China Vs Taiwan / Supply Chains
The semiconductor chokepoint is also a financial one
Onshoring the fabs does not onshore the packaging, the substrates or the chemicals. The dependency map is longer than the headline.
Industrial policy in the West has focused on wafer fabrication, because it is visible, expensive and photographs well. Fabrication is one stage in a chain with several other single points of failure, most of them concentrated in the same region.
The stages nobody funds
Advanced packaging is the current bottleneck for high-performance chips and it is concentrated in East Asia. Substrates are a niche industry with few qualified suppliers. Specialty chemicals, photoresists and process gases come from a short list of plants. Qualification of a new supplier at these stages takes years, because the customer is validating a process rather than buying a part.
A fab in a new country that ships its wafers back across the strait for packaging has moved the risk, not removed it.
The financial dependency
Concentration is also a balance sheet issue. Equipment purchase commitments, long-dated supply agreements and customer prepayments tie a large share of the technology sector's earnings to a small geography. Insurers are aware of this and have quietly reduced aggregate exposure; the disclosure that would let investors see the same picture does not exist.
What to watch
Packaging capacity announcements outside the region with real construction timelines, qualification milestones rather than groundbreakings, and any company that starts disclosing tier-two and tier-three geographic concentration. The last one is rare enough that it is worth rewarding when it happens.