A major earthquake in Taiwan has halted some TSMC chip production lines, potentially impacting the manufacture of Apple devices (via Bloomberg).
A 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck Taiwan in the early hours of the morning, causing significant damage to infrastructure and disrupting operations at several TSMC key manufacturing sites. Sources familiar with TSMC’s operations said that the company’s N3 fab in Tainan suffered structural damage, with beams and columns broken, leading to an outright halt in production. EUV machines, essential for manufacturing processes below 7nm, have stopped, and research and development labs have been subject to significant damage, such as cracked walls. Another fab in Hsinchu reported broken pipelines and extensive damage to wafers, necessitating a halt in production.
Some of TSMC’s high-end chips, such as the 3nm A17 Pro in the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, require round-the-clock operations and a stable vacuum environment for several weeks. As a result, some high-end chips already in production are likely to have been spoiled even if they were not damaged directly.
Read more at MacRumors.com