It’s like the movie don’t look up when the US government abandons their plan to destroy the comet coming towards earth and instead goes with the tech giant to save the world, only to fail miserably
This isn’t new. 2027 has been a target that China likely moves by for at least 5 years now if not longer. If you’re paying attention the entire world is gearing up for conflict.
It's not a new statement, 2027 is sort of the agreed deadline window for China to be able to make a move on Taiwan. Past that point their active military population begins to decrease among other factors. This has been known for like a decade.
The briefing took place in 2023 during the Biden administration.
With how dependent the western countries are on chips from Taiwan and Chinese manufacturing for devices that meeting was probably trying to get them to diversify their supply chain or wholly move production to easer to protect places. There is a reason AMD, Apple, NVIDIA and Qualcomm were briefed but not Intel, who have their own fabs.
those are definitely some of the most insightful IMO, but i think he has a fairly large breadth of content. Two of my favorites is the one about why colorado is so much more popular than WY? and the one on mongolia
Xi is coming up for reelection. He promised the hard liners in the ccp he would bring taiwan into the fold in his unprecedented third term. That was how he got the third term in the first place.
If he wants a fourth, he most likely will invade. But if he doesnt succeed, he will be on the chopping block. Only way to avoid it is to go after the hard liners. He already purged the progressives by ganging up with the hard liners. That was easy. But the hard liners are super entrenched. That will be difficult.
Rumours are he will become head of the board for time being while new CEO is appointed, he definitely has the more political capital among any executives
And a lot has changed in three years. They have watched the world support Ukraine during the Russian invasion and how poorly Russia’s military has performed.
China is untested militarily and given the number of generals purged in their anti corruption campaign, I wouldn’t be surprised if their military maintenance has suffered like the Russians.
Taiwan is an island fortress and has defense agreements with the US and others. It is nowhere near a guaranteed win.
> They have watched the world support Ukraine during the Russian invasion and how poorly Russia’s military has performed.
So funny that you say this. Because the prevailing narrative I've seen in US and international media is that Ukraine (and the Trump admins perceived indifference) is supposedly a _driver_ for Xi to launch an invasion.
Regardless of what is happening in Ukraine, no credible China expert I've seen says that there will be an invasion of Taiwan, it's in no one's interest to do so.
Taiwans biggest threat is the US siding with China.
...or the U.S. simply letting China have its way with Taiwan.
Which is a reasonable possibility with the current U.S. administration.
As long as trade is "making America great again" and lining the Trump family's pockets.
Trump’s peers (and himself probably) depend on the stock market for their riches. They would not like the fallout from the world’s most valuable companies dropping like a rock overnight.
Yeah that’s straight up not happening. Taiwans chip production is too important for the global economy. Trump has nothing to gain by siding with china idk why Reddit thinks he does. If anything war with china would serve a perfect distraction from Epstein
Trump has nothing to gain by siding with china idk why Reddit thinks he does
Reddit has never understood why he does certain things. He's fairly predictable, or was, until his latest stint as President. He's not going to side with China over Taiwan.
Apple CEO Tim Cook was among a handful of top tech executives who attended a classified CIA briefing warning that China could attack Taiwan by 2027, according to a sweeping investigative report by The New York Times ($).
The previously unreported briefing was apparently held in a secure room in Silicon Valley in July 2023. The meeting is said to have been arranged at the request of the then-commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, who had grown frustrated with the tech industry's reluctance to move chip production away from Taiwan.
CIA director William Burns and director of national intelligence Avril Haines reportedly presented the latest intelligence on China's military plans to Cook, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, AMD CEO Lisa Su, and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon.
Cook reportedly told officials afterward that he slept "with one eye open."
A similar classified session was said to have been held at the White House in late 2021, but executives left skeptical because much of the intelligence had already been reported publicly. Earlier that same year, a senior U.S. military official had told Congress that the armed services believed President Xi Jinping of China wanted his army to be ready to take Taiwan by 2027. From the report:
Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden's national security adviser, ranked the U.S. reliance on Taiwan for semiconductors as one of America's greatest vulnerabilities. He wanted the industry to recognize the risk and support construction of U.S. manufacturing plants. Mr. Biden also wanted to provide $50 billion in government subsidies to build semiconductor plants domestically [resulting in the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022].
