Does TW have an equivalent item to US H1 and other worker visas? That is another way many US firms try to deal with a lack of acceptable candidates (at the salary level the firms wish to pay). And, well, the Visa program has 'worked' in the US for quite a long time now.
It's resulted in thousands of people who are barely capable and only doing the jobs for the money compared to back home, meanwhile skilled, experienced, talented people who just wanted to be paid appropriately for their talents are out of work or underpaid. A broad temporary working visa employment increases the likely hood of people staying after their visa has expired, as unlike a holiday these people have financial incentive to do so (note: I'm not saying that everyone on a visa is trying to be "an illegal", I do not think people in a country without a visa is strictly an issue - however these have been very relevant to the world and more specifically the given example of US of recent decades). Furthermore, if you're doing this kind of work, do you really want people that you're not sure you can trust doing it? Especially Taiwan where the Silicon Shield is a very, very real thing. For these main points, I do not believe a working visa plan would be a great way to primarily compete here for anyone involved.
TSMC will just have to cough up no?
This will result in higher wafer costs (already going up near exponentially) for their clients, and I do not expect any major chip company to just eat that against their profit - they'll pass it on to end users. Similarly, your comment about "the best company should have the best pay"[sic] - again, this will all come from an end purchaser. There is insufficient market elasticity for this to go any other way noticeably.
As for my thoughts on the matter - clearly, TSMCs renumeration needs to be addressed. I don't think a straight up pay increase would be viable - the sheer cost of it would risk bankrupting someone major - worker campuses, free lunches, etc and a long term plan to bring the pay up to relative parity ($200,000USD in the USA != $200,000USD in TW, not even close), and I think the retention increase needs to be a year or two in front of the hiring increase. Purpose here is twofold:
1) Stop the drain, better conditions NOW, and prove to your irreplaceable skill holders that it is worth them staying. Leaving your home and family for a 10x increase is very different to a 3-4x increase, especially if you have a partner or children.
2) Keep a trickle of new hires coming in who see value in staying - this is for your standard turn over (retirement / expansion based rates). If you're not hiring at this rate at least, you're effectively losing staff, and see point 1
As for what this would cost? I'm napkin mathing ~3x labour cost over a 5-10 year period. I don't reliably know how much of a wafer cost is labour value at the end of the day, a 3x increase on 10% is only a 20% total increase, so a 30k wafer is effectively 36k, but a 3x increase on 20% is 40%, leading to a 42k wafer. Break it down (5y @10% labour, 10y @20%) and you have a ~1.2k, or ~4% wafer cost increase PA due to labour, this leaves 6% for material, transport, cap-ex repay, and inflation increases, assuming they continue their 10% PI on a yearly basis (iirc this was actually for a 4nm node, but it's "the most relevant" data I'm bringing to mind), which I do not believe was the expectation, but I do believe would be absorbed
graciously enough.
That being said, TSMC are certainly not "TW Fabless" - so what's happening there?
I could see Realtek being purchased by Broadcom - just to kill them to be honest. Marvell could have a go at it, but ehh, they have Aquantia for that market. NVidia could well snap them up, integrate Mellanox + RT into a networking umbrella, with RT for consumer / the poors, and mellanox for corporates. Intel... I'm surprised they didn't sell their NIC business off with the rest. Glad, but surprised. None of these will help TW, but Realtek doesn't help much either so what's the real loss.
And to be frank - Realtek dying would just make my life easier. Supporting products with their chips is just painful. Waste of time and resources usually when an intel card's only 3-4x the cost, but will
just work forever (and save you on tech labour).
Silicon motion are in a really weird spot where... I don't think they have anything to be worried about in demand, by sheer virtue of regularly being the first to their market in volume. Their products don't have critical issues, aren't releasing outside of scope, and are highly affordable. That being said, if all their designers get poached, the first I'll know about their issues is when I have a thousand devices fail, so there's a real, real concern here. Frankly, the flash market is like Milk in Australia - being sold notably below what it should ever have been, but because it has been no one wants to pay any more than what it was. I cross my fingers and hope because their controllers are decent enough for me to want them to keep developing. I would love to see Silicon Motions share holder meetings, because they really could do with paying their staff better but would be better off not increasing prices (the USA should be
begging for a reason to fund Micron) - unlike the overall silicon market, the DRAM / PCIe controller market has
more elasticity.
How do you float companies like that generally next to NVidia? Well, more trained staff overall really. You make sure you have enough people to staff NVidia, AND a reasonable enough chunk left over that even with bleed off to the USA / Europe, you'll have enough people stay for passion. When that's not enough, what you need next is the government to step in and say "How do we make our people want to stay in their home country? What can we do for them to keep them?" Because losing workers to the USA IS a national issue, and it will need government oversight at the very least to improve the situation.
TL;DR:
Supply : Demand must always be considered with market conditions, wages between nations are rarely comparable, and paying more costs more. Fabless companies losing staff to NVidia should fall under monopoly concerns, as that's what will happen in the long run; fabless companies losing staff to overseas should fall under a national economic stability concern; both of these happening at once is what we have. And thanks, now I've put all my thoughts down, trimmed out some weird relics... I'm more worried. dang.
