What is the most important company in the world? I think it's the Taiwan chipmaker TSMC because it manufactures 90% of the world's most advanced microchips and if they were to cease operations, or even if two or three of their largest factories were destroyed, there would be a worldwide depression. Warren Buffett has said " *TSMC is one of the best-managed companies and important companies in the world, there's no one in the chip industry that's in TSMC's league"*. Nevertheless, Buffett recently sold all his shares in TSMC because "*I don't like their location*".
Some say the reason China wants Taijuan so badly is so they can get their hands on TSMC, but others say that would be foolish because if they use military force the factories would likely be destroyed, either in the fighting or by the Taiwanese themselves to avoid them falling into Chinese hands. And even if they remained intact there would be such a huge brain drain nobody would be around to operate them. And even if they could find the people the Chinese would be cut off from foreign semiconductor equipment suppliers that they need, like Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, and above all ASML. Not to mention the fact that the Taiwanese don't design chips, they just manufacture them. So invading Taiwan would harm the Chinese economy just as much as it would harm the rest of the world, however history has shown that just because something is stupid does not mean a country won't do it, look at Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Incidentally an invasion of Taiwan by the Chinese would be one of the few things that would delay, but not prevent, the Singularity. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> sqw -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv3NxPkLJhBAa0%2BiWvR4JyNuG%2BtRp_wngmvs-KSQVgLPVg%40mail.gmail.com.
