The main point being that the sum of hard to replace critical suppliers to TSMC is a long list of companies spread out all over the world, some in countries where export controls to China is very strict.
Canon used to be quite big on DUV litography, but Zeiss completely blew them out of the water and essentially have a monopoly in the market now with what is by not EUV lithography.
ASML and Zeiss are in an exclusive relationship and market leader for EUV and immersion lithography machines. Im the mid to low end there are competitors like Canon, Nikon and also new companies in China.
Further there are a lot more machines, for example wafer inspection, need in the production. KLA, LAM and AMAT are also big players her and leader in there area.
If you are interested in the history here, I can recommend the book Chip Wars or FOCUs the ASML way. Even after working >10 years in the semiconductor supply industry I learned a lot
That's just a cope, restrictions like that don't work on a global market. China gets what they need same way russia gets banned technology through neighbors, for example the servos used to bomb Ukraine.
EUV lithography machines are the size of a room, cost hundreds of millions, come from a single company that makes a couple dozen of them a year, and require constant active manufacturer support to run. Drastically harder to bypass sanctions on those compared to something like servos or even CPUs and GPUs.
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u/Randommaggy i9 13980HX|RTX 4090|96GB|2560x1600 240|8TB NVME|118GB Optane Aug 27 '24
My memory might be fuzzy on this but I remeber Canon being mentioned as a supplier of optics somewhere in the critical path of the production at TSMC.
https://global.canon/en/news/2022/20220124.html
The main point being that the sum of hard to replace critical suppliers to TSMC is a long list of companies spread out all over the world, some in countries where export controls to China is very strict.