Originally Posted by
Arcanum
For about a month. Maybe.
More than 50% of the world’s silicon chip supply comes from TSMC fabs in Taiwan. Assuming those fabs survive an invasion, China would have a stranglehold over the world chip market and the most advanced fabs in the world. It would take 2-3 years to replace a meaningful proportion of that lost fab capacity in the West.
How long do you think the western population is going to do without shiny new phones, TV’s, luxury cars, computers...? Not 2-3 years.
Global semiconductor capacity is about a quarter from Taiwan, although TSMC does have at least half the global production of the very latest chip technology. Korea has the other quarter of the capacity, the US about an eighth.
Is China going to take out Korea as well in your scenario?
Separately, semiconductor production facilities do not tolerate disruptions very well, just a simple power failure can knock out a couple of months of production. Physical damage translates to several times that.
So a Chinese invasion would kill those operations for quite a while.