“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.”