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submitted 6 hours ago by Beep@lemmus.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[-] xodasu@sh.itjust.works 31 points 6 hours ago

About time someone put serious money into advanced fabs outside Taiwan, this is a smart play by TSMC to chase AI demand and hedge geopolitical risk. 3nm in Kumamoto is a big vote of confidence for Japan and a signal that the industry sees AI chips as where the margins are.

That said, don't expect a flood of 3nm product overnight. Ramping 3nm in a brand new fab is brutally hard, yields take months if not years, and skilled fab workers and equipment are not plug-and-play. Bumping the budget to $17B and promising late 2027 is fine on paper, but the real work is the grind of volume ramp and supply chain readiness.

Also meh about the cheerleading from politicians. Sure, public support matters, but taxpayers deserve transparency on what they're subsidizing. Overall I'm cautiously optimistic, but staying realistic: this helps diversify capacity, but it's neither cheap nor quick.

[-] gens@programming.dev 10 points 6 hours ago

I thought fabs are bad agains earthquakes

[-] WereCat@lemmy.world 1 points 14 minutes ago

This one will be designed to work during earthquake. Meaning that it won’t work without earthquakes

[-] xep@discuss.online 6 points 3 hours ago

Is there anything that's good against earthquakes?

[-] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 32 minutes ago

Living in the sky

[-] TammyTobacco@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 hours ago
[-] frunch@lemmy.world 4 points 1 hour ago

Mr. Godzilla, i would like one RAM please 🙏

[-] TammyTobacco@sh.itjust.works 1 points 29 minutes ago

Godzilla blesses you with a large dose of radiation.

[-] photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 6 hours ago

They are. But Taiwan is prone to earthquakes as well and seem to handle them fine

[-] errer@lemmy.world 2 points 47 minutes ago

Those fabs in Taiwan, even though they look like plain boxes from the outside, are really a wonder of human ingenuity. Each machine that’s sensitive to quakes is on a vibration isolation pedestal and that pedestal is seismically braced, from what I’ve read.

Not to mention every building in Taiwan is laced with explosives in case China ever attacks…

[-] TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works -5 points 4 hours ago

How come another East Asian country? Why does literally no other country want to make microchips?

[-] chaogomu@lemmy.world 1 points 10 minutes ago

Another factor here is that to make the most advanced chips, you need something called eleven 9 silicon. That's silicon that's 99.999999999% pure.

We can only artificially manufacture up to nine 9 silicon.

Eleven 9 has to be mined, and there's only one spot in the world were it exists. A little town in North Carolina.

That's why the US gets to say who can even attempt to manufacture advanced chips.

[-] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 4 points 3 hours ago

Oh they want to... There are quite a few chip fabs around the world... there are very few that can manufacture at this size, along the bleeding edge of the numerous technologies necessary to do so.

Having the knowledge required to build the fab, the actual hardware required to manufacture them, and the skilled personnel to operate it all are hard to do. This is not something that you can toss together in a cave from scraps like Iron Man.

And a lot of that is by design with companies and governments trying to guarantee sovereignty by tightly controlling where these can be manufactured. The idea that enemies are less likely to try to take over/colonize a smaller country (like Taiwan) if the global chip manufacturing apparatus can be destroyed in minutes to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.

this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
143 points (99.3% liked)

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