TaipeiTaiwan’s chip fabs lie 180km from mainland China.
The island controls advanced semiconductor supply; any escalation is an immediate supply shock to global tech.
China and the US meet in Beijing this week; access to Taiwan’s foundries is the unresolved variable.
Sources: Rest of World
THE CONCENTRATION
A single company, TSMC, fabricates the overwhelming majority of the world's leading-edge logic chips — the silicon inside iPhones, Nvidia GPUs, F-35 avionics, and the servers training every frontier AI model. No comparable single-point dependency exists in any other strategic industry.
THE GEOGRAPHY
Taiwan's most advanced fabs cluster around Hsinchu and Tainan on the island's west coast — the side facing the mainland across the Taiwan Strait, which is roughly 130–180km wide at its narrowest. PLA Rocket Force ballistic missiles can range every fab in under ten minutes.
WHY IT CAN'T BE COPIED FAST
An EUV-equipped 3nm fab costs ~$20bn and takes 3–5 years to build, plus another year of yield ramp. Each ASML High-NA EUV machine costs $380m, weighs 150 tons, and ships in 13 freight containers. ASML produces only a few dozen a year, and TSMC takes most of them.
THE SILICON SHIELD
Taiwanese strategists have argued for two decades that TSMC itself deters invasion — destroying or capturing the fabs would crater the global economy the attacker depends on. Critics counter that the shield rusts as US-funded fabs in Arizona and Japan come online, diluting Taiwan's irreplaceability.
WHAT CHINA STILL CAN'T MAKE
SMIC, China's leading foundry, reached 7nm in 2023 using older DUV lithography — an impressive workaround, but yields are poor and the process can't scale to 5nm or below without EUV. The 2019 US-led ban on EUV exports to China is the single most consequential export control of the decade.
THE LEVERAGE LADDER
China's options short of invasion are graduated: customs inspections of Taiwan-flagged vessels, a quarantine of specific ports, a partial air-and-sea blockade, then full encirclement. Each rung disrupts chip exports more severely than the last — and each rung also raises the price the global economy pays to keep buying from Taiwan.