If TSMC’s fabs were to slip into the Chelungpu Fault, whose movement caused Taiwan’s last big earthquake in 1999, the reverberations would shake the global economy. It would only take a handful of explosions, deliberate or accidental, to cause comparable damage. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations illustrate what’s at stake. Taiwan produces 11 percent of the world’s memory chips. More important, it fabricates 37 percent of the world’s logic chips. Computers, phones, data centers, and most other electronic devices simply can’t work without them, so if Taiwan’s fabs were knocked offline, we’d
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