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
Copyright and patent laws
If Nvidia suspects that someone is stealing their intellectual property they can buy one of those chips and look at it under a microscope and very quickly prove it was stolen.
Similarly TSMC aren’t idiots, if you submit a design drawing to them that’s a copy of what another company has already submitted to them they’ll notice and tell Nvidia or whoever. They have a vested interest in maintaining business with companies like Nvidia, so they work with them to stop this sort of thing.
This is however a potentially major problem with China, as the Chinese are notorious for IP theft and you can’t stop them with traditional legal cases. China also can’t manufacture chips of this grade on-shore yet, but they will in time.
Right now the Chinese are careful about this because they want Western companies to invest in China but in time they can easily turn this around and start making Chinese knock-offs of chips to sell to the 3rd world for cheaper and there’s nothing the west can do about it short of war.
The pandemic caused the Chinese and the US to both finally realize the dangers of TSMC having a monopoly on chip manufacturing. Particularly the effect this could have on the supply chain during a war. So both are investing in their own domestic chip manufacturing.
There’s also a knock-on effect that neither side can afford to give the other a chance to put backdoors into the chips that could be used to spy or shutdown systems during a conflict.
This is partly the reason why the US has started restrict the sale of top-end Nvidia chips to China because they want to stall the Chinese development of AI tools.
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