The point is, that if you do shower money on TSMC for the next 15 or 20 years, you won't get your own fab built. You give money to someone else to get short-term advantage, at the price of not having long-term capacity & control yourself. You basically co-finance R&D that in the end will get owned by someone else.
No, your new fab won't have the market like TSMC today; but so won't TSMC tomorrow, when the market splits.
The same thing was Intel vs. rest of the fabs; TSMC made it. Just like Intel couldn't keep themselves on the top forever, the same will happen to TSMC.
I’m fairly convinced that the authoritarian regimes will eventually come to realise that pooling their resources to jointly develop manufacturing technology will behoove them as it will allow them to build their own fabs to manufacture their own devices.
The know-how that will come from this collaboration is useful to all of the participants, and it puts them in a position to be independent of the USA and each-other (if each builds their own fab), and doesn’t require revealing their processor IP.
There’s other examples of collaboration between authoritarian regimes. Most of the time (in the 1970s and 1980s in particular) OPEC was hugely effective (just think of the oil crises of the 1970s when they curtailed production) despite the regimes not always being particularly open to collaboration. And realise that collaboration in a cartel such as OPEC provides each member with an incentive to defect and sell more of its own oil at the higher price. A consortium of regimes banding together to develop chip-manufacturing technology would not suffer from such an incentive (after all, they can sell it or divulge it, but that doesn’t reduce it’s value at all — and it’s zero marginal cost anyway).
No, your new fab won't have the market like TSMC today; but so won't TSMC tomorrow, when the market splits.
The same thing was Intel vs. rest of the fabs; TSMC made it. Just like Intel couldn't keep themselves on the top forever, the same will happen to TSMC.