The political consensus that Taiwan’s concentration of advanced semiconductor production represents a strategic vulnerability has produced a global effort to disperse that production — or at least to replicate enough of it elsewhere that a Taiwan Strait crisis does not produce a complete collapse of advanced chip supply. TSMC is building fabs in Arizona, in Kumamoto and Hokkaido in Japan, and in Dresden, Germany. Intel is building in Ohio and Germany. Samsung is expanding in Texas. The CHIPS Act in the United States, the European Chips Act, and Japan’s semiconductor subsidy programs have collectively directed tens of billions of dollars at this dispersal objective. The effort is serious, expensive, and insufficient on the timescale that matters most.

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces the majority of the world’s most advanced logic chips. Its fabs in Hsinchu and Tainan manufacture the processors that go into every iPhone, every data center GPU, every advanced weapons guidance system, and most of the AI training infrastructure that has been built in the past three years. No other company operates at the frontier process nodes at anything close to TSMC’s volume. No other geography concentrates this much irreplaceable productive capacity in a single location. The decision by the global electronics industry to concentrate its most advanced semiconductor production on an island that a nuclear-armed neighbor claims as its own territory is the most significant strategic miscalculation of the early twenty-first century, and it has not been corrected.