The Plan to Secure Taiwan’s AI Chips Amid Fears of a Chinese Invasion | WSJ

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5:32 “TSMC is trying to get US visas for hundreds of skilled Taiwanese workers but American unions say this is an excuse to hire CHEAP FOREIGN LABOR.”

Is this a joke? Semiconductor workers are some of the most highly skilled, extremely specialized technical professionals in the world, and they are in desperately short supply. They are not migrant farm workers picking tomatoes or sweatshop workers making cheap sneakers.

Unions complaining about “cheap foreign labor” completely and hilariously misses the mark. It’s like being in Pompeii and complaining about air pollution as the volcano is erupting and lava is flowing down the street. Semiconductors are Priority #1 because they are National Security Vulnerability #1. We’re talking geopolitical meltdown, World War 3 level stakes, and with the pressure of an invasion countdown clock to boot, not to mention the specter of Artificial Super-Intelligence staring us down.

Fun fact: The CEO of Nvidia and AMD are both Taiwanese,I would say Taiwanese has been dominant the entire artificial intelligence and semiconductor field.

It’s never going to happen. TSMC is partially government owned. They will never, ever, let their cutting edge lines be moved abroad. They will let their older and current lines be moved, but never the cutting edge because 1. security and self-preservation, and 2. Cost.

Many Americans overlook why TSMC thrives in Taiwan. It's not solely about low labor costs—China's costs are even lower. Rather, it's the supportive ecosystem. Can you earn an EE master's, respond to 2 am calls, arrive in 2 hours, and locate all equipment/materials within a few hours to prevent millions in production losses?

The key to Taiwan's success in high-end chip production is its engineering, researching, and production staff. Witout these talents, there is no chance of success making cutting edge chips in the US.

Here is the irony, the US considers high tech chip manufacturing as a US technology and yet the US is unable to manufacture them without a foreign country.

buffet sold his TSMC shares low, lost billions as a result of his wrong prediction making about TSMC and Taiwan's security.

Surrounding TSMC are over 500 top-tier supply chain partners that provide services to TSMC. TSMC's ability to surpass its American, Korean, Japanese, and European counterparts stems not from being a single company but from its representation of a collective force of over 500 upstream, midstream, and downstream supply chain partners with a combined workforce of over 300,000 individuals. This formidable army of talent has propelled Taiwan's entire semiconductor industry to shared prosperity, making the likes of Intel's tens of thousands of employees and Samsung's tens of thousands of employees no match. TSMC's recent announcement of its foray into 1nm chip fabrication technology and its unveiling of its proprietary 0.5nm technology (akin to the size of a hydrogen atom) have sent shockwaves through the industry. TSMC is leading a charge into 1nm chips and cutting-edge domains with its army of over 300,000 individuals spanning the upstream, midstream, and downstream supply chain, leaving Intel and Samsung with no comparable workforce to compete.

"US is committed to bombing the chip factory. This shows our commitment to Taiwan's independence" the irony in that sentence...

He who controls the spice,
controls the universe.

Chris Miller’s book Chip Wars is a good read.

US companies sent the fabrication to lower labor cost areas many decades ago but kept R&D here. Now we have to pay them to bring it back and they still don't want to pay for the highly skilled labor it takes to do the final construction of the fabs. I used to be part of that workforce, but I'm happily retired now.

Taiwanese chip engineers "cheap labor" 😂

This is great. Thanks!

Taiwan not only dominate chip making, but the entire chain of electric manufacturing. For example, who makes AI servers with AI chips? Still Taiwanese companies such as Foxconn

Very informative! 🌐 The geopolitical aspect of AI is eye-opening.

From a Taiwanese perspective, TSMC will success is actually based on exploiting the highly-skilled worker with salaries and resting hour that lower than the developed western countries, imagine you have to work over 10 hours per day and basically have to be prepared to be called back to the Fab if there is anything goes wrong, even you're on a vacation, and they pay you for about 100,000 every year. A LOT OF Taiwanese can accept such working environment and salary, while the Americans, I have to doubt that. Thus, the productivity of the Fabs in AZ may not be able to maintain the same as the Fabs in Taiwan.

The irony is that the founder of TMSC used to work for Texas Instruments. Why did he leave to setup his own company? He was constantly looked over for promotion because of his race. The US did it to themselves.

This is important. Conflict is ahead.