Taiwan DRAM maker Nanya Tech plans to build new 12-inch wafer fabs in Yunlin and Pingtung, Taiwan for DRAM and customized DRAM, media report. -The Yunlin fab will focus on sub-10nm process node products for AI. -Nanya’s latest project, the NT$300 billion Linkou 5A DRAM fab, due for mass production in 2028 -Media quote a Nanya executive confirming plans for additional new fabs, but declining to comment where. $AMAT $ASML $LRCX $KLAC $TOELY #semiconductors#

🛑 Dongsha Water Cannon 🛑 Taiwan’s Coast Guard just put a water cannon on a Chinese fishing boat that would not leave Dongsha. Thursday around 11 a.m., the Dongsha-Nansha branch picked up an unidentified boat about 15.5 nautical miles northeast of Dongsha Island, roughly 5.5 miles inside prohibited waters. The 4,000-ton patrol ship Yunlin went out. By about 3 p.m. it found two Chinese boats, Yue Hui Dong Yu 75066 and Jin Sha, anchored and fishing about 27 nautical miles east of the island, about 8 miles inside restricted waters. Yue Hui Dong Yu weighed anchor and left. Jin Sha did not. Three radio warnings failed, so Yunlin fired the water cannon for 30 seconds from about 200 meters. Still nothing. The ship closed in and sprayed the wheelhouse for 90 seconds, keeping the stream off the crew on deck, which is the Coast Guard’s low-lethal playbook. Jin Sha finally moved, then lost power on the way out. Yunlin stayed with the boat, handed over 35 hot meals when the crew asked, towed it clear of restricted waters overnight, and around 6:15 a.m. Friday passed it to the Chinese work vessel Haiyang Shiyou 681. Dongsha sits about 450 kilometers southwest of Kaohsiung with roughly 300 Coast Guard personnel on station. Through August this year, local reporting put Chinese fishing-boat expulsions at 411. Beijing keeps sending boats into waters Taipei controls, then acts shocked when the cannon comes out.

Yanliang Miao is right that it would be a mistake to assume that China’s economy is running out of steam simply because property and infrastructure investment are weakening. But I disagree with his suggestion that China can largely replace the old investment-driven growth model with a technology-driven one as it rebalances toward domestic demand. The problem is that China’s extraordinary technological competitiveness is itself mostly a consequence of the imbalances that created the old model. China’s challenge, in other words, is not simply to find new engines of growth by continuing to fund technological progress in the same way it has in the past. It is to develop new engines of growth even as surging debt and growing international tensions force it to reverse the very conditions that created its past technological progress – excessively high investment and excessively low consumption. This was the same challenge the USSR faced in the 1960s and Japan in the 1980s, and neither was able to do so. Their failure was not an accident. As with China today, it was precisely their highly unbalanced economies that funded their spectacular technological advances until debt capacity limits forced a reversal. That’s the problem. Until it figures out how to maintain technological progress while dramatically restructuring the conditions that created it in the past, Beijing will continue to try to “solve” the supply-side “problem” China doesn’t have while worsening the real constraint on its economy, its unbalanced demand.