This is dangerously careless thinking which completely disregards the complexity of supply chains.
Modern IT infrastructure needs lots of different kinds of chips, not just CPUs. Most of them aren't manufactured in the US. If chips stopped shipping from Taiwan tomorrow, then sure, people would scramble to switch to other manufacturing, and presumably some of the gap could be filled from existing products or of Korea, but getting a design up on a new process can easily take a year, often more. Not to mention that building up raw fab capacity takes time as well.
The impact on supply chains in the short term would be devastating even if the long term can be gotten under control. If the short term includes a war with China, then, well... it certainly complicates any sort of military scenario.
>but getting a design up on a new process can easily take a year, often more.
That's only relevant to companies that have to build all their own CPUs.
The world is not HackerNews. 99.999999% of companies can do with the radical idea of using an existing older, slower, perhaps more power hungry processor. [It can be argued this already happened - all the Spectre/Meltdown mitigations costing performance, and the world kept trucking on]. Apple's bottom line may be temporarily hurt, and AMD will be in trouble, but that's hardly an economy-shaking threat.
>Not to mention that building up raw fab capacity takes time as well.
TSMC is actually rather small in the raw picture.
>The impact on supply chains in the short term would be devastating even if the long term can be gotten under control.
We were just having a huge pandemic. We can handle merely another chip shortage.
>If the short term includes a war with China, then, well...
Modern IT infrastructure needs lots of different kinds of chips, not just CPUs. Most of them aren't manufactured in the US. If chips stopped shipping from Taiwan tomorrow, then sure, people would scramble to switch to other manufacturing, and presumably some of the gap could be filled from existing products or of Korea, but getting a design up on a new process can easily take a year, often more. Not to mention that building up raw fab capacity takes time as well.
The impact on supply chains in the short term would be devastating even if the long term can be gotten under control. If the short term includes a war with China, then, well... it certainly complicates any sort of military scenario.