Lol TACO want to try to clean up the last taco he spilled all over the floor? Taiwan, call his bluff.
TSMC is Taiwan’s nuke.
Global politics for the past 80 years has been busy teaching folks what happens to you without mutually assured destruction.
Trump will not protect you no matter what you do.
China will promote Taiwan independence… Independence from USA.
Why would the US protect Taiwan if Taiwan’s chip productions were cut in half ?
USA won’t, especially not with science denying racist nazi conservatives leading the government.
Because trump’s capacity for planning does not extend to 2 contiguous sentences
His “plans” are the equivalent of “if I die in a car accident, my parents would kill me” logic
I wouldn’t trust the Americans if I were Taiwan. Scepticism about their reliability is reasonable. They guaranteed Ukraine’s integrity in return for denuclearization; we have enough data to make educated guesses about their behaviour and level of courage.
If I were Taiwan, I’d say “give us protection or no chips for you”.
Scepticism about their reliability is reasonable.
Drastic understatement.
The US has fucked Ukraine royally on multiple fronts.
I wouldn’t trust the US either, although having economic leverage helps. But are you referring to the Budapest memorandum with
They guaranteed Ukraine’s integrity in return for denuclearization
If yes I don’t understand how this misunderstanding still has to be corrected. Read it for yourself here (swapped link to something working, pdf warning)
At no point does it promise defense against foreign third-party attacks except in case nuclear weapons get involved. Every security assurance only covers the nation themselves. Something Russia has obviously broken (but there are no penalties stipulated), whereas the UK and USA have held up their part of the deal. Unless they have invaded Ukraine themselves without my knowledge.___
I am aware of the limitations of the wording in the Budapest memorandum. Note the exact words that I used.
Even if the wording was more explicit, do you honestly think Obama and the Americans wouldn’t chicken out in 2014 and would be willing to fight to kick out the Russians from Crimea?
Sorry, if i missinterpreted your post.
Even if the wording was more explicit, do you honestly think Obama and the Americans wouldn’t chicken out in 2014 and would be willing to fight to kick out the Russians from Crimea?
That’s a difficult one to answer, but yeah it wouldn’t have been a certain thing. However i don’t think we’d have ever arrived in the same circumstances like 2014, had the US given explicit security guarantees.
They didn’t give those, because they didn’t have to and Ukraine wasn’t in a position to force the issue (similar maybe to how there wasn’t any formal pact regarding Russia and NATO’s expansion). But had they signed any explicit form of mutual defense arrangement i’d imagine that this would have lead them to build some form of permanent military presence in Ukraine. And that would almost certainly have changed everything. Would Russia ever dare to invade, if there was a US military base in Ukraine? And in that scenario i would answer your question with “yes, Obama/the Americans would likely not have chickened out and fought back”.
Agreed. If there were American bases in Crimea/Donbas, I don’t think the russians would have invaded in the first place.
I was refering more to a hypothetical scenario with a mutual defense treaty without bases. A situation where they would have to land in Crimea and start sinking the russian black feet and bombing Moscow.
I have my doubts they would act even with a treaty that used explicit wording around a russian invasion in context of mutual defense obligations. I think Obama would chicken out and cite some technicality.
In general, the impression I get is that US leadership in the last ~40 years has been subpar both in the foreign policy arena and in domestic matters.
Dont take this an an Anti-American rant. Our leadership was incompetent and corrupt. Poroshenko had a chance after the Revolution of Dignity, but he messed it up. Zelebakyy is probably the first leader of modern Ukraine that has been competent and has shown some level of achievement.
Sorry about that, i think the brackets in the wikipedia-link somehow messed up the formating. I swapped out the link to another one from the UN.
Golli is right regarding the wording of the Budapest memorandum, it isn’t explicit at all.
I would even agree that perhaps technically “the UK and USA have held up their part of the deal”.
Nothing in my OP denies this, I am talking about a more general evaluation of the reliability of the US.
I don’t have an opinion either way, I haven’t read it. I’m just pointing out that the link they added doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.
Yes, the link didn’t work.
I am from Ukraine, so I didn’t need the link. :)
*hits the ASML machine
“It would be a shame if something happened to this facility, seeeee”
Trump is the kind of moron that confuses extortion for diplomacy.
The only option when facing extortion is to fight for your life.
He will get nothing from no one and have to pretend to like it.
What a fucking schmuck.
Dicklomacy.
Taiwan, if you are reading this: Don’t.
-sincerely China
Actually China is likely getting Taiwan if Taiwan does what Teump wants. Trump ain’t gonna do anything to protect Taiwan once he’s got the semi prod.
The article says 50% of production. So the other 50% would still be in Taiwan and China wants it.
Not sure if that’s agreement or disagreement. Yes China wants it but Trump won’t protect Taiwan if he’s got 50% of the prod in the US. If he’s got that much semi capacity he’s gotta have Taiwan-independent supply chains and it would be much easier to scale as needed. And therefore he wouldn’t stand in the way of China taking over Taiwan one way or another.
