So your question caused some free association.

First, a correction: Apple has no capabilities. Their chips are made by TSMC. I have opinions about TSMC.

Second, an elaboration. Taiwan is 90% of advanced chip fab. No one gave the first fuck about this until Intel ordered a bunch of chips from TSMC at which point the world was going to end and hair caught fire.

Third, a disquisition.

The general consensus among talking heads is there's this big dumb building called "Taiwan Semiconductor" that you pour money in and iPhones come out. There's actually seventeen sites, two of which are in China, one of which is in Washington State. And it's not like everything is in Taiwan. Everyone's hair caught fire because Team Capitalism wants Intel to stop doing things that don't maximize shareholder value but Intel seems more interested in staying in business.

The basic problem is well-illustrated by pp. 21-26 of this PDF. Should Russia wish to ever manufacture another Borisoglebsk-2, they must play nice with the United States, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands and the UK. The US does not have this problem. If you wish to build something for the government, you must use American-manufactured parts or say why you can't. if you can't, the GSA goes "here's something Americans need to make." It would likely surprise you to learn that the most common microphones used in Hollywood are American for the simple reason that the FBI, local police, the State Dept. etc need surveillance mics, translation systems, conference systems etc that are American-made, which has subsidized one hell of an indigenous electronics industry. You may know Haas primarily as a Formula 1 team but they're also like the fourth largest manufacturer of CNC and automation equipment in the world because if you're making F-35 parts? You're not making them on a fucking FANUC, we've got taxpayers to think about.

I think, really, there are two things at play here:

1) Any manufacturer worth their salt fished their limit on defensible stock buybacks the minute the pandemic hit. Not to say some companies didn't keep going, but an exogenous shock to the manufacturing web of the world demonstrated pretty cleanly that the ability to retrench, change tactics and manufacture differently separated the quick from the dead. Add in a universe in which we have a fuckin' COLD WAR again, in which the NATO boundary stretches from fucking Finland to Canada, where we've spent a third of our Javelins, where Boeing is probably looking at an emergency order of Harpoons, and you goddamn betcha there's gonna be a lot of shelter and subsidy for retenching and updating your manufacturing pipelines.

2) Computing has been at a goddamn standstill for twelve fucking years. Yeah sure your phone keeps getting new chips but that's about battery life not horsepower. Know who just upgraded their arsenal of 12-year-old Mac Pros? Skywalker Sound. I know this because reasons. Most movies you've seen have been made on grandpa hardware because nobody has done anything more than make things incrementally better and monumentally more expensive. yeah, sure, Ryzen-whatever-the-fuck, i3080blahblahblah I went from a Gen1 2013 PS4 to a PS5 and yeah, some games benefited. I upgraded my laptop recently but that's primarily because browsers have become such bloated pieces of shit that they need to auto-load every video on Twitter before they'll render a screen, not because it wasn't perfectly adequate for purposes of actually doing some shit.

But all that has changed.

Current computational paradigm is "we don't know what we're going to do with AI, but we know it needs fucktons of horsepower, and it responds better with custom shit."

Now look. I think the Chinese would be stupid to do more than wave their dicks at Taiwan. But I also thought Putin was far, far, far too clever to invade Ukraine.

I don't think Xi is stupid. And I think China has watched developments in Ukraine with a more-than-casual interest. From a military perspective, it sure looks like Russia voluntarily gave themselves a 500-mile active attrition front for NATO to chew up at the cost of a third of their military. Three months in Ukraine has been worse than nine years in Afghanistan. Biden's remarks didn't really say anything that hasn't been said? And if they needed to, they could certainly walk it back, just like they half-did with his genocide comments about Ukraine.

Bottom line, I think the majority of the world's diplomatic entities have made clear that they favor stability, and that threats to stability are going to be made to eat shit. I personally think a clear-eyed CCP assessment of the invasion of Taiwan would determine that any attempt would dissolve decades of Chinese posturing, much like the whole world is busily grappling with the fact that the Warsaw Pact sucks, has sucked, probably always sucked and what the fuck were we so worried about.

I think TSMC is just planning on a future full of chips.