I've been looking at Huawei gear, Samsung memory as well and its getting a bit scary about how far USA is behind Asian countries in high tech. Meanwhile all undergrads understand FANG companies pay best, it seems crazy.
TSMC and Samsung are based in Taiwan and South Korea, both strong allies of the US. There was a recent FT article on how the real risk is actually their proximity to China and the potential of China taking military action against factories in Taiwan. TSMC is eyeing a factory in Arizona, so there is that, and honestly, Intel isn't that far behind.
Not only military action. China can simply offer the engineers extremely generous offers and invite the talent to them. From what I read in a few places this is what they are doing.
I live in Taiwan and know many engineers who work in Science park (Foxconn, Tsmc, etc.) It is not at all uncommon for Taiwanese engineers looking to work in China because they pay more, but they really don’t want to do that if given a choice. Lots of people work in China for three or four months and return to Taiwan for a two week rest. Taiwan just doesn’t pay very well for engineers and takes advantage of them being citizens of this country.
These same engineers looking to go would rather relocate to Germany or the US than China. Either way there is a serious brain drain going on here where the brightest want to leave. Taiwan is a wonderful place but I question its stability over the next few decades.
It is quite sad how every developed country in the world is practically giving away their advantages to China. All because of short-sighted economics and political incompetence.
Chips are manufactured using equipment that is not made in Taiwan or China. It's primarily made in the USA, Japan and Europe. That same equipment is available to Intel.
In the last 12 months, Intel's net profit was $21,000,000,000.
I don't work for Intel so I don't know, but I'd wager that any chip node that TSMC can produce, Intel can produce as well. Intel has access to the same equipment and plenty of profit to work with. They either choose not to, or, they simply choose not to advertise the capability.
For TSMC, as a foundry, their manufacturing capability is a selling point. For Intel, it is a strategic advantage. It makes sense for TSMC to announce what node they are capable of. It does not make sense for Intel to do so. Intel sells chips based on the chips' capabilities. Not on Intel's manufacturing capabilities.
> Interestingly, however, Intel's CFO has previously admitted that 10nm yields aren't great and will actually be lower in profitability than their older 22nm process
Perhaps, but bringing up a fab production line is (massiveley) expensive. It could just as easily be a business decision to outsource the GPU production to TSMC for the time being, or indefinitely, depending on anticipated volumes.
I'm looking for more than assumptions and inference based on public information. Sure, Intel might not have the capability to build at 5nm even if they wanted to, but a lack of public evidence that they are building at that node does not mean they can't.
> its getting a bit scary about how far USA is behind Asian countries in high tech
Yeah right.
Cambodia, North Korea, Myanmar, Mongolia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, Laos, Thailand, Nepal, Russia, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan
Which of those are leading the world in "high tech"?
China's only consequential tech company is Huawei. South Korea has Samsung, SK and LG. Taiwan has TSMC, Pegatron, Quanta. Japan has Sony, Nintendo, Canon, Hitachi, Panasonic and one or two others that are relevant.
It's amazing how far ahead the US remains after so many decades.
That's a partial list of large US tech companies. Asia has nothing like it, and that's before getting into the vast number of US software & cloud services companies (Workday, ServiceNow, Splunk, Twilio, Cloudflare, Datadog, Palo Alto Networks, Akamai, etc.), of which Asia has no comparable list.
Besides that, Asia isn't a country, it's silly to pretend they're somehow one unit. They're all competitors. It's equivalent to pretending Europe or Latin America operate as combinations.
Show me the Asia equivalent of AWS (Alibaba's 1/5th size clone?). The world lags embarrassingly, the US has a ten year lead in cloud services.
Tencent is a gaming & entertainment company. Baidu is a languishing search company that never got outside of China. Alibaba is an advertising platform that does nothing special. ByteDance is mostly social media, there's nothing special about that either (see: FB, Twitter, Snap, Pinterest, etc).
China is the only individual country that comes close to competing with the US in tech and they're still well behind in most tech segments and surpass the US in none other than digital payments.
> Japan has Sony, Nintendo, Canon, Hitachi, Panasonic and one or two others that are relevant.
Add Nikon to the list, especially in the context of chip fabbing (They and Canon are one of the few companies that make fab equipment not necessarily of the same caliber as ASML, but similar vein.).
