I’ve posted about this elsewhere, I think this risk is overstated.
That’s not embarrassing or an accident, US-Taiwan codependency is built upon their mutual reliance for technology and military might respectively. If the US had been willing to sell F-35s to Taiwan as requested then it would be almost perfectly analogous for their relationship.
It’s not just Apple’s M1, it’s almost all of Apples products (80%+ of Apple’s revenue is from TSMC-based products and the remaining 20% is services based on those products). Google, Microsoft, Amazon cloud are all using TSMC-fabbed compute (either directly with inhouse designs or from designers). TSLA hardware (inhouse + AMD, Nvidia) is reliant on TSMC. Then you’ve got all the indirectly impacted companies that rely on CDNs/cloud like Netflix, Disney.
If you remove TSMC hardware then Facebook/Meta might even top out the S&P500 because they are mostly on Intel hardware, but even they would be severely impacted.
Based on the widespread disruption if you do believe China invading Taiwan is a realistic scenario I think there are probably much better positions to consider than long Intel, puts on Apple or S&P500, gold, old iphones, second hand cars, non-perishable food & potassium iodide.
If you wanted to go long a stock as a hedge against WW3 I think Samsung is the more logical choice as it will become the world’s leading high-end foundry (until IFS is up and running) everything currently running through TSMC would be trying to go through Samsung. Likewise GF for less advanced nodes.
Even if TSMC collapsed, no one is going back to in-house fab, the fabless model is proven to be the way forward, with even Intel now embracing it with TSMC outsourcing and IFS. Everyone would have to tape out designs for other foundries (Samsung, IFS) which is expensive, but much cheaper than buying a fab.
I am long TSMC, AMD though so I’m certainly biased. I’ve said elsewhere I’m keeping an eye on Intel because I do think they have a real shot with Diamond Rapids, but I’m not buying at this price.