TSMC mass-producing 2nm chips in Baoshan while ASML High-NA EUV machines cost $380M a pop. Everyone talks about Taiwan's "silicon shield", but if a single stray missile hits the Hsinchu power grid, 35% of global computing capacity vanishes in 48 hours. No amount of US CHIPS Act subsidies can duplicate 40 years of geographic cluster synergy.
ASML engineer here in Veldhoven. Our EUV machines have 100,000 precision parts, 2 kilometers of cabling, and require Zeiss mirrors so flat that if they were the size of Germany, the highest bump would be under a millimeter. You cannot just "rebuild that in Arizona".
American labor unions in Phoenix threw a tantrum when TSMC tried to bring in Taiwanese construction crews to calibrate the cleanrooms on 12-hour shifts. The cultural clash of industrial discipline is comical.
In Taiwan, engineering is considered national defense duty (護國神山). In the US, top engineering talent goes to Wall Street to optimize high-frequency algorithmic options trading. That is the structural gap.
And if the worst happens, ASML has remote kill-switches (kill-codes) hardcoded into the EUV firmware. Scorched earth doctrine in the digital age.
People think TSMC is just "a factory". It is an entire ecosystem of thousands of specialized suppliers, cleanroom chemical purifiers, and PhD technicians who live 10 minutes away and will report to work at 3 AM if a vacuum pump loses 0.01 PSI of pressure.