As Taiwan recovers from a deadly 7.2 magnitude earthquake, the figurative aftershocks may be felt as far away as Silicon Valley.
Taiwan’s biggest earthquake in 25 years killed nine and injured more than 1000.deadly 7.2 magnitude earthquake
, the figurative aftershocks may be felt as far away as Silicon Valley. As the producer of almost all the world’s most advanced microchips, the East Asian island nation plays an outsized role in providing the brains for everything from computers to cars to the latest AI – and any interruption could be damaging.
Here’s what you need to know about the quake’s implications for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing , why it matters, and how it’s connected to ongoing tensions with China.Almost all of the other major semiconductor companies in the world are “fabless”, meaning they design the chips but send the schematics to an external manufacturer to have them made. This includes Nvidia, Apple, AMD and Qualcomm.
With the boom in AI requiring more and more powerful chips, and continued demand for smartphones and other processor-intensive hardware, TSMC is already struggling to scale fast enough to meet demand. It is opening up new fabs in Japan, Germany and the US, but they won’t be pushing out chips to their full capacity until 2028 at the earliest.The company has reportedly evacuated some of its facilities out of an abundance of caution, but has said some workers are already returning.
Nvidia, the US chip company leading the design of chips for graphics processing and AI, has said it does not expect any interruption in supply as the result of an earthquake. However, the event has underscored how vulnerable the company would be should anything happen to Taiwan.Earthquake aside, the prospect keeping chip-designers up at night is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
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