML could sell to Cuba and Iran. If the EU were to tell ASML to sell to China the US would be free to not buy ASML machines any more and, doing that, kill off Intel’s fabs.
None of this stuff has military relevance, you don’t need or even want to use small nodes (which require EUV) in military applications you want hardened chips instead. Run off the mill consumer chips go all frizzy if an EMP looks at them sideways. This is about the US protecting US fabs, foremost Intel. Not the chip design part but the manufacturing one.
Europe hasn’t played the high-end end-consumer chip market for ages and I doubt we’ll do it any time soon. Having ASML, Zeiss etc. means that whoever actually produces that stuff wants to be friendly with us and strategically, both military and economy, our own production facilities are perfectly sufficient. Hence also why ESMC will only go as small as 12nm, it’s the most cost-effective node size and performance is perfectly adequate for a missile, a CNC mill, or a car infotainment system. Or the gyroscope chip in your phone (it’s almost certainly a Bosch), EUV doesn’t make a lick of sense when you’re doing MEMS. Where we have to catch up is chip design lets see how that RISC-V supercomputer chip turns out.
Did you just post a misleading title and put a correction right underneath?
Is it misleading?
r/worldnews only allows unedited titles. Looks like it has changed since then.
The thread I stole comments from was answering a person asking someone like “how can the US order Taiwan to do anything?”. I hate to promote Reddit but credit where it is due…
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1gnowuf/comment/lwd8fy0
Ahh, that makes more sense! It looked like an odd thing to do
