which could mean that invading Taiwan would give China a substantial advantage in any sort of AI-driven war.
My assessment is that actually the opposite is true. Invading (and even successfully conquering) Taiwan would actually cause China to fall behind in any potential AI race. The reason is that absent a war, China can hope to achieve parity with the West (by which I mean the countries allied with the US including South Korea and Japan) on the hardware side by buying chips from Taiwan like everyone else, but if a war happened, the semiconductor foundries in Taiwan would likely be destroyed (to prevent them from falling to the Chinese government), and China lacks the technology to rebuild them without Western help. Even if the factories are not destroyed, critical supplies (such as specialty chemicals) would be cut off and the factories would become useless. Almost all of the machines and supplies that go into a semi foundry are made outside Taiwan in the West, and while China is trying to develop its own domestic semiconductor supply chains, it’s something like 10 years behind the state of the art in most areas, and not catching up, because the enormous amount of R&D going into the industry across all of the supply chains across the West is not something China can match on its own.
So my conclusion is that if China invades Taiwan, it would lose access to the most advanced semiconductor processes, while the West can rebuild the lost Taiwan foundries without too much trouble. (My knowledge about all of this came from listening to a bunch of different podcasts, but IIRC, Jon Y (Asianometry) on Semiconductor Tech and U.S.-China Competition should cover most of it.)
absent a war, China can hope to achieve parity with the West (by which I mean the countries allied with the US including South Korea and Japan) on the hardware side by buying chips from Taiwan like everyone else
Summary from Lam Research, which is involved with these new sanctions:
All Chinese advanced computing chip design companies are covered by these sanctions, and TSMC will no longer do any tape-out for them from now on;
This was apparently based on this document, which purports to be a transcript of a Q&A session with a Lam Research official. Here’s the relevant part in Chinese (which is consistent with the above tweet):
My assessment is that actually the opposite is true. Invading (and even successfully conquering) Taiwan would actually cause China to fall behind in any potential AI race. The reason is that absent a war, China can hope to achieve parity with the West (by which I mean the countries allied with the US including South Korea and Japan) on the hardware side by buying chips from Taiwan like everyone else, but if a war happened, the semiconductor foundries in Taiwan would likely be destroyed (to prevent them from falling to the Chinese government), and China lacks the technology to rebuild them without Western help. Even if the factories are not destroyed, critical supplies (such as specialty chemicals) would be cut off and the factories would become useless. Almost all of the machines and supplies that go into a semi foundry are made outside Taiwan in the West, and while China is trying to develop its own domestic semiconductor supply chains, it’s something like 10 years behind the state of the art in most areas, and not catching up, because the enormous amount of R&D going into the industry across all of the supply chains across the West is not something China can match on its own.
So my conclusion is that if China invades Taiwan, it would lose access to the most advanced semiconductor processes, while the West can rebuild the lost Taiwan foundries without too much trouble. (My knowledge about all of this came from listening to a bunch of different podcasts, but IIRC, Jon Y (Asianometry) on Semiconductor Tech and U.S.-China Competition should cover most of it.)
The argument you presented appears excellent to me, and I’ve now changed my mind on this particular point.
Apparently this is no longer true as of Oct 2022. From https://twitter.com/jordanschnyc/status/1580889364233539584:
This was apparently based on this document, which purports to be a transcript of a Q&A session with a Lam Research official. Here’s the relevant part in Chinese (which is consistent with the above tweet):