Taiwan Frontlines: Former TSMC R&D director says Taiwan should not rely on ‘silicon shield’

Taiwan Current News (TCN), in partnership with the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), produces the podcast series Taiwan Frontlines, which tracks global trends and explores how Taiwan connects with the world.

In the latest episode, Konrad Young (楊光磊), former director of research and development at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and former head of its R&D Technology Program Office, said Taiwan should not rely on the idea of a “silicon shield” to deter a Chinese attack.

Young said Taiwan’s central position in the global semiconductor supply chain gives it strategic value, but warned that placing the country’s security burden on a single company is neither fair nor sufficient. He also argued that China will face major difficulty closing the gap in leading-edge semiconductor technology, even as it develops a separate strategy centered on “good-enough” AI and large-scale real-world applications.

China’s technology gap

Young said China may come close in some areas, but is unlikely to match the performance of the world’s leading semiconductor technologies in the near term. In his assessment, China could need at least another decade to catch up.

He attributed TSMC’s advantage partly to its access to global markets, which gives the company the resources to sustain long-term technology development. Young said TSMC invests about 8% of its revenue in research and development, amounting to roughly US$10 billion annually — a scale he argued few governments, including China’s, could support consistently for a single company.

China may seek alternative paths rather than compete directly along the same technological trajectory, he said. Comparing the approaches to skiing, Young said the leading-edge semiconductor path follows a rapid, straight ascent under Moore’s Law, while China may advance more slowly through a “zigzag” route.

“Good-enough” AI and the physical world

Young said China has a large domestic market that can absorb “good-enough” technology and products, allowing it to pursue a different model of AI competition from the United States.

The US, he said, retains the world’s strongest computing power and focuses on what he called the “brain” of AI. China, by contrast, can apply sufficiently capable AI to the physical world, including robotics, electric vehicles and internet-based business models, supported by the scale of its population and market.

“They don't have the best brain, but they could have a good-enough brain to make a robot move or perform certain tasks,” Young said.

He said the two sides should therefore not be measured by identical standards. China could remain behind in frontier computing power while still becoming highly competitive in applying AI to real-world products and services, he argued.

Silicon shield has limits

Young described the “silicon shield” as a contradictory idea. The argument holds that the world’s dependence on Taiwan-made chips could raise the costs of conflict and encourage other countries to help defend Taiwan. 

Yet he said it may overstate the extent to which semiconductor dependence alone would lead another country to use military force on Taiwan’s behalf.

Taiwan’s position in the first island chain and wider regional-security considerations may also shape allied decisions, he said. But he cautioned that portraying TSMC as a shield can increase the company’s risk exposure, because governments and companies will seek to reduce their dependence on a single location even if the probability of a crisis remains low.

“It's not fair for a single company to take on the country's entire burden of being a shield,” Young said.

Overseas expansion as risk management

Young said TSMC’s expansion into the US reflects Washington’s national-security concerns and its need to ensure at least some domestic supply in a contingency. He described the company’s Arizona investment as a risk-management move intended to reduce supply-chain vulnerability in an extreme scenario.

Taiwan also faces its own constraints, Young said, including limited natural resources, electricity needs and demographic pressures that could affect the availability of talent over the longer term. Given those challenges, he said overseas expansion should be managed to maximize TSMC’s interests and operational effectiveness.

Young said Taiwan should pursue other means to deter conflict rather than expecting one company to shoulder the country’s entire security responsibility.

For more in-depth coverage, listen to Taiwan Frontlines on NOWNEWS’ official YouTube channel.