Shelley Rigger

And not everybody wants to work at TSMC.

But I think what I see in Taiwan, although my friends there complain all the time in the same way that my friends here complain all the time.

But what I see in Taiwan is that this kind of foundational industrial strength has provided sufficient prosperity for people who would like to have a graduate degree in semiotics or political science, for that matter, can't.

do that and can make a living whereas in a country without that kind of powerful industrial foundation it is very hard to sustain a lifestyle that gives people choice and freedom so that's the story of how taiwan became an indispensable manufacturer of the chips powering the ai race

Removing the option of having TSMC make specialized chips for your business means that either you got to change the product, which you could do, right?

You know, right now, Chinese companies, they would do a lot better if they only had access to TSMC's most advanced chips, or managing without it.

They're doing things in a different way.

be a little bit more cumbersome, take longer, not have the same high efficiency, but you can do it.

Or you have to just charge more because you've got to find another supplier who is not going to have that high efficiency.

So I don't think it's that Taiwan's chips are irreplaceable in the sense that there's some kind of value or utility that they provide that cannot be achieved other ways.

But they are irreplaceable at a certain price point, and they are at least temporarily irreplaceable in the sense that no one else is making what they're making.

But no one else is making it because no one else could make it

as inexpensively and with the same quality level.

So it's not like forever and that it's irreplaceable.

It's just that we would all change a lot.

And like the pace of AI development would probably slow down a lot.

And, you know, not everybody would think that was a bad thing.

Those are the changes that I think would ensue if we lost access.

Right.

And I think what really scares people about the kind of conflict or events that would cause those factories to go dark is not just the loss of their output, but the secondary effects on the global economy.