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Bloomberg: ASML and TSMC Can Disable Chip Machines If China Invades Taiwan
It's unclear how irreversably they can remotely disable the machines, but they are by all accounts extremely delicate (as expected for something operating on a nanometer scale) so it's possible they would be difficult or impossible to repair. Spare parts for the machines, like the machines themselves, are only manufactured in the Netherlands.
They would also be trivial to destroy for those on-site of course - I saw a suggestion that spraying them with a powder fire-extinguisher would do it, as would a bit of smashing stuff with a heavy object. Even if Taiwan gives up without a fight, and TSMC doesn't decide to destroy them, and ASML in the Netherlands can't or won't do it remotely, and the U.S. decides not to do it openly, and none of the TSMC employees decide to do it on their own, U.S. intelligence might have at least one TSMC employee ready with a plan on how best to destroy them before fleeing. And even undamaged they require the expertise of TSMC employees who might flee the country, and a whole supply chain reliant on various western countries.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying that Chinese are generally pragmatic people who wouldn't cause billions of $ of damage, for what? To spite other Chinese, on behalf of a foreign country that doesn't give a fuck about them because they're 'functionally' whites ?
ASML is Dutch, not Chinese. Though I guess if TSMC higher-ups were sufficiently dedicated to protecting the machinery in case of invasion (contrary to their public statements) they might decide to cut them off from the internet before ASML decides to trigger the remote killswitch.
If a minority of people are capable of doing something, "generally" isn't good enough to ensure it doesn't happen. We're talking equipment so delicate that 1 TSMC employee with physical access could do hundreds of millions of dollars of damages in a matter of seconds, and many billions in a matter of minutes. If one or more employees flip out and the reason the others don't is because of "pragmatism", are they willing to get hit by a fire-extinguisher for the sake of limiting the damage? There's presumably also plenty of stuff they could do more covertly by messing with configurations.
Even without anyone deciding to do it organically, given the known geopolitical importance the U.S. could easily be paying a couple TSMC employees in case of such an eventuality. Or some random guys who live in the area and have guns stashed away. I remember when the invasion of Ukraine started Russia had people planting devices that shot green lasers at the sky to help with targeting. It doesn't seem like a stretch that even if the U.S. was completely unwilling to confront China openly, it could easily destroy the fabs covertly and blame Taiwanese patriots deciding to do it on their own. The Nord Stream pipelines weren't even being used and they still got sabotaged.
Even completely intact equipment is reliant on a complicated supply chain scattered across western countries that would be near-impossible to replicate in case of sanctions. The machines themselves and their spare parts from the Netherlands, ultra-pure quartz that is nearly all from Spruce Pine, North Carolina, etc.
I know. But ASML is prevented from doing business with Chinese on order of the US.
Chinese people aren't stupid, I presume they're very tightly keeping people to the stuff they know because if you're dealing with a highly delicate process you don't want anyone poking without asking. It's also a military-style management culture.
Yeah, and how do these employees expect to ..leave Taiwan to collect their bribe for betraying the rest of the company?
Yeah, sure. You can work around these things, Chinese are doing it since they were cut off from western suppliers. And guess what - people can reverse engineer and learn to make do. It gave a big boost to Chinese chip industry startups. Which, in many cases, have TSMC veterans working in them, because it's easier to fly high in a new company.
see this interview: https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/huawei-and-the-us-china-chip-war-44/transcript
Chinese have a higher supply of STEM grads of the appropriate intellectual level than the entire West, so 'catching up' for them is only a matter of will and investment. I mean, they'd even without the spying.
Getting a single individual out of a war zone by calling them embassy staff seems doable. You’d need to find an employee with risk tolerance, but on the scale of TSMC there’s probably at least a few.
I share your assessment that China can eventually find a way to make the equipment work.
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And, most critically, time. EUV took decades to get to the state where it could barely be called working. Remember the mythical man-month? China's supply of STEM grads is sufficient to undertake nation-state scientific giga projects, yes, but they will be rediscovering the required physics and engineering for years. And until they figure it out, they're stuck at quad-patterning DUV yields (which aren't great below 14nm), or even worse yields on even more multipatterning. And that means more subsidies the government has to pay to top chip manufacturers to produce otherwise unprofitable chips. I know you linked to a guy who says they got the yields up above 50% and they can probably improve it, and that this could be profitable if their devices sold for comparable prices to next-gen TSMC tech, but this comes at considerable cost to power efficiency, places intense demands on the fab to customize process to fit design issues, and sucks money and time away from longer-term research to pivot away from DUV. They would spend the next ten years on the same trajectory as Intel 14nm, where they keep squeezing minor miracles out of the chip design in exchange for increasing power consumption and overspecialization. They'd keep getting tiny improvements, for years; meanwhile, Western EUV will also be improving, yields will also be slowly catching up, and costs will start falling off as the EUV nodes mature (look at TSMC wafer prices for 7nm at start vs today). The whole reason the major players are transitioning to EUV now is because they all recognize that, long-term, the future of DUV is unsustainable, and EUV is going to be less costly. Chinese fabs also know this. If China manages to stay competitive against EUV, they will be required to pay dearly for it. Lay-journo interpretations notwithstanding, this is, and has always been, the aim of sanctions - to penalize and slow access to cutting-edge technology.
I suspect that an invasion of Taiwan in which the outcome appears dire would result in the EUV machines being rendered into indistinguishable welded slag and scraps, at least in the molten tin UV source. Several hundred billion dollars and decades of research and development is tied up in the design and manufacturing of these machines. The critical trade secrets are going to be unrecognizably destroyed. If TSMC doesn't destroy their machinery, and ASML can't, the US will, covertly if possible, overtly if unavoidable. China will eventually get access to domestic EUV with enough will and investment; but without intact examples of working EUV machines to study, they're stuck on the long, slow grind of figuring it out themselves. How many years of progress will be made in western chip fabrication while the Chinese are busy re-solving EUV?
They do industrial espionage, they're very rich and can pay people who developed these processes for ASML, TSMC and so on more than they would get paid in the West.
Yeah, and imagine if they didn't manage to get these great chips, just built some more nuclear power and bigger datacenters? What then? I mean, assuming starting fake companies in the neutral countries and straw purchasing Yankee Haram compute that way wasn't an option.
In spite of their best efforts, they still have no domestic EUV industry to speak of. Contrast with the domestic advanced semiconductor industry they do have. Clearly one of these is harder to replicate than the other.
They do pay well, provided you don't mind living in a country where the government can and will disappear or execute you for wrongthink, regardless of your station or importance to the technology roadmap. Many such cases!
Again, no one can stop them with sufficient motivation and willpower. But it can certainly be made to take a while and cost a boatload. As HPC systems get bigger, there are topological and latency challenges that compound on each other. And they will have to keep getting bigger, slower, and less efficient to keep up with the pace of innovation in equivalent western systems. It's not an insurmountable obstacle, but it costs resources and time. ETA: More power also means more cooling required. More power density in less efficient devices places huge demands on cooling, or forces more lateral scaling, which also compounds the problems above.
I'm assuming that the big concern with high-volume Chinese HPC is them achieving AI dominance and outpacing western innovation long-term - correct me if I'm wrong. I think, for very large AI, the software, and particularly the training techniques, have orders of magnitude of improvements awaiting discovery and implementation. This could go either way, western or Chinese advantage, with the understanding that Chinese industrial espionage is highly effective at extracting and implementing mathematical innovations in software, substantially moreso than hardware. I think it's more likely that the high costs of hardware force China to be parsimonious with their compute resources and ultra-efficient with their software craftsmanship, than that they just steamroll through the obstacles and disregard the expense.
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