Taiwan bucks world trend to be No. 1 in semiconductor equipment spending

[baybal2]

New backend house company opening, TSMC fab 18 and upgrades at few minor fabbers.

If you take fab 18 and ardentec away, you will see that Taiwan did not reverse the trend, and semi spend keeps going down industry wide for 4th year straight.

[StudentStuff]

Newer nodes are hellishly expensive to develop, ballooning in cost over previous nodes. Global Foundries and most others are not working on more advanced nodes than 14nm, leaving just TSMC & Samsung with 7nm fabs. Intel has 10nm kinda crappily working, turning out low end chips that are mostly dead silicon (due to process issues).

We're definitely hitting a silicon bottleneck, the physical barriers are very real, and exceedingly costly to attempt to work around. AMD's strategy of using 14nm chiplets for components that don't scale down well (eg: analog interfaces, DRAM, etc) is likely to become much more common.

[culturestate]

Not to mention that semiconductor manufacturing (among other advanced mfg verticals) is such an integral part of Taiwan’s economic strategy at this point that it would be shocking if they weren’t making heavy investments, global trends be damned.

[emmelaich]

aside: Taipei Times please get a tls site.

[lallysingh]

This may have something to do to with making sure mainland doesn't block them.

[ShinTakuya]

Saying that is like saying America overtaking Britain was no big deal.

[gridlockd]

No, from South Korea to Taiwan. Mainland China is still #3.

[adamzhou]

TSMC is selling chips to Huawei under war pressure of the Chinese government. TSMC should stop the supply.

[adinobro]

I'm just curious why you think a Taiwanese company should stop selling to a Chinese company based on statement/policy of a foreign country?

It is obviously in their best financial interest to sell to Huawei. Why should they stop?

[chvid]

Mainland China is by far Taiwan's biggest trading partner. If you were TSMC or the Taiwan government - why would you risk that relationship?

[chvid]

Taiwan's chip industry is an obvious winner in USA's trade war against China.