🏛️ Taiwan's US protection expires as fabs onshore — TSMC carries the risk

“And I think underneath that, if I had to guess what he's trying to say about Taiwan indirectly, through his sale of TSMC is the odds are that we are not going to get into a land war over there, which means that that asset and its equity value is in danger and I don't want to own it. And I think that that's a very clinical summation of his rational action.”

“Well, it's not about being independent. It's how much longer will Taiwan have what they believe to be de facto protection from the United States. And I was told by one very influential Taiwanese family that they believe when the fifth chip fab comes online in Arizona, which I think is scheduled for 25 or 26, they intended to have most of their family members out of Taiwan at that period in time. Now, I think most Taiwanese don't envision this being, you know, a violent invasion of Taiwan. It's more of a take under in the same way that Hong Kong was.”

“On Taiwan, there's an election next year. And it looks like right now that the pro-China party might actually take power. Right now, the party that's in power is more of a pro-Western party. And the reason, I think, is that the Taiwanese are looking at what's going on in Ukraine and they're looking at the corpses of the Ukrainian youth pile up. And they're thinking maybe it's not such a great idea to be an American proxy state.”

“the issue with the Chibs Act is that there's a lot of good reasons to believe that even if we incentivize this, we're still hopelessly behind. And the chip fabs that we're building are just, they're still years behind what they have in Taiwan, for example. So it's not clear it's going to work, is my point.”