alt Hacker NewsIt would be darkly amusing if all chips come from either politically unstable Taiwan or seismically unstable Hokkaido.
But then Japan seems amazing at producing all sorts of other delicate things, despite all of its soil being basically built out of earthquakes, so I guess they have this bit figured out.
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That's not even a tough call if you had to lay odds on which would go offline first.
Is "politically unstable" once again an acceptable euphemism for a small democracy being threatened with destruction by a totalitarian superpower? I thought we decided that was gauche. After, say, the German invasion of Czechoslovakia.
I guess it depends on what sort of monetary damage the typical Hokkaido earthquake would have on a fab - just result in a bad batch of chips perhaps, or also damage equipment? Obviously it's known that the region is very seismically active (159 earthquakes in Hokkaido so far this year!), but Japan are used to having to build to minimize earthquake damage.
Isn't Taiwan also seismically active? They are reports of earthquakes affecting TSMC fabs in january 2025 and april 2024.
Apparently these were not huge blows to their fabs, otherwise we would be talking about that day-in-day-out, but there's always a risk of that happening.