TSMC

“The other thing to highlight under here that was seemingly monumental was TSMC actually starting to produce chips here in America.”

“China is actively working to catch up in chip fabrication with SMIC and SME. So they have their own TSMC, they have their own NVIDIA, and they have their own ASML.”

“Huawei was able to manufacture an enormous amount of chips at TSMC by basically creating a shell company, TSMC you know, deciding to look the other way about some Chinese firm manufacturing all these AI chips, and then the US government catching them and be li…”

“We need to reshore semis, but I think the way you reshore semis is not randomly tariffing stuff and then providing exemptions when you have a lobbyist that is convincing enough to go to the White House. I thought we were supposed to be opposed to that, but I g…”

“They're more pot committed than almost any other company in the world. And they don't really have an out for this. So they're gonna do everything they can to, you know, make make Arizona work and make the relationship with this administration in this country m…”

“Particularly like the teams, the TSMC plant in Arizona, nobody knows where the water for that's going to come from.”

“Apple has enough of a relationship with TSMC that they could go and do kind of like, ah, you know, the A three, the A, or the, ah, the Apple Silicon, you know, the M two chip, the M three chip, like the M four chip, they could do a different run with TSMC that…”

“Intel will have to be aggressive on pricing if they want to compete because they are not competitive on the actual cost of the wafer, and so they would need lower margins if they want to compete”

“Now, the problem is that Intel is still more expensive than TSMC on a normalized per wafer basis.”

“I don't think the government's equipped to make the decision on how they should position against TSMC, where they fit in Apple Silicon versus TPU versus Tranium. Like, it just doesn't seem like government's set up to actually run this company more effectively …”

“ASML, the Dutch company, they did what's called a customer co-investment program. Where Intel, TSMC, and Samsung pitched in 6.8 billion dollars across R&D funding and equity purchases in the company in order to help pull in order to help ASML. This is 2012.”

“So no mentions of Stratechery, no mentions of Dwarkesh, no mentions of TSMC, Abilene, Amade, TPU.”

“There was also no there were no mentions of AI keywords. Like, if Skynet's really waking up, are they not thinking about Dario Amade? Yeah, so no mentions of Stratechery, no mentions of Dwarkesh, no mentions of TSMC, Abilene, Amadei, TPU.”

“I'm bullish on robots, like super bullish on robots, but only for like, not for tasks that have like, TSMC's Arizona fabs, or okay, let's say TSMC Tynon, which I think produces like, you know, indirectly hundreds of billions of dollars of global GDP, even dire…”

“The baton got passed from semiconductor shortages in 23 to power and data centers in 24, 25. 26, we're still, we're swinging the pendulum, but it will fully beat semiconductors again in 27, right?”

“What happens if we get super powerful AI and China doesn't? What are they going to do? The optimal thing would be to just bomb TSMC out of existence, because suddenly that becomes optimal, even with all the costs that that does, and then what?”

“I think it is a safer equilibrium To have China dependent on Taiwan than to try to cut them off from Taiwan while we are dependent on Taiwan. Taiwan is 70 miles off the coast of China. It's not an ideal position in the world for us to have a dependency on it a…”

“TSMC is planning ahead, working on a fab complex in Arizona, which Tyler visited. Should be able to handle 30% of total advanced truck production at scale, but it's on a knife's edge.”

“TerraFab, I'm not that optimistic. I mean, it's so hard to do with that. Because TSMC is so short that, you know, Elon needs to find, but even then, like, how are they going to buy, like, semi-cap equipment from ESML and AMAT? Like, there, there's just no capa…”

“NVIDIA is in the driver's seat because Jensen goes there five, six times a year and he has best friends at TSMC and speaks at their employee day. So they're going to get higher. They are getting a higher allocation to wafers and all that stuff.”

“They're spending a lot more money, and pledged to invest an additional hundred billion in the U.S.”

“Over the next year or two, you're going to see NVIDIA able to add tons of revenue because they were able to lock up all the supply components.”