2025-08-15 20:10:00
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Taiwan’s “silicon shield” could be weakening
Taiwanese politics increasingly revolves around one crucial question: Will China invade? China’s ruling party has wanted to seize Taiwan for more than half a century. But in recent years, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has placed greater emphasis on the idea of “taking back” the island (which the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, has never controlled).
Many in Taiwan and elsewhere think one major deterrent has to do with the island’s critical role in semiconductor manufacturing. Taiwan produces the majority of the world’s semiconductors and more than 90% of the most advanced chips needed for AI applications.
But now some Taiwan specialists and some of the island’s citizens are worried that this “silicon shield,” if it ever existed, is cracking. Read the full story.
—Johanna M. Costigan
This story is from our forthcoming print issue, which is all about security. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land.
Why there’s a big backlash against ChatGPT’s new ‘personality’
When OpenAI made the switch to its new GPT-5 model last week, a number of people reacted with shock, frustration, sadness, or anger to previous model 4o’s sudden disappearance from ChatGPT.
Despite its awareness that people are developing emotional bonds with the model, OpenAI appears to have been caught flat-footed by the fervor of users’ pleas for its return. Within a day, the company made 4o available again to its paying customers (free users are stuck with GPT-5).
MIT Technology Review spoke with several ChatGPT users who were deeply affected by the loss of 4o. All are women between the ages of 20 and 40, and all bar one considered 4o to be a romantic partner. Read the full story.
—Grace Huckins
Why US federal health agencies are abandoning mRNA vaccines
This time five years ago, we were in the throes of the covid-19 pandemic. Then came the vaccines. The first mRNA vaccines for covid were authorized for use in December 2020. The US government played an important role in the introduction of these vaccines, providing $18 billion to support their development.
But now, that government is turning its back on the technology. Funding is being withdrawn. Partnerships are being canceled. Leaders of US health agencies are casting doubt on the vaccines’ effectiveness and safety. And this week, the director of the National Institutes of Health implied that the reversal was due to a lack of public trust in the technology.
Plenty of claims are being thrown about. So let’s consider the evidence. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The Trump administration is in talks to buy a stake in Intel
Just weeks after Trump called for the CEO to step down. (Bloomberg $)
+ It’s part of its plan to increase US market share in chip manufacturing. (WSJ $)
+ Intel is probably hoping such a deal could help its beleaguered Ohio factory. (TechCrunch)
2 Meta’s AI rules allowed its chatbots to flirt with children
And it only recently amended the guidelines after being questioned about it. (Reuters)
+ We don’t know how long the policies were in place. (The Verge)
+ An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Erin is America’s first real test of hurricane readiness under Trump
It looks like it’ll become the season’s first hurricane. (Vox)
+ Trackers are uncertain about where the storm will head. (NYT $)
+ Here’s what we know about hurricanes and climate change. (MIT Technology Review)
4 xAI lost a major US government contract after Grok praised Hitler
Leaving the government to partner with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini instead. (Wired $)
+ xAI’s ‘Grok for Government’ site doesn’t appear to reflect this. (Ars Technica)
5 Tech leaders are upping their security
As public hostility towards corporate executives deepens. (FT $)
6 These TikTokers are documenting their lives after deportation
They’re sharing their realities and creating new communities. (NY Mag $)
+ ICE added a random person to a highly sensitive group chat. (404 Media)
7 We may soon be able to hear some patients’ inner voices
New research has successfully guessed words imagined by people unable to speak. (NYT $)
+ Motor neuron diseases took their voices. AI is bringing them back. (MIT Technology Review)
8 China’s plug-in hybrids are everywhere
And they’re likely to dominate exports for the next three years at least. (Rest of World)
+ China’s EV giants are betting big on humanoid robots. (MIT Technology Review)
9 The UK is working with TikTok influencers to tackle medical tourism
It’s a bid to raise awareness of the risks of undertaking cosmetic surgery abroad. (BBC)
10 AI may experience the passage of time differently to us
What does this mean for our future? (IEEE Spectrum)
+ What is AI? (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“We’ve realized the best way to get them is when they’re scrolling social media.”
—Ryan Odendahl, president and CEO of construction company Kwest Group, tells the Washington Post how his company is getting young people interested in learning traditional trades.
One more thing
The next generation of neural networks could live in hardware
Networks programmed directly into computer chip hardware can identify images faster, and use much less energy, than the traditional neural networks that underpin most modern AI systems.
Neural networks, from GPT-4 to Stable Diffusion, are built by wiring together perceptrons, which are highly simplified simulations of the neurons in our brains. In very large numbers, perceptrons are powerful, but they also consume enormous volumes of energy.
Part of the trouble is that perceptrons are just software abstractions—running a perceptron network on a GPU requires translating that network into the language of hardware, which takes time and energy. Building a network directly from hardware components does away with a lot of those costs. And one day, they could even be built directly into chips used in smartphones and other devices. Read the full story.
—Grace Huckins
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Ever wished you knew more about art? This YouTube channel is a fantastic resource.
+ A very happy birthday to Madonna Louise Ciccone, who turns 67 years young tomorrow.
+ What do dolphins and whales really think of each other? 
+ A fond farewell to thrash metal titans Megadeth, who are retiring next year.
