The Republic of China will not allow a foreign business to acquire TSMC.
Furthermore, the United States government is pumping billions of dollars into domestic semiconductor manufacturing. If Apple wants a fab, they'll build one stateside, and they'll get Uncle Sam to pay for it.
But as has been seen by market realities of the last 15 years, affordable silicon manufacturing has been driven by massive scale across all market segments, not vertical integration. To the contrary, the most vertically integrated silicon manufacturers are the ones with the slower, hotter, and more expensive products. Acquiring a fab just for Apple products would probably not make better chips cheaper.
TSMC is literally Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, and I doubt the other leading edge fab clients like Nvidia & AMD would appreciate Apple owning TSMC.
If anything, this business is too capital intensive for Apple to want to hold a foundry. Why lock yourself into one companies fabs like Intel did when you can pick between TSMC, Samsung, Intel and any other fabs that are competitive at the time?
AMD split off their foundry side. Intel is using Samsung's foundries more and more. Vertical integration does not make sense given the increasing cost of new fabrication nodes.
"the Republic of China" is the official name of the nation that governs the island of Taiwan, I was trying to be a bit facetious. I wanted to say there's no way in hell that the government that continuously faces an existential threat from the communist rulers of mainland China will let go of the single most important business to their national security. Particularly a foreign business that has cozy ties to the Chinese Communist Party and is willing to kowtow to their leadership to access their labor and markets.
Cringley continues to be wrong in so many cases I dont even know where to start. And It is clear he has little to no understanding of how semiconductor industry works.
I am not sure what his motives are.
And worst of all, vast majority of the comments under the article agrees with him.
Every single day I am thinking, with or without Social Media, the Internet hasn't make more of the general public informed, which was one of its original intent and purposes, but the opposite. And in fact as I get older, it seems most of the world is very counterintuitive.
> the Internet hasn't make more of the general public informed
Well said, it was not better in the 'old days' but its also not better today. The Internet reminds me always at that scene in 7 (the movie) when he goes into the library and the watchman's are playing card.
I don't buy it. TSMC is a lot bigger than Apple's hardware business. Even if TSMC was on the market (which I doubt it is), Apple's needs aren't sufficient to keep an entire semiconductor fab afloat. Owning TSMC would mean that Apple would have to take orders from other clients, which really isn't the sort of thing Apple likes to do.
Yea people said Apple would buy a display company, or many other companies, but they tend not to be interested in buying these manufacturing focused companies. It’s not high enough up on the value chain for them. Manufacturers also have exposure to lots of negative things like how workers are treated or pollution and things like that. It paints a target on their back that they don’t want.
Apple would buy GF long before they ever get the chance to buy TSMC (which I'm sure they would do if they could).
GF has a decent 14/12nm node and they've basically said they have given up going smaller. That slashes their long term projections and valuation.
Apple comes in with a decent, but not great, offer while GF is still getting orders for their mature process. Then Apple does what only it can do, spend billions without blinking. Apple take 5 years to refine a 4nm node while using TSMC in the interim. R&D costs are offset with (1) whatever customers GF has, (2) building whatever it can on GF's 12nm node.
The whole idea of using TSMC is being able to switch to someone else if they drop the ball. Apple has never been interested in buying commodity manufacturing, or they woukdhave bought Foxconn.
Furthermore, the United States government is pumping billions of dollars into domestic semiconductor manufacturing. If Apple wants a fab, they'll build one stateside, and they'll get Uncle Sam to pay for it.
But as has been seen by market realities of the last 15 years, affordable silicon manufacturing has been driven by massive scale across all market segments, not vertical integration. To the contrary, the most vertically integrated silicon manufacturers are the ones with the slower, hotter, and more expensive products. Acquiring a fab just for Apple products would probably not make better chips cheaper.