Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images via Getty Images; Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images
- President-elect Donald Trump named Elbridge Colby as his next undersecretary of defense policy.
- In February, Colby said "disabling or destroying TSMC is table stakes" if China invades Taiwan.
- Colby made the same point in 2023, saying the US should never allow TSMC to fall into Chinese hands.
President-elect Donald Trump's pick for undersecretary of defense policy once called for the destruction of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's chip plants if China takes over Taiwan.
"If China attacks Taiwan, Taiwan itself and US should not allow TSMC to fall intact into PRC hands," former senior Pentagon official Elbridge Colby wrote in an X post in May 2023.
Trump announced Colby's nomination on Sunday in a Truth Social post, calling him a "highly respected advocate for our America First foreign and defense policy."
Colby, a Harvard and Yale Law graduate, was part of the first Trump administration. He served as Trump's deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development from 2017 to 2018.
"There's no scenario in which Taiwan falls to the PRC and Taiwanese can expect TSMC and its central role to persist," Colby wrote in the same thread, adding that the US and its allies couldn't afford to allow China to "have such dominance over global semiconductors."
TSMC, Colby wrote, needs to be included in the US' semiconductor sanctions against China in the event Taiwan surrenders.
Colby made a similar point in another X post he published earlier in 2024.
"Disabling or destroying TSMC is table stakes if China is taking over Taiwan," Colby wrote on February 24.
"Would we be so insane as to allow the world's key semiconductor company fall untouched into the hands of an aggressive PRC?" he added.
Representatives for Trump and Colby did not respond to Business Insider's requests for comment. TSMC also did not respond to a request for comment.
TSMC is the world's largest contract chipmaker and counts US tech giants like Apple and Nvidia as major customers.
Its core base, Taiwan, is also home to smaller chip producers like MediaTek and ASE, making the island a critical node in the global semiconductor supply chain.
According to the US-based Semiconductor Industry Association, 92% of the world's most advanced microchips are produced in Taiwan.
In May, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told lawmakers at a House hearing that a Chinese seizure of TSMC during a Taiwan invasion "would be absolutely devastating." The US is obliged by law to protect Taiwan by providing the island with military means to defend itself.
Under President Joe Biden, the US has strived to diversify its chip supply.
In August 2022, Biden signed the $52 billion CHIPS for America Act, which provides manufacturing incentives for chip production in the US.
But the legislation drew Trump's criticism, who said in an interview with Joe Rogan in October, that tariffs, not subsidies, would have been more effective.
"You could have done it with tariffs. You tariff it so high that they will come and build their chip companies for nothing," Trump said.
In December, the Biden administration introduced a new raft of export controls on China's semiconductor industry.
The restrictions, which target 140 Chinese companies, mark the third time the administration has cracked down on China's chipmaking industry since October 2022.
The list includes companies like Huawei, Naura Technology Group, and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation.
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