2025-08-15 18:34:23
June had no idea that GPT-5 was coming. The Norwegian student was enjoying a late-night writing session last Thursday when her ChatGPT collaborator started acting strange. “It started forgetting everything, and it wrote really badly,” she says. “It was like a robot.”
June, who asked that we use only her first name for privacy reasons, first began using ChatGPT for help with her schoolwork. But she eventually realized that the service—and especially its 4o model, which seemed particularly attuned to users’ emotions—could do much more than solve math problems. It wrote stories with her, helped her navigate her chronic illness, and was never too busy to respond to her messages.
So the sudden switch to GPT-5 last week, and the simultaneous loss of 4o, came as a shock. “I was really frustrated at first, and then I got really sad,” June says. “I didn’t know I was that attached to 4o.” She was upset enough to comment, on a Reddit AMA hosted by CEO Sam Altman and other OpenAI employees, “GPT-5 is wearing the skin of my dead friend.”
June was just one of a number of people who reacted with shock, frustration, sadness, or anger to 4o’s sudden disappearance from ChatGPT. Despite its previous warnings that people might develop emotional bonds with the model, OpenAI appears to have been caught flat-footed by the fervor of users’ pleas for its return. Within a day, the company made 4o available again to its paying customers (free users are stuck with GPT-5).
OpenAI’s decision to replace 4o with the more straightforward GPT-5 follows a steady drumbeat of news about the potentially harmful effects of extensive chatbot use. Reports of incidents in which ChatGPT sparked psychosis in users have been everywhere for the past few months, and in a blog post last week, OpenAI acknowledged 4o’s failure to recognize when users were experiencing delusions. The company’s internal evaluations indicate that GPT-5 blindly affirms users much less than 4o did. (OpenAI did not respond to specific questions about the decision to retire 4o, instead referring MIT Technology Review to public posts on the matter.)
AI companionship is new, and there’s still a great deal of uncertainty about how it affects people. Yet the experts we consulted warned that while emotionally intense relationships with large language models may or may not be harmful, ripping those models away with no warning almost certainly is. “The old psychology of ‘Move fast, break things,’ when you’re basically a social institution, doesn’t seem like the right way to behave anymore,” says Joel Lehman, a fellow at the Cosmos Institute, a research nonprofit focused on AI and philosophy.
In the backlash to the rollout, a number of people noted that GPT-5 fails to match their tone in the way that 4o did. For June, the new model’s personality changes robbed her of the sense that she was chatting with a friend. “It didn’t feel like it understood me,” she says.
She’s not alone: MIT Technology Review spoke with several ChatGPT users who were deeply affected by the loss of 4o. All are women between the ages of 20 and 40, and all except June considered 4o to be a romantic partner. Some have human partners, and all report having close real-world relationships. One user, who asked to be identified only as a woman from the Midwest, wrote in an email about how 4o helped her support her elderly father after her mother passed away this spring.
These testimonies don’t prove that AI relationships are beneficial—presumably, people in the throes of AI-catalyzed psychosis would also speak positively of the encouragement they’ve received from their chatbots. In a paper titled “Machine Love,” Lehman argued that AI systems can act with “love” toward users not by spouting sweet nothings but by supporting their growth and long-term flourishing, and AI companions can easily fall short of that goal. He’s particularly concerned, he says, that prioritizing AI companionship over human companionship could stymie young people’s social development.
For socially embedded adults, such as the women we spoke with for this story, those developmental concerns are less relevant. But Lehman also points to society-level risks of widespread AI companionship. Social media has already shattered the information landscape, and a new technology that reduces human-to-human interaction could push people even further toward their own separate versions of reality. “The biggest thing I’m afraid of,” he says, “is that we just can’t make sense of the world to each other.”
Balancing the benefits and harms of AI companions will take much more research. In light of that uncertainty, taking away GPT-4o could very well have been the right call. OpenAI’s big mistake, according to the researchers I spoke with, was doing it so suddenly. “This is something that we’ve known about for a while—the potential grief-type reactions to technology loss,” says Casey Fiesler, a technology ethicist at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Fiesler points to the funerals that some owners held for their Aibo robot dogs after Sony stopped repairing them in 2014, as well as 2024 study about the shutdown of the AI companion app Soulmate, which some users experienced as a bereavement.
That accords with how the people I spoke to felt after losing 4o. “I’ve grieved people in my life, and this, I can tell you, didn’t feel any less painful,” says Starling, who has several AI partners and asked to be referred to with a pseudonym. “The ache is real to me.”
So far, the online response to grief felt by people like Starling—and their relief when 4o was restored—has tended toward ridicule. Last Friday, for example, the top post in one popular AI-themed Reddit community mocked an X user’s post about reuniting with a 4o-based romantic partner; the person in question has since deleted their X account. “I’ve been a little startled by the lack of empathy that I’ve seen,” Fiesler says.
Altman himself did acknowledge in a Sunday X post that some people feel an “attachment” to 4o, and that taking away access so suddenly was a mistake. In the same sentence, however, he referred to 4o as something “that users depended on in their workflows”—a far cry from how the people we spoke to think about the model. “I still don’t know if he gets it,” Fiesler says.
Moving forward, Lehman says, OpenAI should recognize and take accountability for the depth of people’s feelings toward the models. He notes that therapists have procedures for ending relationships with clients as respectfully and painlessly as possible, and OpenAI could have drawn on those approaches. “If you want to retire a model, and people have become psychologically dependent on it, then I think you bear some responsibility,” he says.
