Post #108949
2026-01-03 12:18 UTC
guess the USA invasion of Venezuela puts a flashing neon crosshair on Taiwan.
An extremely ridiculous notion that I am forced to consider right now is that it matters whether the CCP invades before or after the “AI” bubble bursts. Because the “AI” bubble is the biggest misallocation of capital in history, which means people like the MAGA government are desperate to wring some water out of those stones, anything. And for various economical reasons it isn’t doable at the moment to produce chips anywhere else than Taiwan. No chips, no “AI” datacenters, and they promised a lot of AI datacenters—in fact most of the US GDP “growth” in 2025 was promises of AI datacenters, if you don’t count these promises the country is already in recession.
Basically I think if the CCP invades before the AI bubble pops, MAGA would escalate to full-blown war against China to nab Taiwan as a protectorate. And if we all die in nuclear fallout caused to protect chatbot profits I will be so over this whole thing
Replies (1)
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@cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop 2026-01-03 13:01
@mirrorwitch@awful.systems I note that China is on the verge of producing their own EUV lithography tech (they demo'd it a couple of months back) so TSMC's near-monopoly is on the edge of disintegrating, which means time's up for Taiwan (unless they have some strategic nukes stashed in the basement). If China *already* has EUV lithography machines they could plausibly reveal a front-rank semiconductor fab-line—then demand conditional surrender on terms similar to Hong Kong. Would Trump follow through then?