
Senate Democrats Seek Suspension of TSMC Deal - corrupt_measure
https://www.eetasia.com/us-senators-seek-suspension-of-tsmc-deal/
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seibelj
In my perfect world, governments wouldn’t rip me off by spending my tax
dollars on their favored industries.

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.

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mech422
Dammit - the TSMC fab would have a been an awesome boost for Phoenix...

Just when you think you got a lil good news, some politician gotta screw it up

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pkaye
> In a May 19 letter addressed to U.S Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and
> Defense Secretary Mark Esper, the senators requested the two Trump
> administration cabinet members to “cease any such negotiations or
> discussions” until the relevant authorization and appropriations committees
> have been briefed on plans, including any commitments the two departments
> have made to funding, tax breaks, licenses, or other incentives.

Do such deals normally require the approval of Congress?

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InTheArena
No.

And despite the language here, they don’t really have a way of stopping this
from happening.

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londons_explore
This is clearly very related to efforts to take TSMC away from China.

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.

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InTheArena
TSMC has been used by Taiwan as a strategic - only we can do this- car by the
Taiwanese government for a while. China started a effort to create a advanced
foundry independently. The USA has global foundries and Intel. This is another
effort.

TSMC was already loosing their monopoly.

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londons_explore
TSMC's chip fabrication tech is world leading, and is vital for thousands of
other industries. Nearly every computing device has some of TSMC's parts in,
and if TSMC tech was restricted, performance metrics would decrease across a
lot of industries.

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.

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tibbydudeza
You really think China is going just sit back and allow Huawei to be cut off
from any sort of leading edge IC manufacturing.

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.

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InTheArena
China already has a multi tens of billions of dollar project to do that.

