Just when you think you got a lil good news, some politician gotta screw it up
Do such deals normally require the approval of Congress?
And despite the language here, they don’t really have a way of stopping this from happening.
Not that I'm aware of...
Conjecture:
This new fab was announced the same day as restrictions on TSMC selling chips to Huawei, it's 2nd biggest customer.
Presumably behind closed door negotiations, TSMC made clear that if they were banned by us from selling chips to China, they'd just split the company into a "China branch" who breaks these US rules and a "USA branch" that follows US sanctions.
To preempt that, the US government offered a sweet deal to TSMC, to start a fab in the US with massive subsidies, on condition they didn't move any more tech to China.
TSMC was already loosing their monopoly.
I would not be too surprised if TMSC helps to start up a fab with plausible deniability on the mainland catering solely for Chinese production.
But we live in the real world and China throws money to undermine US industry. Letting all of our knowledge of how to build actual things leave the country is a strategic blunder. Not just chips, but everything! And 3D printing hasn’t enabled us to print whatever we need in an emergency. We need this knowledge for national defense.
So if we want to print a few billion dollars and hand it to Taiwan, whatever. Drop in the bucket compared to the $7 trillion printed this year. Democrats are making a mistake.
That's why both China and the US are offering TSMC sweetheart deals to not sell tech to the other.
Whoever loses this battle will probably be left 3 years behind in CPU and GPU performance. Which in turn will make them dead in smartphones, laptops/desktops, cloud computing, scientific simulations, etc.
