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
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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