TSMC is banned from exporting high-end chips to China. The Taiwanese want to be an US ally, and not end up destroyed like Hong-Kong, hence they'll comply with US sanctions.
China is still far behind the US in high-end chips. Sure they are catching up. But China is on borrowed time due to population collapse. China will run out of young engineers far more quickly than the US will.
The first mover can have overwhelming advantages. If the US gets to AI first, dominates the global AI market, China facing demographic collapse, economic decline, will lose the ability to compete for supremacy
> But China is on borrowed time due to population collapse. China will run out of young engineers far more quickly than the US will.
And the US can attract foreign engineers far better than China ever will. For many, many reasons, whether it is the language (English is far more common as a second language than Chinese, even though Chinese is among the top spoken as a first. And Chinese is ridiculously hard to learn, it's not just the writing system, the spoken language being a tonal language is not helpful either.), the capital - US corporations pay better, the higher quality of life/work environment etc.
This is what happens when people foreign to Chinese corporate culture have to deal with it (the first link is about Taiwan but they're not too dissimilar when it comes down to this):
> Chang, speaking last year about Taiwan’s competitiveness compared to the U.S., said that “if [a machine] breaks down at one in the morning, in the U.S. it will be fixed in the next morning. But in Taiwan, it will be fixed at 2 a.m.” And, he added, the wife of a Taiwanese engineer would “go back to sleep without saying another word.”
No, I don't want to work for this kind of asshole.
> Although US and Singapore teams aren't expected to do 996 — I work normal US working hours — the reality is that US employees still often attend late night meetings to collaborate with teams in Asia.
> The lack of process, mentorship, standardized performance review, and internal documentation means that it's harder to learn best practices and mature in your profession.
Oof.
The US can afford a population decline more than many other nations of the earth, and it is continously draining brain power from the rest of the world. Many of the more talented programmers I've known as a French living in France moved to the US for greener pasture. Americans should not have too many worries about the future: if it ever gets bad for them, it means the rest of the world will suffer even harder.
China is still far behind the US in high-end chips. Sure they are catching up. But China is on borrowed time due to population collapse. China will run out of young engineers far more quickly than the US will.
The first mover can have overwhelming advantages. If the US gets to AI first, dominates the global AI market, China facing demographic collapse, economic decline, will lose the ability to compete for supremacy