• zephyreks [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Nevermind that China has a huge domestic research industrial base, China has also poached a bunch of TSMC engineers recently (obviously, since Taiwan and Mainland China are so similar culturally and pay in large Chinese cities is very similar to Taiwan).

    Plus, TSMC work culture is sort of fucked and has a shit ton of bureaucracy that a newer upstart can avoid. The only reason the West doesn't have semiconductor foundry startups is because nobody is willing to dump a billion dollars into an unknown quantity.

    For what it's worth, that's also why the big US semiconductor companies also have absolute dogshit work culture.

    Basically, anyone surprised by this is a fucking idiot. Anyone with one ounce of sense could have realized that Huawei doesn't need to dodge sanctions because they have the largest supply of semiconductor engineers in the world literally on their doorstep. This feat could have been achieved without hiring a single person from Mainland China, and it would have been entirely legal.

    Nevermind that, people seem to forget how TSMC was founded. About 20 years after the US had been an established player (Intel, AMD/GloFo, TI, Philips/NXP, etc.) in the semiconductor foundry business, the Taiwanese government decided that the foundry game was something they were interested in and decided to dump massive swaths of money into not only the company but into the supporting infrastructure (a cadre of elite semiconductor schools, for one).

    Decades later, the government has made it so that the most desirable job in Taiwan isn't to become a lawyer or doctor, but to become a TSMC engineer. If Taiwan could do it, why can't China? China has more people, better schools, more money, and more resources... And SMIC was founded more than two decades ago. It was actually around this point in TSMC's company history that they received their first order from Apple.

    White people are racist as fuck.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      West doesn't have semiconductor foundry startups is because nobody is willing to dump a billion dollars into an unknown quantity.

      Not true. Biden gave IBM or Intel billions of dollars recently to accelerate the process of domestic chips. They fired a bunch of the engineers and used the money to increase shareholder profits