My Take | Taiwan’s hi-tech jewel is quietly fighting US industrial capture
- No thanks to Tsai, TSMC is waking up to the danger of Washington’s ‘friendshoring’ of its most advanced chip-making capabilities
Sanity has returned to Taiwan, at least temporarily. TSMC last week announced that most of its valuable chips will still be produced on the island. This is despite intense pressure from the Joe Biden White House to “friendshore” TSMC’s most advanced chipmaking capacities, including those for the next-generation chips, to the United States.
Taiwan alone produces more than 60 per cent of the world’s semiconductors and 90 per cent of the most advanced ones; at the apex is TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chip maker.
While President Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party have effectively capitulated to the US demands, the island’s public and its business elite have realised giving up the jewel in their manufacturing crown is a bridge too far.
They have belatedly realised the Faustian bargain the Tsai government has made for them by going over completely to the American side. Hopefully, they will translate that realisation in the coming election next year.
“A majority of [these advanced chips] will be made in Taiwan,” TSMC’s chief executive C.C. Wei told shareholders last week.