Washington was accustomed to reviewing Chinese investments in American tech firms and stopping them whenever they detected a threat to national security. There was no equivalent process to stopping companies from moving their production overseas—that was purely a business decision. So over the years, American tech firms decided to focus on designing their own chips and leave the manufacturing to the true experts like TSMC. It was a strategy reinforced by the reassuring myth that in a globalized world, it didn’t really make any difference where you produced the semiconductors that fuel the
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