There was also talk of US concession of reasserting “one China policy” as part of trade deal. I think they are trying to get TSMC investment, probably with big fat “CHIPS act” level cash gifts, before throwing Taiwan under the bus. Fascist Taiwan President won’t allow it, but neither would opposition.
Yeah we need bodies to replace the koreans in our new prison system.
How big is Taiwan? The US should give Taiwan a section of California about that big to be the new Taiwan. Then empty the country out, burn everything and salt the fields and give the useless island to China.
The reason TSMC is in Taiwan in the first place is their sand is particularly good for making silicon wafers. You can do it with almost any soil, but Taiwan is particularly well-suited to the task.
Burning everything to the ground and abandoning the island is tantamount to just giving China exactly what they want.
Well, I think you’re wrong about the soil being very special, but my plan was a bad one for a completely different reason. I was supposing they were mostly after the people and the wealth that left China when Tiwan broke away from China during the civil war and many of the richer people moved there, sort of like when all the rich people left Cuba to live in Miami when the communists took over there.
The bigger reason not to abandon Taiwan is that it is a strategic point where china can menace the pacific islands and Guam a little easier. As it is they are pushing around the Philippine fishermen and encroaching into their area, taking over reefs that would belong to the Philippines or other countries and trying to make little base islands and Taiwan would be a better staging area.
The reason TSMC is in Taiwan in the first place is their sand is particularly good for making silicon wafers.
Are you sure this is the case? I’ve never heard of this before and was under the impression that raw materials were largely imported for the manufacturing processes. Is it possible you got mixed up with something else?
Am I sure? No, but I have a recollection of reading that the sand in Taiwan has a higher silicon content and is better suited to making wafers. You can make silicon from just about any dirt on earth, since it’s virtually everywhere, but when you want to make a bunch for manufacturing, it’s more effective to choose an abundant source as your starting point.
Well curiosity got the better of me, and the best sources I could find in ~an hour of researching suggest that they import most of the raw materials. For example, this report cites a Taiwanese source (written in Chinese), claiming:
According to statistics in the second quarter of 2022, the self-sufficiency rate of semiconductor manufacturing materials in Taiwan is 1 percent in front-end manufacturing and 15 percent in back-end manufacturing.
I don’t know what exactly goes into those figures, but this overview of the supply chain for semiconductors suggests that most of the raw silicon comes from not-Taiwan which is then also refined in not-Taiwan before it makes its way to TSMC-and-co.
Three products are used as raw materials to produce wafers in step 1: high-purity silicon, silicon carbide, and germanium. If we look at the trade balance of raw materials per country, we find that Germany is the top net exporter and China the largest net importer (see Figure 7). Germany has this position thanks to high-purity silicon exports, which have the highest trading value of the three raw materials. Although silicon is the second-most abundant element (by mass) on Earth after oxygen, there are only a few deposits that can be used for high-tech applications, mainly quartz deposits (chemical: silicon dioxide). High-quality quartz sands are widespread in Germany, as reported by the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR).
A third of global high-purity silicon exports comes from Germany (the German company Wacker Chemie is one of the largest producers worldwide), and more than 70% of German silicon exports goes to China. Although China is one of the world’s major purified industrial silicon producers (7 of the 10 largest polysilicon manufacturers in 2020 were from China), it still imports a sizable amount and is the largest net importer of high-purity silicon. The US also exports a large share of silicon (a quarter of all exports), and Hemlock, based in the US, is one of the largest polysilicon manufacturers.
Of the other raw materials, China exports the largest share, with 35% of global germanium exports and 38% of global silicon carbide exports.
Silicon and other semiconductor raw materials are melted and cast in the form of a large cylinder called an ingot and then sliced into wafers (ASML). Wafers are then used to create the integrated circuits in step 2. By comparing the trade balance of wafers with that of raw materials, we can see that the top net importers of raw materials are also the top net exporters of wafers, confirming that countries like Japan and China import raw materials for the production of wafers.
These wafers are then mostly imported by Taiwan, followed by South Korea (see Figure 9). Trade data also shows that Southeast Asia plays an active role in the semiconductor industry. While more advanced front-end chip production is centered in Taiwan and South Korea, back-end assembly is centered in Southeast Asia.
I know that that’s not Taiwan-specific data but I wasn’t able to find any source saying that Taiwan had a lot of high quality raw silicon to work with.
Looking at the supply chain for this is actually pretty interesting - I had no idea Germany was an important source of raw materials for example o_o
Thanks for this.
Very interesting for a nerd like me.
I thought about posting the second report to [email protected] but it felt like a borderline fit and it’s from 2023 so I went “eh” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s very cool, and I’m happy to be wrong (or at least partially informed). I also didn’t know that Germany was such an important player in silicon, but it just goes to show how important globalization is!
