Comment by nicoburns
9 days ago
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?
The supply chains for high-end chips are brittle enough that it's a very real possibility we end up with a severe supply crunch such that neither clouds nor individual users can access new chips at anything approaching reasonable prices.
TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decides to invade Taiwan, that would likely mean ~60% of CPU and GPU manufacturing capacity permanently destroyed at once. That would be "iPhones are no longer for sale this year, and PCs now cost $5000 if you're lucky enough to get ahold of one" kind of territory.
> TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decides to invade Taiwan, that would likely mean ~60% of CPU and GPU manufacturing capacity permanently destroyed at once.
While it would certainly be devastating, do note that TSMC has fabs in places that aren't Taiwan. So their entire production wouldn't immediately go offline, and presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories.
If China suddenly decides it doesn't want to export electronics, though, then we're all super fucked. After all, what percentage of those TSMC chips flow through China to get mounted onto PCBs or need major supporting components from one of the "Foxconn Cities" in China?
> presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories
There are rumours from seemingly credible sources that Taiwan has the TSMC factories (at least the ones located in Taiwan) rigged with explosives that they intend to trigger in case of invasion by China (as a disincentive against China invading). So China may well not have any say in the matter.
Why would Taiwan destroying its own assets disincentivize annexation goals that have existed long before computer chips were produced there?
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> presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories
It has been hinted by people who might know something that Taiwan has rigged their factories to explode if China invades to ensure China can't get a hold of those factories. I'm not sure if it is true, but it wouldn't be hard to do (the hard part is ensuring the explosives don't go off for other reasons)
ASML can also disable much of the equipment remotely, from Europe. So even if the buildings aren't actually bombed (they likely would be though), someone presses a button a few thousand miles away and most of it gets bricked anyway.
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Not to mention the number of random individuals, with enough access, who might want to sabotage them in those circumstances. And fuck knows what the Trump administration decides to bomb. And the general fog of war. And how delicate everything is.
These supply chains have very non-linear responses. Relatively small fluctuations in demand can have enormous effects on prices and leadtimes.
It's a one-way journey, unless we can adapt quickly enough to a drastic reduction in the general availability of compute power. IMO, our reliance on bloated tech is an existential risk, and reverting to some reasonable baseline needs addressing as urgently as any other current crisis.
I have been waiting for quite some time for some sort of reckoning with our glut for compute resources, but for years I had optimistically assumed this would be due to physical constraints rather than artificial socioeconomic ones. Now is the most advantageous time to be a retrocomputing enthusiast as the definition of "retrocomputing" may seek to expand to engulf the whole category of home computing.
Destroyed? It's far more likely that China will find a diplomatic solution to prevent sabotage of the foundries. Supply capacity will collapse for the US, but only because it will blanket ban imports of TSMC-made products, i.e. a self-imposed supply shock.
I sometimes wonder if this is the real reason for the AI bubble. Major cloud providers are trying to front-load their computing purchases in case geopolitical trouble makes it impossible to get computers. At cloud scale, that's billions of dollars in new investment. So they kick off a new computing paradigm, hype it up, and now their cost of capital for this new investment is significantly lower because they can sell it as getting a piece of future revenues. Basically just a way to make shareholders pay for geopolitical hedging.