“Taiwan won’t matter in 18 months” is what happens when software people mistake civilization for a SaaS product. It's one of the most clueless takes I've heard on this platform in months and that's saying something. Yes, America has semiconductor fabs. Mostly old ones. Really old. Taiwan has the fabs that matter: The ones that make every single chip for NVIDIA and Apple and every damn Android and iPhone on Earth and even most of the 1500 or so chips that go in your truck or car. Without TSMC these companies simply do not exist. Not kind of struggling. I mean "wiped off the freaking face of the Earth and unable to produce a single product" level gone. As in "worth zero instantly." Taiwan has: - Multiple leading-edge giga-fabs - The *overwhelming* majority of advanced AI chip production - Dominant advanced packaging capacity - Dense supplier clustering - Decades of accumulated yield/process knowledge and the most skilled workforce on Earth to run it all The US still barely has frontier-scale advanced packaging online. Much of it is literally still under construction and won’t ramp until years from now. Momos hear “we’re only 1–2 nanometers away” and think semiconductors are just transistor geometry. No freaking way. Sheer idiocy. The real moat is: - Yields - Packaging - HBM integration - Substrates - Tooling - Tacit manufacturing expertise - Workforce density - Supply chain coordination TSMC is not “a fab.” It is one of the most sophisticated industrial ecosystems ever created by humanity. And no, a tiny Neuralink surgery robot does not mean America can magically reproduce decades of semiconductor manufacturing concentration in 18 months. Reality is not a podcast episode. Taiwan remains strategically critical for years, likely a decade+. This is like saying: “We’re 18 months away from replacing the global oil system because we built a nice electric bike.”

The most revealing thing about this AI leadership paper is that it reads less like a vision for innovation and more like a glossy whitepaper for a 21st century East India Company. Every generation of incumbents discovers a new moral vocabulary for why they alone should control transformative technology. In the 90s it was cryptography. We were told strong encryption was too dangerous to spread because terrorists, rogue states, chaos, dual-use, etc. So the US crippled exports, weakened products, slowed adoption, and kneecapped parts of its own software industry. Right up until reality steamrolled the policy and we woke up to its stupidity and then eCommerce, secure communications, software signing, and the modern internet exploded and gave us tremendous benefits. Now the exact same priesthood has returned with AI. - “Dual-use.” - “Strategic advantage.” - “Model distillation.” - “National security.” - “Responsible access.” A few different nouns but mostly the same ones. Same instinct: Centralize control, gatekeep compute, fuse state and corporate power, and call it safety. The funniest part is that this strategy is almost perfectly designed to accelerate the thing they claim to fear. You do not stop a rival superpower (who happens to be the absolute best at scaling energy and manufacturing and who has a choke-hold on rare Earths refinement) from building domestic capability by permanently attempting to strangle them. You create the economic and political incentive for total self-sufficiency. We have already done that as Jensen warned. We went from 100% market to nearly 0%. Huawei is now manufacturing millions of chips. DeepSeek v4 trained on them. They have more energy than the rest of the world combined. Meanwhile, we have activists and anti-economic fools like AOC and Bernie pushing for data center moratoriums and we can't build a single bullet train in 20 years and folks fighting to not expand the energy grid here and new nuclear plants getting tied up in environmental regulation for a decade. The sanctions did the exact opposite of what the hawks wanted. They jumpstarted a moribund, dinosaur of a Chinese chips industry. We basically said to the people who happen control the most powerful manufacturing engine on the planet "we intend to squeeze you." They rightly saw it as an existential threat. The sanctions become the industrial policy. Huawei. SMIC. Domestic lithography. Packaging. Memory. Entire Chinese supply chains that did not exist at serious scale a decade ago now exist precisely because Washington convinced Beijing they had no choice. Brilliant work. So the endgame here is what exactly? 1) Push China into a Manhattan Project for chips and AI. 2) Increase the strategic value of Taiwan even further. 3) Once China reaches self sufficiency that can invade Taiwan and choke off our own super advanced chips where are made there exclusively (and no we don't have even close to enough TSMC factories in Arizona or anywhere else in the world). That's every NVIDIA chip. Every Google tensor chip. Every Apple chip. Every chip in you iPhone and Android phone. Every Amazon chip. The chips in your car and truck and hair dryer and washing machine. 4) Escalate a cold tech war into a permanent civilizational bloc conflict that is likely to turn into a shooting war at one point. 5) Fragment the global software ecosystem. 6) Create American AI aristocracies protected by regulation and compute licensing. And somehow call this “open innovation.” Meanwhile the actual history of software keeps screaming the opposite lesson: Knowledge diffuses, open ecosystems win, developers route around gatekeepers, and attempts to permanently contain computation usually fail. What really jumps off the page is the assumption that a tiny cluster of frontier labs should become quasi-sovereign actors, deciding who gets intelligence, who gets compute, who gets models, and which countries are permitted to participate in the future. Not elected governments. Not open markets. Not open-source communities. A handful of corporations sitting beside the national security state, insisting that concentration of power is necessary to protect democracy. You almost have to admire the audacity.