What makes Taiwan so important in microchip production?
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There are basically factories in only 3 countries that can manufacture the highest end semiconductors in volume – Taiwan, S Korea and the USA. In fact there are only 3 companies in the world that can do this TSMC (Taiwan), Samsung (Korea) and Intel (USA)
Of the 3 companies, TSMC has the largest volume and specifically designs their factories to build chips for other chip design companies. So companies like AMD, NVIDIA etc etc are pretty much 100% dependent on TSMC Taiwan for the high end semiconductors.
That just happens to be how the industry developed since the 1980s. These factories require billions of dollars of investment and decades of ongoing process development and knowhow in order to run these factories. Therefore this capability is not easily developed by other companies.
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