Both parent comments were likely referring to any entity other than Taiwan. If you are a fabless chip designer or one of their customers, it makes sense to diversify away from Taiwan, even if that comes at Taiwan's expense.
I worry that a lot of large cap companies either depend directly on TSMC (Nvidia, AMD, Apple) or depend on a company that depends on TSMC (Microsoft/OpenAI, Arm). It's TSMC all the way down and that scares me.
It’s easy to forget that TSMC was not the chipmaking leader until 7 or 8 years ago. Intel was. Things can change quickly in tech. Intel is trying to reclaim their old glory. We’ll see if they succeed.
Historians might look back at Intel’s and GloFo’s stumbles in the mid 2010s as being a pivotal turning point. Chips are the new oil and that makes the mid term future very dangerous.
