Between China and a US place: Taiwan’s chip sector weighs obstacles, chooses to take ‘its own road’
- Washington wants Taiwan’s world-leading chip makers to come to the States while shunning mainland China, but doing so would open a big can of proverbial worms
- Expanding on their home turf offers benefits that are not available by moving production stateside, Taiwanese firms said
Taipei-based memory chip developer Ancore Technology has done its homework by scoping out the United States as a work site, but what it found merely stoked fears that production there would take too long, according to company representative Chien Wei-hsi.
Meanwhile, some of Ancore’s tech-industry peers in Taiwan fear that US operations would simply cost too much, or that unionised workforces could clash with Taiwanese corporate culture.
Mainland China – an old go-to destination for Taiwanese manufacturers in search of lower costs – does not cut it as a factory base now like it did before the China-US trade dispute hatched in 2018 and prompted the world’s two largest economies to slap tariffs on each other, Chien said.
He expects to stay home, instead. “Taiwan is taking its own road,” he said.
That decision is essentially becoming a default choice for much of the iconic Taiwanese chip sector because of mature local supply chains, incessant client demands, and the need to hedge against the China-US tech tug of war.
Taiwan … actually has no problems related to geopolitics and can ship to all countries
But it is not always an obvious choice. The US government is pushing Taiwan’s chip makers to onshore near Silicon Valley and employ more Americans. But mainland China might get upset if Taiwanese chip makers lean too far toward the US, which has cut back its own tech ties with Beijing.