Oh boy, it sure was a good idea to rely on one company, with facilities located in just one country, for almost all production of an essential component that basically all modern technology needs in order to work.
Imagine a really bad quake… Everything has to be realigned. Their perfectly manometer aligned tech suddenly moves 3 inches in all directions, so it must be re-alighned before it can continue making good chips. Even today will have an effect on prices, but imagine a week or a month of no chip making!
i think on the richter scale an earthquake of this size moves everything like 12+ feet.
Yeah of course they are, Taiwan gets hit by earthquakes like this regularly.
Well, here’s an excuse to raise the price of chips just like the bird flu for eggs, even though egg production wasn’t affected.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Bloomberg reports that the company is still “examining impact” to its operations, but it “expects to resume production overnight.”
The quake’s epicenter was on Taiwain’s east coast and has prompted tsunami warnings in Japan, China, and the Philippines, according to The New York Times.
Bloomberg reports that the quake also paused manufacturing at United Microelectronics Corp., which makes some chips for AMD, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Realtek, Rockchip, and other companies with a large footprint in smartphones, wireless communications, and cars.
TSMC is currently responsible for the vast majority of high-end chipmaking at this point, with a hand in manufacturing essentially every single current-generation CPU, GPU, and SoC for Nvidia, Apple, and AMD.
Intel is manufacturing its Arc GPUs and major parts of its newest Meteor Lake CPUs at TSMC, even as the company tries to convince third-party fabless chip designers to use its factories.
A disruption at TSMC could affect everything from PCs and workstations to smartphones to AI servers, to say nothing of the universe of smart gadgets that use lower-end, less-glamorous processors and microcontrollers.
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