[SlinkyOnStairs]

> It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out other players forever, especially in DRAM.

It's not dumping, it's the opposite.

Sam Altman's stunt has created massive amounts of fictitious demand (OpenAI isn't using those wafers it's ordering) and triggered massive panic-buying from everyone else.

Prices are arteficially high, this has turbocharged China's fab and R&D budgets as you observe.

> is about to pay off with some industry dominance soon.

They're not looking to dump the semiconductor markets. They're looking to invade Taiwan.

All this buildout in their semiconductor industry is to detach themselves from the western semiconductor industry that will either sanction them if they invade Taiwan, or in the case of TSMC, suffer major damage in the ensuing conflict.

That the collapse/destruction of the Taiwanese semiconductor and electronics industries will utterly ruin the western tech industry is somewhere between a happy coincidence and acceptable collateral damage to them. No dumping required.

[dontlaugh]

Why would they bother to invade Taiwan when they’re winning economically and diplomatically?

Public opinion in Taiwan is rapidly changing towards peaceful re-unification and no one anywhere on earth trust the US will help them with anything.

[PowerElectronix]

China economic numbers don't have a winning tune to the in the least. I don't think taiwan could ever be taken by force, but that doesn't matter as Xi Jinping seems to think it's doable and is taking steps towards it (developing landing ships, purging the military of oppsition and pacifists, building a fleet and bombers...)

It would be very surprising to me that taiwan people think a reunification is feasable while the CCP still exists, just see how things are going in HK to see what would be waiting taiwan if they reunite.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> Why would they bother to invade Taiwan when they’re winning economically and diplomatically?

They are hedging their bets. If Taiwan refuses to accept re-unification, China wants to have the option of a military annexation.

They have been planning this for quite a bit longer than the current US administration. They're not going to bank on Donald Trump forever, he's not getting any younger and healthier, and November 2028 is sooner with every passing day. A military conflict is not off the table, and so it is considered and prepared for.

[fc417fc802]

> utterly ruin

I realize Intel has done some serious ball dropping over the past two decades but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs, right? It's only luxury consumer electronics and the highest end corporate gear that use cutting edge nodes to begin with.

Disruption of the cutting edge would certainly wreak havoc on the pricing and specs of high end luxury electronics but that would hardly be the end of the world. I still use a desktop with DDR3 on a daily basis (granted the GPU is much newer with GDDR6) and my laptop is from the early era of DDR4 ...

[smw]

> but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs, right?

No they don't. Even the US partnerships with TSMC aren't cutting edge.

TSMC and arguably Samsung have cutting edge fabs, no one else.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> I realize Intel has done some serious ball dropping over the past two decades but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs, right?

We could squabble about the finer details of Intel's fab capabilities. They have advanced nodes, but it's irrelevant. They simply do not have the capacity to support the entire demand that is currently supplied by TSMC.

It is not just "high end luxury electronics" that have modern CPUs. It's every bloody server in the cloud. (Have a look at who makes and distributes the mainboards. Same story, substitute Intel for Supermicro.)

The economic impact on this field would be a disaster. Compute becomes much more expensive, SaaS prices will follow, and with that a massive drop in demand.

Not to mention you can kiss the entire AI industry goodbye if the price of GPUs spike.