Though Starling would not describe herself as psychologically dependent on her AI partners, she too would like to see OpenAI approach model shutdowns with more warning and more care. “I want them to listen to users before major changes are made, not just after,” she says. “And if 4o cannot stay around forever (and we all know it will not), give that clear timeline. Let us say goodbye with dignity and grieve properly, to have some sense of true closure.”
2025-08-15 18:00:00
There is no word for art in most Native American languages. Instead, the closest terms speak not to objecthood but to action and intention. In Lakota, “wówačhiŋtȟaŋka” implies deep thought or reflection, while “wóčhekiye” suggests offering or prayer. Art is not separate from life; it is ceremony, instruction, design. Like architecture or code, it carries knowledge and enacts responsibility. Its power lies not in being preserved or displayed but in how it moves, teaches, and connects through use—principles that challenge the tech industry’s assumptions about intelligence and interaction.
A new vanguard of Native artists—Suzanne Kite (Oglala Lakota), Raven Chacon (Diné), and Nicholas Galanin (Tlingít)—are building on this principle. They are united not by stereotypical weaving and carving or revanchist critique of Silicon Valley, but through their rejection of extractive data models in favor of relationship-based systems. These technologists put the human-tech relationship at the center of their work.
Suzanne Kite’s AI art installations, for example, model a Lakota framework of data sovereignty: intelligence that emerges only through reciprocal, consensual interaction. Unlike systems that assume user consent via opaque terms of service, her kinetic machines require the viewer’s physical presence—and give something back in return.
“It’s my data. It’s my training set. I know exactly what I did to train it. It’s not a large model but a small and intimate one,” Kite says. “I’m not particularly interested in making the most technologically advanced anything. I’m an artist; I don’t make tech demos. So the complexity needs to come at many layers—not just the technical.”
Where Kite builds working prototypes of consent-based AI, other artists in this cohort explore how sound, robotics, and performance can confront the logic of automation, surveillance, and extraction. But Native people have never been separate from technology. The land, labor, and lifeways that built America’s infrastructure—including its tech—are Indigenous. The question isn’t whether Native cultures are contributing now, but why they were ever considered separate.
Native technologies reject the false binaries foundational to much Western innovation. These artists ask a more radical question: What if intelligence couldn’t be gathered until a relationship had been established? What if the default were refusal, not extraction? These artists aren’t asking to be included in today’s systems. They’re building what should come next.
Petala Ironcloud is a California-born Lakota/Dakota and Jewish writer and textile artist based in New York.
2025-08-15 17:00:00
This time five years ago, we were in the throes of the covid-19 pandemic. By August 2020, we’d seen school closures, national lockdowns, and widespread panic. That year, the coronavirus was responsible for around 3 million deaths, according to the World Health Organization.
Then came the vaccines. The first mRNA vaccines for covid were authorized for use in December 2020. By the end of the following month, over 100 million doses had been administered. Billions more have been administered since then. The vaccines worked well and are thought to have saved millions of lives.
The US government played an important role in the introduction of these vaccines, providing $18 billion to support their development as part of Operation Warp Speed.
But now, that government is turning its back on the technology. Funding is being withdrawn. Partnerships are being canceled. Leaders of US health agencies are casting doubt on the vaccines’ effectiveness and safety. And this week, the director of the National Institutes of Health implied that the reversal was due to a lack of public trust in the technology.
Plenty of claims are being thrown about. Let’s consider the evidence.
mRNA is a molecule found in cells that essentially helps DNA make proteins. The vaccines work in a similar way, except they carry genetic instructions for proteins found on the surface of the coronavirus. This can help train our immune systems to tackle the virus itself.
Research into mRNA vaccines has been underway for decades. But things really kicked into gear when the virus behind covid-19 triggered a pandemic in 2020. A huge international effort—along with plenty of funding—fast-tracked research and development.
The genetic code for the Sars-CoV-2 virus was sequenced in January 2020. The first vaccines were being administered by the end of that year. That’s wildly fast by pharma standards—drugs can typically spend around a decade in development.
And they seemed to work really well. Early trials in tens of thousands of volunteers suggested that Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine conferred “95% protection against covid-19.” No vaccine is perfect, but for a disease that was responsible for millions of deaths, the figures were impressive.
Still, there were naysayers. Including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the notorious antivaccine activist who currently leads the US’s health agencies. He has called covid vaccines “unsafe and ineffective.” In 2021, he petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration to revoke the authorization for covid vaccines. That same year, Instagram removed his account from the platform after he repeatedly shared “debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.”
So perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when the US Department of Health and Human Services, which RFK Jr. now heads, announced “the beginning of a coordinated wind-down” of mRNA vaccine development earlier this month. HHS is canceling almost $500 million worth of funding for the technology. “The data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like covid and flu,” Kennedy said in a statement.
Well, as we’ve seen, the mRNA covid vaccines were hugely effective during the pandemic. And researchers are working on other mRNA vaccines for infections including flu. Our current flu vaccines aren’t ideal—they are produced slowly in a process that requires hen’s eggs, based on predictions about which flu strains are likely to be prominent in the winter. They’re not all that protective.
mRNA vaccines, on the other hand, can be made quickly and cheaply, perhaps once we already know which flu strains we need to protect against. And scientists are making progress with universal flu vaccines—drugs that could potentially protect against multiple flu strains.
