The AI venture-capital bubble is destined to burst (eg. Humane and Rabbit are going nowhere) but the incumbents like TSMC and Nvidia are probably going nowhere anytime soon.
As companies not going anywhere. Their valuations specially Nvidia could realistically track back a lot. Drop to half seems reasonable, third realistic and almost eight not impossible.
Nvidia's value is inflated today, but an eightfold drop would be a pretty shocking undervaluation. Half maybe, but someone else would have to displace a large amount of the value Nvidia provides. AMD is chronically incapable of building vertically, and Apple has been plugging their ears ignoring the datacenter market for almost a decade now. Until someone finally funds a proper CUDA-killer, I don't think Nvidia is going to feel the hurt. Their hardware has demand, their software has market-fit.
China invades Taiwan and goes anywhere near the island’s TSMC fabs, you can bet the stock will be affected. They might have fabs in the rest of the world but my impression was it is still a pretty fragile chain
Well sure, then everyone's goose is cooked. Do you really think Apple is going to rise from the ashes in that scenario and finally use it as an opportunity to replace CUDA?
No, everyone will be in exactly the same doghouse. Nvidia has experience hedging their bets on multiple silicon suppliers, I suspect they are better-prepared for this situation than any other manufacturer.
Regarding Apple specifically, no, I don't believe they have the fabs to support that scale. Bing chat says Apple themselves manufactures the M2 chip but it must be hallucinating, I strongly doubt they have <5nm manufacturing capability in house. Personally assume that pretty much every <10nm process chip is made by TSMC but I'm not a semiconductor professional and not really qualified for this kind of strategic forecasting. TSMC themselves have tried to diversify manufacturing across the globe but at least in the USA it has been more or less a failure [0]
Maybe Apple will try to rekindle that partership with ARM, or maybe they've diversified enough that they can try to make something with old TSMC fabs in Vietnam, assuming the war doesn't engulf them too, but I didn't think any sub 10nm stuff was being made outside of Taiwan.
The invasion is more or less a certainty in the next few years, though. I am much more sure about that than any prognostications about Apple's response to the invasion
