It would make a lot of sense if the Koreans could fab for boycotted Chinese customers (HiSilicon etc.). Instead of trying to steal TSMC's business at Qualcomm, Apple, AMD etc.
@dirtyid: makes no sense for China to use the Korean fabs. They could simply hire more Taiwanese engineers, aka ex-TSMC'ers, who had been the main drivers behind the development of China's chip industry so far.
Given an ultimatum by whom? And is the ultimatum issuer OK with the other side of the coin? (That China will likely invade Taiwan the moment there's no global economic incentive not to?)
Global politics are always very messy and ultimatums don't help.
It is not like they are being kidnapped/brainwashed to work there aka Soviet Union style, or their genocidal war crimes are ignored like the US did with Nazi scientists.
Chinese companies are simply offering a good financial package to these people with valuable skill sets. TSMC can pay it's employees to retain they can certainly afford to.
Taiwan is not officially exporting talent to China.
No country wants their best people to leave, US and countries have used their wealth to attract the best from developing countries and benefited immensely, china is also using a similar strategy
That is a very western-centric view. Outside of the west and India, Huawei is still going strong. Support for China is quite high in the middle east and in Africa, where many people are skeptical of western narratives about China.
Furthermore, Huawei isn't the only Chinese party that needs advanced chips. Other Chinese phone makers such as Oppo and Xiaomi aren't banned. But they have become wary of US dependence and are seeking to decouple their semiconductor supply chain from the US. To them, while Korean suppliers are more risky than Chinese suppliers (which still need time to catch up), it's still less risky than TSMC.
This comment would have been more accurate a year or two ago.
But with the Belt and Road Initiative struggling to deliver on many of its infrastructure projects countries are increasingly reluctant to get back into bed with China. More so now that the world has seen what happens if you don't bow down to China's every demand i.e. Australian style economic blackout.
My point still stands that if I was a fab right now I would be far more attracted to the growth prospects of US/EU companies than Chinese ones.
I've seen this narrative along with CPEC failure, but is it?
Considering that US wants to join the infrastructure development game indicates it unlikely.
SK suppliers maintaly supply memory and displays to those Chinese makers and they are already produced locally in China. Samsung OLED mobile display may be the exception to this.
Strategically it wouldn't make sense. South Korea shouldn't do that because the US is their defense umbrella and helping China in such a manner would go against the spirit of that pact, de facto helping to undermine the containment system being placed on China by the West.
so true. Aside from SK's geopolitical alliance with the US, South Korea has so much to gain from the West's banishment of China than anyone else. The current situation between the West vs China is the best thing happened to South Korea since the Japan-US trade war that helped SK's semiconductor manufacturing industry get their foot in the door and eventually surpass all their Japanese rivals in the 80's and 90's.