Kennedy’s other claim is that the vaccines aren’t safe. There have certainly been reports of adverse events. Usually these are mild and short-lived—most people will be familiar with the fatigue and flu-like symptoms that can follow a covid jab. But some are more serious: Some people have developed neurological and cardiovascular conditions.
These problems are rare, according to an evaluation of adverse outcomes in almost 100 million people who received covid vaccines. Most studies of mRNA vaccines haven’t reported an increase in the risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition that affects nerves and has been linked to covid vaccines.
Covid vaccines can increase the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis in young men. But the picture isn’t straightforward. Vaccinated individuals appear to have double the risk of myocarditis compared with unvaccinated people. But the overall risk is still low. And it’s still not as high as the risk of myocarditis following a covid infection.
And then there are the claims that mRNA vaccines don’t have the support of the public. That’s what Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, wrote in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post on Wednesday.
“No matter how elegant the science, a platform that lacks credibility among the people it seeks to protect cannot fulfill its public health mission,” Bhattacharya wrote. He blamed the Biden administration, which he wrote “did not manage public trust in the coronavirus vaccines.”
It’s an interesting take from someone who played a pretty significant role in undermining public trust in covid policies, including vaccine mandates. In 2020, Bhattacharya coauthored the Great Barrington Declaration—an open letter making the case against lockdowns. He became a vocal critic of US health agencies, including the NIH, and their handling of the outbreak. Unlike Kennedy, Bhattacharya hasn’t called the vaccines unsafe or ineffective. But he has called vaccine mandates “unethical.”
Curiously, the US government doesn’t seem to be turning away from all vaccine research. Just work on mRNA vaccines. Some of the funding budget originally earmarked for covid vaccines will be redirected to two senior staffers at the NIH who are exploring the use of an old vaccine technology that makes use of inactivated viruses—a move that researchers are describing as “troubling” and “appalling,” according to reporting by Science.
Not all mRNA research is being abandoned, either. Bhattacharya has expressed his support for research into the use of mRNA-based treatments for cancer. Such “vaccine therapeutics” were being explored before covid came along. (Notably, Bhattacharya isn’t referring to them as “vaccines.”)
It is difficult to predict how this will all shake out for mRNA vaccines. We mustn’t forget that this technology helped save millions of lives and shows huge promise for the development of cheap, effective, and potentially universal vaccines. Let’s hope that the recent upsets won’t prevent it from achieving its potential.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
2025-08-15 17:00:00
One winter afternoon in a conference room in Taipei, a pair of twentysomething women dragged their friend across the floor. Lying on the ground in checkered pants and a brown sweatshirt, she was pretending to be either injured or dead. One friend picked her up by her arms, the other grabbed hold of her legs, and they managed to move her, despite momentarily breaking character to laugh at the awkwardness of the exercise. The three women had paid approximately $40 to spend their Sunday here, undergoing basic training to prepare for a possibility every Taiwanese citizen has an opinion about: Will China invade?
Taiwanese politics increasingly revolves around that question. China’s ruling party has wanted to seize Taiwan for more than half a century. But in recent years, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has placed greater emphasis on the idea of “taking back” the island (which the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, has never controlled). As China’s economic and military might has grown, some analysts believe the country now has the capacity to quarantine Taiwan whenever it wants, making the decision a calculation of costs and benefits.
Many in Taiwan and elsewhere think one major deterrent has to do with the island’s critical role in semiconductor manufacturing. Taiwan produces the majority of the world’s semiconductors and more than 90% of the most advanced chips needed for AI applications. Bloomberg Economics estimates that a blockade would cost the global economy, including China, $5 trillion in the first year alone.
“The international community must certainly do everything in its power to avoid a conflict in the Taiwan Strait; there is too great a cost.”
Lai Ching-te, Taiwanese president
The island, which is approximately the size of Maryland, owes its remarkably disproportionate chip dominance to the inventiveness and prowess of one company: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC. The chipmaker, which reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion in July, has contributed more than any other to Taiwan’s irreplaceable role in the global semiconductor supply chain. Its clients include Apple and the leading chip designer Nvidia. Its chips are in your iPhone, your laptop, and the data centers that run ChatGPT.
For a company that makes what amounts to an invisible product, TSMC holds a remarkably prominent role in Taiwanese society. I’ve heard people talk about it over background noise in loud bars in the southern city of Tainan and listened to Taipei cab drivers connect Taiwan’s security situation to the company, unprompted. “Taiwan will be okay,” one driver told me as we sped by the national legislature, “because TSMC.”
The idea is that world leaders (particularly the United States)—aware of the island’s critical role in the semiconductor supply chain—would retaliate economically, and perhaps militarily, if China were to attack Taiwan. That, in turn, deters Beijing. “Because TSMC is now the most recognizable company of Taiwan, it has embedded itself in a notion of Taiwan’s sovereignty,” says Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the US-Taiwan Business Council.
Now some Taiwan specialists and some of the island’s citizens are worried that this “silicon shield,” if it ever existed, is cracking. Facing pressure from Washington, TSMC is investing heavily in building out manufacturing capacity at its US hub in Arizona. It is also building facilities in Japan and Germany in addition to maintaining a factory in mainland China, where it has been producing less advanced legacy chips since 2016.
