if nVdia doesn’t manufacture their own chips and sends their design document to tsmc, what’s stopping foreign actors to steal those documents and create their custom version of same design document and get that manufactured at other fab companies?

Question

if nVdia doesn’t manufacture their own chips and sends their design document to tsmc, what’s stopping foreign actors to steal those documents and create their custom version of same design document and get that manufactured at other fab companies?

In: Technology

Answer 1

There *aren’t* other fab companies, is what.

TSMC has the most advanced fabrication machines in the world. That’s what makes them so valuable – nobody else can do what they do. There’s been work to change that so it’s not such a singular point of weakness/failure, but it’s still a very specialized type of machinery, and even the machines to build the machines are hard to come by.