The difference is that it's basically impossible to take control of a fab the same way you can for an oil well. No matter your military advantage, the people you're trying to take the fab from will just destroy it, and odds are good that you can't rebuild it yourself. You may as well skip the war altogether and begin researching how to build your own fabs since you need to do that anyway.
And yet fabs aren't reliant on minerals that are rare and geographically concentrated (for the most part, I'm sure they rely on some rare earths. The point is silicon is hilariously common).
Fabs also capture very little value. TSMC and Intel aren't the trillion dollar companies. Google, MS, Amazon, etc. are.
So there's really no upside. Only the downside of a large fraction of the world's high end fab capacity disappearing overnight. It'd be one thing if one side of the US and China had their own backup capacity. But they don't. And they won't for at least a decade, in my non-expert opinion.
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The difference is that it's basically impossible to take control of a fab the same way you can for an oil well. No matter your military advantage, the people you're trying to take the fab from will just destroy it, and odds are good that you can't rebuild it yourself. You may as well skip the war altogether and begin researching how to build your own fabs since you need to do that anyway.
The people are also unique and essential to the fab in a way they aren’t for oil.
And yet fabs aren't reliant on minerals that are rare and geographically concentrated (for the most part, I'm sure they rely on some rare earths. The point is silicon is hilariously common).
Fabs also capture very little value. TSMC and Intel aren't the trillion dollar companies. Google, MS, Amazon, etc. are.
So there's really no upside. Only the downside of a large fraction of the world's high end fab capacity disappearing overnight. It'd be one thing if one side of the US and China had their own backup capacity. But they don't. And they won't for at least a decade, in my non-expert opinion.
MARKET CAP:
Uber (2x) > Ford
Airbnb (3x) > Hilton
The entire gig economy is this premise, so what's your point?
'Gigs' burn, then flop.