Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What if The World’s Largest Chipmaker Disappeared?”.
Imagine if the world’s biggest manufacturer of chips just shut down and I’m not talking Fredo, I mean tsmc the massive company based out of Taiwan that produces around 90 % of the world’s leading Edge computer chips. Recently, earthquakes That Shook Taiwan, as well as tensions with neighboring China, have led people around the world to be concerned about what would happen if tsmc suddenly couldn’t make chips anymore. So exactly how would the planet fair with the sudden loss of one of its most important companies before we answer we’d like to thank our friend, Dr Ian cutus, for helping us out with this video when you’re done watching go check out his website more than more And his YouTube channel tech, tech potato. First, let’s talk about natural disasters. Taiwan is located squarely within the infamous Pacific Ring of Fire, meaning earthquakes are a concern. Tsmc, along with other Fabs, is generally quite well protected against vibrations that can disturb the delicate Machinery needed to produce chips between anchors that dampen the effects of Earth, earthquakes and floating piles that allow buildings to be supported by more stable soil. Deep underground tsmc can and does get back up and running, even after significant earthquakes within a matter of hours.
Good thing, too, considering 1 hour of downtime could cost the company millions of dollars. But earthquakes are one thing. Human caused problems like War are another, so let’s say tsmc was wiped out due to some kind of military confrontation. What, then, well, do you remember the graphics card shortage from a few years back? It would be like that, except much worse, a big part of the reason for this is not just because tsmc makes so many chips, but because they produce tons of Leading Edge chips. Basically, these are chips that have smaller transistors than other chips, allowing them to be higher performance and much more power, efficient, think current gen CPUs and computers, or the S so’s that power Flagship smartphones, but it isn’t just higher end chips. That would suffer a big time Supply shortage of the roughly 12 million 12in Wafers that tsmc produces yearly about 95 million of those are on older nodes for cheaper chips for applications that don’t need the highest performance in a smartphone, for example, about 70 % of the Silicon inside is on these older nodes.
This means there would be shortages of everything resulting not only in higher prices say on cars, for example, but also a Ras to the bottom. What we mean is you’d start seeing PCS and phones being made with the fewest number of chips possible, meaning more basic functionality, lower resolutions and refresh rates, older versions of Wi-Fi and less responsive performance in general from most devices on the market would likely be the order Of the day, if you don’t want to deal with this extreme version of paying more for Less you’d have to hope your current devices are high-end enough to last, until tsmc could get back up and running, but how would the world try to recover? In the meantime, we’ll tell you right after we thank ODU for sponsoring today’s video to car, for your your own space in the digital world. Without a website is madness with ODU you can design and get your very own website up and running in no time at all, thanks to their intuitive codefree, drag and drop elements, and if you find yourself experiencing some writer block odu’s AI copywriter is there to help You out, oh, and did we mention that it’s free, that’s right and you can get unlimited hosting and a fully paid custom Dona name for the first year visit the link below and start building your very own website with Odo. Of course, if tsmc went away, there are are other chip Fabs.
That would try to fill the void, but they don’t have the capacity that tsmc does, especially for Leading Edge Products. Much more strain would be put on firms like Intel, Global, foundaries and lesser known companies. Like Tower semiconductor, along with other companies like Tokyo, electron and ASM, which make equipment important for chipm that they then sell to Fabs, all this pressure means that there wouldn’t be a whole lot of innovation for a while. You know how Intel does that thing where every year they talk about how their upcoming chip lineup is faster, consumes less power.
Well, instead of that, all their efforts would be going into just cranking out as many chips as possible on existing process nodes, so it would be very difficult to upgrade. Even if you had the cash, the problem would be exacerbated even further, as some companies AMD being one of them are very reliant on tsmc to produce their chips to the point where their designs assume they’ll have access to tsmc manufacturing. This means upcoming designs would instead get abandoned for the time being, and AMD would have to try and adapt anything still in development for foundries, like Samsung or even Intel ironic, if you know Computing history, this kind of situation would probably last for 6 years or so Until tsmc could be rebuilt and in the meantime there would be obvious geopolitical consequences, as tsmc is a crucial source of chips for NATO, member states and NATO alligned countries. Maintaining a sufficient chip Supply would suddenly become a major national security issue for those Nations, meaning you might see nationalization or at least closer government Direction Over chip Fabs within some country’s borders.
Of course, the assumption is that the most likely way this would happen is due to a Chinese attack on Taiwan. But there’s a high possibility that such an attack would result in the most costly war in human history and that China would be cut off from nearly all Global Financial markets as a result. So do we really have to worry about tsmc going up in Flames tomorrow? Most likely not, but no one would blame you if you squirreled away a latest gen high performance Ultra Book fresh in the Box to go in your doomsday stockpile of canned lima beans, thanks for watching guys, if you like this video, you might like the one where We covered this dude who built his own graphics card at home, very cool .