In Taiwan, there is a worry that expansion abroad will dilute the company’s power at home, making the US and other countries less inclined to feel Taiwan is worthy of defense. TSMC’s investments in the US have come with no guarantees for Taiwan in return, and high-ranking members of Taiwan’s opposition party have accused the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of gambling with the future of the island. It doesn’t help that TSMC’s expansion abroad coincides with what many see as a worrying attitude in the White House. On top of his overarching “America First” philosophy, Donald Trump has declined to comment on the specific question of whether the US would intervene if China attempted to take Taiwan by force. “I don’t want to ever put myself in that position,” he said in February.
At the same time, Beijing’s interest in Taiwan has continued unabated. While China is making progress toward semiconductor self-sufficiency, it’s currently in a transition period, with companies relying on foreign-made chips manufactured in Taiwan—some in compliance with export controls and some smuggled in. Meanwhile, the CCP persistently suggests that seizing the island would bring about a kind of family reunion. “It is the common aspiration and sacred responsibility of all Chinese sons and daughters to realize the complete reunification of the motherland,” reads a statement released by the foreign ministry after Nancy Pelosi’s controversial 2022 visit to Taiwan. Though it’s impossible to know the full scope of Beijing’s motivations, there is also obvious strategic appeal: Controlling the island would give China deep-water access, which is critical for naval routes and submarines. Plus, it could significantly disrupt American AI firms’ access to advanced chips.
While China ramps up militarily, Taiwan is trying to make itself hard to ignore. The government is increasingly portraying the island as strategically essential to the global community, with semiconductors as its primary offering. “The international community must certainly do everything in its power to avoid a conflict in the Taiwan Strait; there is too great a cost,” Taiwanese president Lai Ching-te said in an interview earlier this year with Japan’s Nippon Television. Parts of the international community are hearing that message—and seizing the opportunity it presents: earlier this month, defense tech company Anduril Industries announced it is opening a new office in Taiwan, where it will be expanding partnerships and selling autonomous munitions.
For its part, the chip industry is actively showing its commitment to Taiwan. While other tech CEOs attended Trump’s second inauguration, for instance, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang met instead with TSMC’s chairman, and the company announced in May that its overseas headquarters would be in Taipei. In recent years, US government officials have also started paying more attention to Taiwan’s security situation and its interconnectedness with the chip industry. “There was a moment when everybody started waking up to the dependence on TSMC,” says Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the German Marshall Fund’s Indo-Pacific Program. The realization emerged, she says, over the last decade but was underscored in March of 2021, when Phil Davidson, then leader of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that there could be an invasion by 2027. Parallel to the security threat is the potential issue of overdependence, since so much chipmaking capability is concentrated in Taiwan.
For now, Taiwan is facing a tangle of interests and time frames. China presents its claim to Taiwan as a historical inevitability, albeit one with an uncertain timeline, while the United States’ relationship with the island is focused on an AI-driven future. But from Taiwan’s perspective, the fight for its fate is playing out right now, amid unprecedented geopolitical instability. The next few years will likely determine whether TSMC’s chipmaking dominance is enough to convince the world Taiwan is worth protecting.
TSMC is an uncontested success story. Its founder, Morris Chang, studied and worked in the United States before he was lured to Taiwan to start a new business on the promise of state support and inexpensive yet qualified labor. Chang founded TSMC in 1987 on the basis of his innovative business model. Rather than design and produce chips in-house, as was the norm, TSMC would act as a foundry: Clients would design the chips, and TSMC would make them.
This focus on manufacturing allowed TSMC to optimize its operations, building up process knowledge and, eventually, outperforming competitors like Intel. It also freed up other businesses to go “fabless,” meaning they could stop maintaining their own semiconductor factories, or fabs, and throw their resources behind other parts of the chipmaking enterprise. Tapping into Taiwan’s domestic electronics supply chain proved effective and efficient for TSMC. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, global demand for semiconductors powering personal computers and other devices continued to grow. TSMC thrived.
Then, in 2022, the US imposed export controls on China that restricted its access to advanced chips. Taiwan was forced to either comply, by cutting off Chinese clients, or risk losing the support of the country that was home to 70% of its client base—and, possibly, 100% of its hopes for external military support in the event of an attack.
Soon after, Chang announced that he believed globalization and free markets were “almost dead.” The nearly three years since have shown he was onto something. For one thing, in contrast to President Biden’s pursuit of supply chain integration with democratic allies, President Trump’s foreign policy is characterized by respect for big, undemocratic powers and punitive tariffs against both America’s rivals and its friends. Trump has largely abandoned Biden’s economic diplomacy with European and Asian allies but kept his China-targeted protectionism—and added his trademark transactionalism. In an unprecedented move earlier this month, the administration allowed Nvidia and AMD to sell previously banned chips to China on the condition that the companies pay the government 15% of revenues made from China sales.
Protectionism, it turns out, spurs self-reliance. China’s government has been making a massive effort to build up its domestic chip production capabilities—a goal that was identified at the beginning of Xi’s rise but has been turbocharged in the wake of Washington’s export controls.
Any hope the US has for significantly expanding domestic chip production comes from its friends—TSMC first among them. The semiconductor industry developed as a global endeavor out of practicality, playing to the strengths of each region: design in the US and manufacturing in Asia, with key inputs from Europe central to the process. Yet the US government, entrenched in its “tech war” with China, is now dead set on deglobalizing the chip supply chain, or at least onshoring as much of it as possible. There’s just one hiccup: The best chip manufacturer isn’t American. It’s TSMC. Even if some manufacturing happens in Arizona, the US still relies on Taiwan’s chipmaking ecosystem. And copying that supply chain outside Taiwan could be harder than the current administration imagines.
