alt Hacker NewsManufacturing is the hard part. China certainly has the knowledge to build a TPU architecture without needing to steal the plans. What they don't have is the ability to actually build the chips. This is even in spite of also stealing lithography plans.
There is a dark art to semiconductor manufacturing that pretty much only TSMC really has the wizards for. Maybe intel and samsung a bit too.
Replies
For China there is no plan B for semiconductor manufacturing. Invading Taiwan would be a dice roll and the consequences would be severe. They will create their own SOTA semiconductor industry. Same goes for their military.
The question is when? Does that come in time to deflate the US tech stock bubble? Or will the bubble start to level out and reality catch up, or will the market crash for another reason beforehand?
The software is the hard part. Western software still outclasses what the chinese produce by a good amount.
Lot of retired fab folks in the Austin area if you needed to spin up a local fab. It's really not a dark art, there are plenty of folks that have experience in the industry.
> What they don't have is the ability to actually build the chips.
China has fabs. Most are older nodes and are used to manufacture chips used in cars and consumer electronics. They have companies that design chips (manufactured by TSMC), like the Ascend 910, which are purpose built for AI. They may be behind, but they’re not standing still.