>>96376Well of course, competition is always a good thing, but what we are seeing here is both a diversification and consolidation in the industry at the same time.
First, as a background information, there are three types of companies in this industry.
There are Integrated Device Manufacturers, which design and manufacture their own chips. Intel and Samsung are notable examples. Samsung also fabs chips for other companies, but they have been bleeding a lot of customers lately (namely, Qualcomm and Nvidia).
And there are fabless semiconductor companies, which design but outsource the manufacturing of their chips. Notable examples are Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia and AMD.
And then there are pure play fabs. These are the companies that take premade chip designs and manufacture them for other companies. Some examples are TSMC and GlobalFoundries. Samsung is also present in this field, but it doesn't fit in any other category I've talked about so far, so it's an outlier here.
TSMC is the leading pure play foundry. So much so that if you want the latest bleeding edge technology on your chips, there is pretty much no other choice, other than Samsung, which has worse offerings compared to TSMC. The problem is that when the entire industry depends on a simple company for leading edge technology, it can easily become a bottleneck. Any delays in their upcoming nodes can cause a ripple effect throughout the industry, which is what we are experiencing right now. Another bottleneck in chipmaking is ASML, which makes laser machines that are used in chipmaking. They are the only company that can make the advanced EUV lithography machines that make the latest generation processors economically viable. They have such a huge backlog of orders that they estimate they can deliver recently ordered machines three years later. This, of course played a part in the recent semiconductor shortage.
So it's true that we have some serious competition in the industry right now, but it's mostly concentrated in the Western sphere of influence and there are several chokepoints that can grind the entire industry down to a halt. If China were to make EUV machines, then I assume we would have astronomic advances in the industry, comparable to Cold War space race, but that doesn't seem probable, at least for 2020s.