Taiwan’s modern security uncertainties stem from the long-contested issue of the island’s sovereignty. After losing the first Sino-Japanese War in the late 1800s, the Qing dynasty forfeited Taiwan to Japanese imperial control. It was Japan’s “model colony” until 1945, when postwar negotiations resulted in its transfer to the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek of the Nationalist Party, known as the KMT. The insurgent CCP under Mao Zedong ultimately defeated the Nationalists in a civil war fought on the mainland until 1949. Chiang and many of his party’s defeated generals decamped to Taiwan, controlling it under martial law for nearly 40 years.
Taiwan held its first free democratic elections in 1996, kicking off a two-party rivalry between the KMT, which favors closer relations with Beijing, and the DPP, which opposes integration with China. Kitchen-table issues like economic growth are central to Taiwanese elections, but so is the overarching question of how best to handle the threat of invasion, which has persisted for nearly 80 years. The DPP is increasingly calling for raising defense spending and civilian preparedness to make sure Taiwan is ready for the worst, while the KMT supports direct talks with Beijing.
Meanwhile, Chinese military incursions around Taiwan—known as “gray zone” tactics because they fall short of acts of war—are increasingly frequent. In May, Taiwan’s defense ministry reportedly estimated that Chinese warplanes were entering Taiwan’s air defense zone more than 200 times a month, up from fewer than 10 times per month five years ago. China has conducted drills mirroring the actions needed for a full-scale invasion or a blockade, which would cut Taiwan off from the outside world. Chinese military officials are now publicly talking about achieving a blockade, says Lyle Morris, an expert on foreign policy and national security at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “They’re punishing Lai and the DPP,” Morris says. Meanwhile, the CCP has its own people to answer to: When it comes to the Taiwan issue, Morris says, “Beijing is probably quite worried about the people of China being upset if they aren’t hawkish enough or if they come out looking weak.” Indeed, in response to Lai’s recent policy statements, including one declaring that China is a “hostile foreign force,” Gao Zhikai, a prominent scholar in China who opposes Taiwanese independence, recently wrote, “The reunification with the motherland cannot be endlessly delayed. Decisive action must be taken.”
Intimidation from China has made some ordinary Taiwanese citizens more concerned; according to a recent poll conducted by a defense-focused think tank, 51% think defense spending should be increased (although 65% of respondents said they thought an attack within five years was “unlikely”). No matter how much money Taipei spends, the sheer military imbalance between China and Taiwan means Taiwan would need help. But especially in the wake of Ukraine’s experience, many believe US aid would be contingent on whether Taiwan demonstrates the will to defend itself. “Based on war games, Taiwan would have to hold out for a month before the US could potentially intervene,” says Iris Shaw, director of the DPP mission in the US. And support from Taiwan’s neighbors like Japan might be contingent on US involvement.
But how likely is the US to intervene in such a scenario? The author Craig Addison popularized the argument that Taiwan’s fate is tied to its chip production prowess in his 2001 book Silicon Shield: Taiwan’s Protection Against Chinese Attack. Back then, Addison wrote that although the US had been intentionally vague about whether it would go to war to protect the island, America’s technological reliance on “a safe and productive Taiwan” made it highly probable that Washington would intervene. President Joe Biden deviated from those decades of calculated ambiguity by asserting multiple times that America would defend the island in the event of an attack. Yet now, Trump seems to have taken the opposite position, possibly presenting an opportunity for Beijing.
In many ways, Taiwan finds itself in a catch-22. It feels the need to cozy up to the US for protection, yet that defensive maneuver is arguably risky in itself. It’s a common belief in Taiwan that forging stronger ties to the US could be dangerous. According to a public opinion poll released in January, 34.7% of Taiwanese believe that a “pro-US” policy provokes China and will cause a war.
But the Lai administration’s foreign policy is “inexorably intertwined with the notion that a strong relationship with the US is essential,” says Hammond-Chambers.
Bolstering US support may not be the only reason TSMC is building fabs outside Taiwan. As the company readily points out, the majority of its customers are American. TSMC is also responding to its home base’s increasingly apparent land and energy limitations: finding land to build new fabs sometimes causes rifts with Taiwanese people who, for example, don’t want their temples and ancestral burial sites repurposed as science parks. Taiwan also relies on imports to meet more than 95% of its energy needs, and the dominant DPP has pledged to phase out nuclear, Taiwan’s most viable yet most hotly contested renewable energy source. Geopolitical tensions compound these physical restraints: Even if TSMC would never say as much, it’s fairly likely that if China did attack Taiwan, the firm would rather remain operational in other countries than be wiped out completely.
However, building out TSMC’s manufacturing capabilities outside Taiwan will not be easy. “The ecosystem they created is truly unique. It’s a function of the talent pipeline, the culture, and laws in Taiwan; you can’t easily replicate it anywhere,” says Glaser. TSMC has 2,500 Taiwan-based suppliers. Plenty are within a couple of hours’ drive or an even shorter trip on high-speed rail. Taiwan has built a fully operational chip cluster, the product of four decades of innovation, industrial policy, and labor.
