In amidst the economic pain and disruption incumbent in the fall of Clown World, there are some significant silver linings:
The founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Morris Chang, says geopolitics is having profound effects on the semiconductor industry.
Speaking at an event in Phoenix Arizona, where his firm was debuting an ambitious $40 billion upgrade and expansion of its new manufacturing facility in the state, he explained the new constraints being placed on the sector by the changing geopolitical scene.
Speaking of the new facility, which is TSMC’s first advanced chip plant built in the United States in over two decades, Chang said there remained a lot of hard work ahead, if it was to be a success.
The upgrades for the facility will enable the phoenix plant to manufacture the chips for Apple’s iPhone, which can perform almost 17 trillion specialized calculations per second. TMSC is planning an even newer facility in the state which will house even more advanced production technology, capable of producing the microchips for future smartphones, computers, and other smart electronics.
In an interview with Nikkei Asia at the event, Chang likened the plant to the first plant TSMC ever built in the US, in 1995 in Carnas, Washington.
Chang said, “Twenty-seven years have passed and [the semiconductor industry] witnessed a big change in the world, a big geopolitical situation change in the world. Globalization is almost dead and free trade is almost dead. A lot of people still wish they would come back, but I don’t think they will be back.”
The death of globalization and free trade is not only a good thing, it is absolutely necessary if Mankind is going to survive, and eventually, thrive. We’ve seen the best that globalism has to offer, and it is nothing more than idiocracy, debt slavery, and a relentlessly ugly monoculture.
It only took 30 years for 300 years of economic theory to be conclusively disproven by reality. But it was always false and totally incompatible with the existence of nations, as my critique of free trade on mathematical grounds demonstrated.