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台积电，世界上最重要的公司Visiting the Most Important Company in the World 6park.com纪思道《纽时》2024年1月25日 6park.comLAM YIK FEI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
6park.com“If China takes Taiwan, they will turn the world off, potentially,” Donald Trump told Fox News recently, apparently referring to a potential seizure of one company that is central to, well, pretty much everything. Indeed, it’s arguably the most important company in the world. 6park.com最近，特朗普在接受福克斯新闻采访时表示：“如果中国占领台湾，他们可能会令整个世界停摆。”显然，他指的是失去一家对几乎所有事情都至关重要的公司。事实上，它堪称世界上最重要的公司。 6park.comThe company Trump alluded to, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or T.S.M.C., is the only corporation I can think of in history that could cause a global depression if it were forced to halt production. 6park.com特朗普提到的是台积电，它是我所能想到的历史上唯一一家如果被迫停产可能导致全球经济萧条的企业。 6park.comThese days it seems impossible to have a conversation about geopolitics or economics without coming back to T.S.M.C., which makes about 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips. If the lights went out here in Hsinchu, in the company’s ultraclean and ultrasecure buildings, you might not be able to buy a new phone, car or watch. Armies could run out of precision-guided missiles and hospitals could struggle to replace advanced X-ray and M.R.I. machines. It might be like the Covid-19 supply chain chip disruption — times 10 — and T.S.M.C., unfortunately, is situated in a region where war is possible and could threaten production. 6park.com如今，谈论地缘政治或经济似乎绕不开台积电，世界上约九成最先进的芯片都是来自该公司。在新竹，如果该公司超干净、超安全的大楼里灯光熄灭，你可能就买不到新手机、汽车或手表了。军队的精确制导导弹可能会消耗殆尽，医院可能难以更换先进的X光和核磁共振成像仪。这可能就像新冠病毒导致的供应链芯片中断——再乘以10倍——不幸的是，台积电位于一个可能发生战争的地区，其生产可能会受到威胁。 6park.com“Taiwan Semiconductor is one of the best-managed companies and important companies in the world,” Warren Buffett said last year. But he sold his $4 billion stake in T.S.M.C. because, he said, “I don’t like its location.” 6park.com“台积电是世界上管理最好的公司之一，也是重要的公司，”沃伦·巴菲特去年表示。但他卖掉了持有的台积电价值40亿美元的股份，因为他说，“我不喜欢它的地理位置。” 6park.comSome believe — it appears this may be Trump’s view — that T.S.M.C. is so valuable that it might tempt China to try to grab Taiwan, and then bring the world to its knees. 6park.com有些人认为——这似乎也是特朗普的观点——台积电非常有价值，可能会诱使中国试图占领台湾，然后让世界屈服。 6park.com“The more you talk about silicon, the less rational people become,” Mark Liu, the chairman of T.S.M.C., told me. 6park.com“硅这个东西，谈得越多，人就越不理性，”台积电董事长刘德音告诉我。 6park.comSo let’s try to have a nuanced conversation about T.S.M.C., its significance and its vulnerabilities. 6park.com所以，让我们试着对台积电进行细致的讨论，谈谈它的重要性和弱点。 6park.comFor starters, T.S.M.C.’s factories, or fabs, would probably be useless to China after an invasion, even if engineers remained on the job and even if the fabs weren’t bombed by American or Taiwanese defenders to keep them out of China’s hands. That’s because the chips are designed in other countries and require international networks to keep production going. To China, T.S.M.C. would be about as useful as a dead phone. 