re: Brutal corporate culture getting in the way of TSMC hiring 4500 people in AZ plant

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Arizona has very little seismic activity in addition destructive weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes not ever happening there.

The seismic stability is extremely important. You're shooting lasers to make things that are only a few nanometers in width. A slight shift in the building could mess up a lot of chips.

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I never knew that. I honestly never even thought about that factoring into it.

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Which is why so many chips are made in Taiwan?

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I know right? Taiwan is in the Ring of Fire. TSMC does operate plans in other parts of the world besides Taiwan.

The reason why TSMC got so big is because they do only one thing and they do it really really well: Manufacturing integrated circuits. They did this so well AMD sold off its fabs and other chip designers followed suit becoming fabless chip designers. Any research and development they do goes strictly into the manufacturing process and explains why they were able to beat Intel to a 5nm process.

Intel on the other hand still run their own fabs and had been in Arizona for decades for that reason. They have fabs in other parts of the world as well.