Tankiedesantski [he/him]

The PRC chip industry doesn’t need to develop exponentially. TSMC is not developing exponentially either.

Monopoly pricing is not just broken when w 1-for-1 peer competitor at the same price appears. Monopoly pricing can be broken by a less performant alternative at a cheaper price that is suitable for the vast majority of applications. You can see this in a number of industries where incumbent players are being displaced by new Chinese suppliers who don’t quite make cutting edge stuff but can sell at a fraction of the price.

Hell, you can see it now with older chips at bigger physical nodes where China is now a significant portion of global production.

Will the PRC chip industry face many challenges? Of course it will. However, the PRC’s track record of going from nothing to 5nm in a few years cannot be ignored by TSMC.

TSMC knows full well that its monopoly (or oligopoly, depending what you think of Samsung I suppose) is on a timer with the development of the PRC’s chip industry.