6park.com首先，台积电的工厂（即晶圆厂）在中国入侵后可能对中国毫无用处，即使工程师们留在那里工作，即使这些晶圆厂没有被美台守军轰炸以防落入中国手中。这是因为，这些芯片是在其他国家设计的，需要国际网络来维持生产。对中国来说，台积电就跟一部没电的手机差不多。 6park.comWhat happens in these fabs — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the work is done by nonunion, unprotesting machines — is astonishing. T.S.M.C. has transformed an industry that now measures its work in nanometers (billionths of a meter). A human red blood cell is around 7,000 nanometers wide, and T.S.M.C. is now developing 1.4-nanometer chips. 6park.com在这些工厂里，每天24小时、每周7天的工作是由没有工会、不会抗议的机器完成的，这些工厂里发生的事情令人震惊。台积电已经改变了一个以纳米（一米的十亿分之一）计量的行业。一个人类红细胞的宽度约为7000纳米，而台积电目前正在开发1.4纳米的芯片。 6park.com“There’s nothing like the T.S.M.C. plants,” Matt Pottinger, a longtime Asia hand who was deputy national security adviser under Trump, told me. “It’s really black magic.” 6park.com“没有什么能与台积电的工厂相提并论，”资深的亚洲事务专家、曾在特朗普政府担任国家安全副顾问的博明(Matthew Pottinger)告诉我。“这真的是黑魔法。” 6park.comBut black magic requires enormous amounts of energy — T.S.M.C. single-handedly consumes perhaps 7 percent of Taiwan’s electricity — and that creates a risk. Even if China couldn’t take over T.S.M.C. fabs, it could disrupt production as a way of putting pressure on Taiwan and the West simply with cyberattacks on the grid. 6park.com但是黑魔法需要大量的能源——台积电这一家企业就消耗了台湾大约7%的电力——这就带来了风险。即使中国无法接管台积电的晶圆厂，它也可以通过对电网进行网络攻击来破坏生产，以此向台湾和西方施加压力。 6park.com“It’d be pretty easy for China to bring down the power networks,” Pottinger said. Alternatively, China could impose a partial blockade with the same effect. Either could quickly ripple through the global economy. 6park.com博明说：“对中国来说，摧毁电网很容易。”或者，中国可以实施部分封锁，达到同样的效果。无论哪种方式，都可能迅速波及全球经济。 6park.comWhich means it would also ripple through China’s economy. T.S.M.C. chips are crucial inputs for Chinese manufacturing, so Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, and others have described the chip industry as Taiwan’s “silicon shield” — meaning that China wouldn’t dare attack because that would destroy its own economy. 6park.com这意味着中国经济也将受到影响。台积电的芯片是中国制造业不可或缺的投入资源，因此台湾总统蔡英文和其他人将芯片产业形容为台湾的“硅盾”——这意味着中国不敢攻击，因为会破坏自己的经济。 6park.comI’m as skeptical of this argument as I am of the notion that China will invade Taiwan to grab T.S.M.C. The silicon shield reminds me of the 1909 best-selling book “The Great Illusion,” which was translated into 25 languages and predicted that Europe was so economically interdependent that warfare was obsolete. World War I and World War II killed its sales. 6park.com我对这种说法持怀疑态度，就像我怀疑中国将入侵台湾以夺取台积电的观点一样。硅盾让我想起了1909年的畅销书《大幻觉》(The Great Illusion)，这本书被翻译成25种语言，预言欧洲在经济上相互依存，战争已经过时。第一次世界大战和第二次世界大战令它的预言破灭了。 6park.comIt’s definitely not optimal that the global economy depends on chips from an area vulnerable to earthquakes and war. That’s one reason America is investing some $39 billion through the CHIPS Act to manufacture chips domestically. But bringing a big chunk of advanced chipmaking back to America is already proving more difficult than passing the legislation. 6park.com全球经济依赖于一个易受地震和战争影响的地区的芯片，这绝对不是最佳选择。这也是美国通过《芯片法案》投资390亿美元在国内生产芯片的原因之一。但事实证明，将一大部分先进的芯片制造工艺带回美国比通过这项立法要困难得多。 