Silicon Valley Has Been Sleepwalking Toward a Taiwan Chip Crisis
U.S. officials warned Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm about China's Taiwan plans. The industry barely flinched.
For years, federal officials have been sounding the alarm to Silicon Valley's biggest players: China could move on Taiwan, and your entire chip supply chain would collapse overnight. Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm all got the memo. The response? Largely shrugs.
Taiwan — a democratic island roughly the size of a small U.S. state — sits at the heart of global semiconductor manufacturing. A Chinese invasion would choke off the chips powering everything from iPhones to data centers.
The U.S. government has tried repeatedly to wean the tech industry off its Taiwan dependency, but progress has been painfully slow. The economics of Taiwanese chipmaking are just too good, and reshoring production is expensive and time-consuming.
The result is a massive geopolitical blind spot for an industry that prides itself on anticipating the future. If the worst-case scenario hits, nobody can say they weren't warned.