Ben Thompson: belief

Transcript context

…All right. The second one, rather than going with another big American tech company, I want to go with one that's an Acquired fan favorite and one that's very close to home for you, TSMC. Any change to what TSMC is doing now if you became CEO tomorrow? Not really. It's a very complicated situation, to say the least. For lots of reasons, I'm not just political, but technological. I think probably doing what they're doing, broadly it makes sense. Yeah, I don't know. I've ever heard a ton about them and where they are. You could talk about maybe some of the pricing stuff. They were pretty slow to raise prices. Even in the face of shortages, they've been much more aggressive about that over the last little bit, which seems reasonable to me. It is opening the door for when and if a competitor comes along to undercut them in that regard. I think they're probably blessed by the weakness of their competition, but the long-term risk is obviously number one, just the geopolitical risk. The reality is TSMC, a core to their model, essentially to the model of being so flexible and being so adaptive, of incorporating new equipment, of accommodating hundreds and hundreds or thousands of customers, is all their engineering is in one place. That place is Taiwan, and that has geopolitical risk. From TSMC's perspective, I think that's just a reality. You can't really hedge against that. If anything, yes, they're building these fabs in the US (I think) largely for political reasons. Sure, do that if the Taiwanese government feels that's what needs to be done to keep the US on board and keep the US happy. Build a couple in Japan, because Japan is a future ally, but I think you do have to double down on Taiwan and roll the dice that nothing happens. I don't think it's a hedgeable risk, the China risk. The other risk is that Moore's Laws are running out. UV has another 5–6 years, and then it's not super clear what's after that. How can you get smaller than one, Ben? You just have one nanometer in this.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.