6park.comIt’s immensely challenging for America to replicate the ecosystem in Taiwan that supports chip manufacturing, from the expertise in constructing fabs to the companies that clean the gowns worn inside them. And America is a plodding bureaucracy where it’s harder and more expensive to get environmental approvals and building permits than it is in other countries. 6park.com对美国来说，复制台湾支持芯片制造的生态系统是一项巨大的挑战，从建造晶圆厂的专业技术到清洗晶圆厂工作人员所穿工作服的公司，不一而足。美国是一个办事迟缓的官僚主义国家，与其他国家相比，获得环境审批和建筑许可要更困难，成本也更高。 6park.comA sign of trouble: Both T.S.M.C. and Samsung have already had to delay plans for new plants in the United States. There’s some uncertainty about how advanced those American-made chips will be, and 18 months after President Biden signed the CHIPS Act into law, the American subsidies are slow going out the door. 6park.com一个麻烦的迹象是，台积电和三星都不得不推迟在美国的建厂计划。这些美国制造的芯片将有多先进还存在一些不确定性，在拜登总统签署《芯片法案》成为法律18个月后，美国的补贴迟迟没有到位。 6park.comAnd a cautionary tale: T.S.M.C. built a fab in Washington State in the late 1990s, and for many years it was an expensive headache. 6park.com还有一个让人警醒的故事：上世纪90年代末，台积电在华盛顿州建了一家晶圆厂，多年来，它成本高昂，是个令人头疼麻烦。 6park.com“It was just a series of ugly surprises,” Morris Chang, the founder of T.S.M.C., said on a podcast in 2022. Despite enormous effort and 25 years of experience, the costs of production at that plant are still 50 percent higher than in Taiwan, Chang added. 6park.com“这只是一系列丑陋的意外，”台积电创始人张忠谋在2022年的一个播客上说。他还说，尽管付出了巨大的努力，积累了25年的经验，该工厂的生产成本仍然比台湾高出50%。 6park.comPerhaps because he’s 92 years old and retired, Chang is candid about the challenges of the American strategy. 6park.com也许是因为他已经92岁，并且已经退休，张忠谋对美国战略所面临的挑战直言不讳。 6park.com“I think it will be a very expensive exercise in futility,” he said of the U.S. efforts. “The U.S. will increase onshore manufacturing of semiconductors somewhat. But all of that will be very high cost increase, high unit cost. It will be noncompetitive in the world markets.” 6park.com“我认为这将是一项耗资巨大、徒劳无功的行动，”他在谈到美国的努力时说。“美国将在一定程度上增加国内半导体制造。但所有这些都会带来很高的成本增长，很高的单位成本。这将在世界市场上失去竞争力。” 6park.comPerhaps it makes sense for the United States to manufacture noncompetitive chips to safeguard access to them, but let’s recognize that there are trade-offs: The tens of billions of dollars spent on fabs subsidies would also boost American competitiveness if they were spent to reduce child poverty and improve American education. If Americans were as good at math as the Taiwanese, our fabs might work better, too. 6park.com也许美国制造没有竞争力的芯片以确保获得这些芯片是有道理的，但这让我们认识到，这是有代价的：如果花在晶圆厂补贴上的数百亿美元用于减少儿童贫困和改善美国教育，也会提高美国的竞争力。如果美国人的数学和台湾人一样好，我们的晶圆厂可能也会更好。 6park.comGiven how difficult it is to move production, the best way to safeguard the manufacturing of chips may be to work harder than ever to deter and avoid war in the Taiwan Strait. More on that in a forthcoming column. 6park.com考虑到转移生产的难度，保护芯片制造的最佳方式可能是比以往任何时候都更加努力地遏制和避免台湾海峡的战争。我们将在后面的专栏中继续探讨。 6park.com 6park.com纪思道(Nicholas Kristof)2001起成为时报专栏作家。他曾因对中国及达尔富尔的报道两次获得普利策奖。欢迎在Twitter上关注他。
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