This is a great reminder regarding class: the rich do not die in the wars. They can only lose a bit of money.
They’re not wrong though.
If China attacks Taiwan, the first thing I’ll do is to buy a high end graphics card and CPU. These parts will be impossible to buy for at least a decade. (should Taiwan be actually occupied)
As a German it’s also one more reason to hate Hitler. Supposedly he liked Germans. But what he actually did was fuck Germany so hard, we would not recover for decades. Just imagine the advancements if Europe were not destroyed in WW2! So much value was lost. Most importantly the knowledge of people who died or were forced to flee.
I don’t know if it’s a decade, aren’t new next-gen (or maybe it was next-next gen) foundries being built in Europe and the US? The actual machines to make the machines that make the hardware is made in Europe IIRC.
Edit: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/eu-news-2022-release.html cutting edge (at their time) Intel foundries plan to come online in 4 years in Germany.
Jup, Magdeburg will get a fab and I think TSMC is building one in the USA as well.
But Taiwan is currently supplying 90% of high end chips in the world. This will not be compensated for by a few new fabs (that are yet to be built). It’s not like there won’t be any new computer hardware, it’s just that the supply/demand ratio will make them exorbitantly expensive.
Furthermore, to get a working part you need the other stuff too, like PCBs, capacitors, resistors, etc and a factory that combines all these parts into a working product. I’m not sure where exactly these factories are, but I’d reckon 90% are in south east Asia as well. So they may be heavily impacted as well.
If anybody needed further proof that capitalism leads to brain rot, this is it.