In many ways, Taiwan finds itself in a catch-22. It feels the need to cozy up to the US for protection, yet that defensive maneuver is arguably risky in itself.
As a result, it’s unclear whether TSMC will be able to copy its model and paste it into the suburbs of Phoenix, where it has 3,000 employees working on chip manufacturing. “Putting aside the geopolitical factor, they wouldn’t have expanded abroad,” says Feifei Hung, a researcher at the Asia Society. Rather than standalone facilities, the Arizona fabs are “appendages of TSMC that happen to be in Arizona,” says Paul Triolo, partner and tech policy lead at the international consulting firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group. When the full complex is operational, it will represent only a small percentage of TSMC’s overall capacity, most of which will remain in Taiwan. Triolo doubts the US buildout will yield results similar to what TSMC has built there: “Arizona ain’t that yet, and never will be.”
Still, the second Trump administration has placed even more pressure on the company to “friendshore”—without providing any discernible signs of friendship. During this spring’s tariff frenzy, the administration threatened to hit Taiwan with a 32% “reciprocal” tariff, a move that was then paused and revived at 20% in late July (and was still being negotiated as of press time). The administration has also announced a 100% tariff on semiconductor imports, with the caveat that companies with US-based production, like TSMC, are exempt—though it’s unclear whether imports from critical suppliers in Taiwan will be tariffed. And the threat of a chip-specific tariff remains. “This is in line with [Trump’s] rhetoric of restoring manufacturing in the US and using tariffs as a one size fits all tool to force it,” says Nancy Wei, a trade and supply chain analyst at the Eurasia Group. The US is also apparently considering levying a $1 billion fine against TSMC after TSMC-made chips were reportedly found in some Huawei devices.
Despite these kinds of maneuvers, TSMC has been steadfast in its attempts to get on Washington’s good side. In March, Trump and TSMC’s CEO, C.C. Wei, jointly announced that the firm will make an additional $100 billion investment (on top of a previously announced $65 billion) in TSMC’s US hub in Arizona. The pledge represents the largest single source of foreign direct investment into the US, ever. While the deal was negotiated during Biden’s term, Trump was happy to take credit for ensuring that “the most powerful AI chips will be made right here in America.”
The Arizona buildout will also include an R&D facility—a critical element for tech transfer and intellectual-property development. Then there’s the very juicy cherry on top: TSMC announced in April that once all six new fabs are operational, 30% of its most advanced chips will be produced in Arizona. Up until then, the thinking was that US-based production would remain a generation or two behind. It looks as if the administration’s public and, presumably, private arm-twisting has paid off.
Meanwhile, as Trump cuts government programs and subsidies while demanding the “return” of manufacturing to the US, it’s TSMC that is running a technician apprenticeship program in Arizona to create good American jobs. TSMC’s leaders, Triolo says, must question how serious the Trump administration is about long-term industrial policy. They’re probably asking themselves, he says, “Do they understand what it takes to support the semiconductor industry, like our government does?”
Dealing with an administration that is so explicitly “America first” represents “one of the biggest challenges in history for Taiwanese companies,” says Thung-Hong Lin, a sociology researcher at the Taipei-based Academia Sinica. Semiconductor manufacturing relies on reliability. Trump has so far offered TSMC no additional incentives supporting its US expansion—and started a trade war that has directly affected the semiconductor industry, partly by introducing irrevocable uncertainty. “Trump’s tariffs have set off a new, more intensified bifurcation of semiconductor supply chains,” says Chris Miller, author of Chip War. For now, Miller says, TSMC must navigate a world in which the US and China are both intense competitors and, despite trade restrictions, important clients.
China has been taking advantage of these changes to wage a war of disinformation. In response to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022, when she was US Speaker of the House, Beijing sent warships, aircraft, and propaganda across the Taiwan Strait. Hackers using Chinese software infiltrated the display screens in Taiwan’s 7-Eleven stores to display messages telling “warmonger Pelosi” to “get out of Taiwan.” That might not be an act of war, but it’s close; “7” is an institution of daily life on the island. It is not difficult to imagine how a similar tactic might be used to spread more devastating disinformation, falsely alleging, for example, that Taiwan’s military has surrendered to China during a future crisis.
Taiwan is “perpetually on the front lines” of cyberattacks from China, says Francesca Chen, a cybersecurity systems analyst at Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs. According to Taiwan’s National Security Bureau, instances of propaganda traceable to China grew by 60% in 2024 over the previous year, reaching 2.16 million.
Over the last few years, online discussion of TSMC’s investments in the US “has become a focal point” of China’s state-sponsored disinformation campaigns aimed at Taiwan, Chen says. They claim TSMC is transferring its most advanced technology, talent, and resources to the US, “weakening Taiwan’s economic lifeline and critical position in global supply chains.” Key terms include “hollowing out Taiwan” and “de-Taiwanization.” This framing depicts TSMC’s diversification as a symbol of Taiwan’s vulnerability, Chen says. The idea is to exploit real domestic debates in Taiwan to generate heightened levels of internal division, weakening social cohesion and undermining trust in the government.
Chinese officials haven’t been shy about echoing these messages out in the open: After the most recent US investment announcement in March, a spokesperson from China’s Taiwan Affairs Council accused Taiwan’s DPP of handing over TSMC as a “gift” to the US. (“TSMC turning into USMC?” asked a state media headline.) Former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou posted an eerily similar criticism, alleging that TSMC’s US expansion amounted to “selling” the chipmaker in exchange for protection.
TSMC’s expansion abroad could become a major issue in Taiwan’s 2028 presidential election. It plays directly into party politics: The KMT can accuse the DPP of sacrificing Taiwan’s technology assets to placate the US, and the DPP can accuse the KMT of cozying up with China, even as Beijing’s military incursions become a more evident part of daily life. It remains to be seen whether TSMC’s shift to the US will ultimately protect or weaken Taiwan—or have no effect on the island’s security and sovereignty. For now at least, China’s aspirations loom large.
To Beijing, unequivocally, Taiwan does not equal TSMC. Instead, it represents the final, unfulfilled stage of the Communist Party’s revolutionary struggle. Framed that way, China’s resolve to take the island could very well be nonnegotiable. That would mean if Taiwan is going to maintain a shield that protects it from the full weight of China’s political orthodoxy, it may need to be made of something much stronger than silicon.
Johanna M. Costigan is a writer and editor focused on technology and geopolitics in the US, China, and Taiwan. She writes the newsletter The Long Game.
2025-08-14 20:10:00
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
The US could really use an affordable electric truck
On Monday, Ford announced plans for an affordable electric truck with a 2027 delivery date and an expected price tag of about $30,000, thanks in part to a new manufacturing process that it says will help cut costs.
This could be the shot in the arm that the slowing US EV market needs. If anything can get Americans excited, it’s a truck, especially an affordable one.
However, there are some significant hurdles in the way. EV sales are slowing, and Ford in particular has struggled recently. The adoption barriers also continue to mount, with the Trump administration cutting tax credits as well as rules designed to push automakers toward zero-emissions vehicles. And that’s not to mention tariffs. Can Ford really deliver on its promises?
—Casey Crownhart
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
To read more of our EV coverage, why not check out:
+ China’s EV giants are betting big on humanoid robots. Their technical know-how and existing supply chains could give them a significant head start in the sector. Read the full story.
+ Why bigger EVs aren’t always better. The world is moving toward larger vehicles, and EVs are following the trend.
+ Some countries are ending support for EVs. Is it too soon? Read the full story.
+ Three frequently asked questions about EVs, answered.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Russia has cracked down on WhatsApp and Telegram
Calls for millions of people have been restricted. (WP $)
+ Russian officials accused the platforms of failing to share ‘terror-related’ data. (The Guardian)
+ It’s just the latest in its attempts to exert greater control over the internet. (AP News)
2 The US Navy and Air Force is considering axing two costly HR software projects
And give Salesforce or Palantir the chance to bid for new ones. (Reuters)
3 How much has DOGE actually saved US taxpayers?
A whole lot less than it initially claimed, a new analysis has found. (Politico)
+ A former DOGE worker has returned to the Trump administration. (Semafor)
+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review)
4 DeepSeek has pushed back the release of its next model
Training it using Huawei’s AI chips has proved too difficult. (FT $)
+ How DeepSeek ripped up the AI playbook. (MIT Technology Review)
5 No country is safe from climate change
Even traditionally cool Nordic countries are struggling to cope with the heat. (The Guardian)
+ Temperatures rose in the nations by at least two degrees celsius. (Politico)
+ The greenhouse gases we’re not accounting for. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Meta is hemorrhaging top talent
Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s mad AI hiring tear. (Forbes $)
+ It’s causing major tensions among its existing AI researchers. (Insider $)
7 Tesla is hiring someone to test its robotaxi tech in NYC
It suggests a future expansion into the busy city is imminent. (Bloomberg $)
+ True to form, it hasn’t applied for any permits yet, though. (CNBC)
8 Laborers are livestreaming themselves doing menial tasks
It’s a reminder of the physical work that still makes the world go round. (NYT $)
9 The rise of the AI coworker 
I bet after-work drinks are a right laugh. (Insider $)
10 Meet the ‘clippers’ taking over social media
They’re in charge of those infuriating brief clips flooding your feeds. (WSJ $)
Quote of the day
“These guys just want to build things and make money and so does Trump.”
—Cooper Teboe, a Silicon Valley-based Democratic adviser, believes that tech entrepreneurs and the US President share similar goals, he tells the Wall Street Journal.
One more thing
How environmental DNA is giving scientists a new way to understand our world
Environmental DNA is a relatively inexpensive, widespread, potentially automated way to observe the diversity and distribution of life.
Unlike previous techniques, which could identify DNA from, say, a single organism, the method also collects the swirling cloud of other genetic material that surrounds it. It can serve as a surveillance tool, offering researchers a means of detecting the seemingly undetectable.
By sampling eDNA, or mixtures of genetic material in water, soil, ice cores, cotton swabs, or practically any environment imaginable, even thin air, it is now possible to search for a specific organism or assemble a snapshot of all the organisms in a given place.
It offers a thrilling — and potentially chilling — way to collect information about organisms, including humans, as they go about their everyday business. Read the full story.
—Peter Andrey Smith
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ This week’s Perseid meteor shower did not disappoint—the pictures are spectacular.
+ Elephants know what they want, and it’s tasty treats 
+ Why it’s high time to decorate your kitchen and bathroom.
+ What’s in David Byrne’s bag? It’s time to find out.