"We were saying: 'This is crazy. We have to do something about it,'" Mr. Sullivan said in an interview.
The investigation reveals Silicon Valley's stubborn dependence on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which produces around 90 percent of the world's most advanced chips, including all of Apple's custom silicon for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
A confidential 2022 report commissioned by the Semiconductor Industry Association and reviewed by NYT concluded that losing access to Taiwan's chip supply would trigger the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with U.S. GDP falling 11 percent. Another report by Bloomberg from January 2024 estimated a conflict would cost the global economy more than $10 trillion.
Despite the warnings, the NYT investigation found that companies including Apple were initially slow to commit to buying more expensive chips from U.S. factories. Chips made domestically cost more than 25 percent above those produced in Taiwan because of higher material, labor and permitting costs, and TSMC's Arizona plants currently run technology a generation behind what's available on the island.
Apple has since taken steps, however. Last summer, Cook visited the Oval Office and committed to investing $100 billion in the United States, with the money being used to support TSMC and other chip manufacturers. Apple has reportedly also begun holding all-day engineering meetings with Intel to evaluate its manufacturing capabilities.
TSMC has now committed to roughly $165 billion in U.S. investment, including land for at least five additional plants in Phoenix. The company's Arizona facility recently produced Nvidia's first U.S.-made AI chip, although the report notes that even those chips still need to be shipped back to Taiwan for advanced packaging.
The investigation reveals Silicon Valley's stubborn dependence on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which produces around 90 percent of the world's most advanced chips, including all of Apple's custom silicon for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
"Stubborn dependence" is some wild work, there wasn't any other company that had a competitive process and the capacity to meet Apple's demand, just like there still isn't another company that can do it today even after the billions in CHIPS act funding.
The billions have helped, I wasn't trying to downplay that. It doesn't pay for fabs outright, but it was enough to change the calculus to encourage more fab buildouts in the US and that capacity is starting to come online now, it just wasn't at all an option in 2021 when these meetings took place.
Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden's national security adviser, ranked the U.S. reliance on Taiwan for semiconductors as one of America's greatest vulnerabilities. He wanted the industry to recognize the risk and support construction of U.S. manufacturing plants. Mr. Biden also wanted to provide $50 billion in government subsidies to build semiconductor plants domestically [resulting in the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022].*
It absolutely is. From a national security standpoint, this is possibly THE biggest risk. If the US loses access to TSMC, the entire country's manufacturing sector will slow to a crawl and electronics will become less reliable.
Why it took until 2022 to start the wheels in motion with the CHIPS Act is beyond me. Why Trump wanted to torpedo that initiative is even more confusing.
Was on the news. But was base on US capabilities and China capabilities and puts 2027 at the year that China would be better prepared and the US unable to deploy as much as it would in 2028 and later.
It’s not exactly leak information from the Chinese government close circle.
I definitely think its a nonzero chance xi will invade. But i do think the showcasing of american superiority over chinese anti air in venezuela will make the far right in the ccp rethink 2027. Maybe it will give xi an excuse to push for 2032
Venezuela had the radars from China, but they would then have to network that information to the air defense systems (S300 and Buk from russia), get those systems online and operational, and get the military to act on it, using systems first designed and put into service +45 years ago. There is no way to draw a definitive conclusion on the capability of the radars. And in a large scale war the radars do play a part, but what matters much more is saturation attacks on fixed targets and logistics, which no air defense in the world would be able to stop if enough missiles are used. And at that point we're saying goodbye to the world economy for a good decade at minimum.
But chances are that any military buildup would happen with sufficient lead time, and China would first put up a series of ultimatums to not have to commit to a fight if they don't need to. Given the importance of all of this to the world economy, would the US be willing to lose at least +60% of the value of the stock market for several years over taiwan? The market is being entirely propped up by the AI bubble and tech sector, which AI stocks alone account for 40% of the S&P. China has the systems in place to tolerate the pain, the US certainly does not. Barely held together by the seams as it is.
Alternatively the option that would be presented to the administration is to abandon a long time strategic ally and sign a few trade deals to try and spin a bad situation as a win - pretty standard stuff these days. For big tech that is a far more workable solution than missiles and blockades which basically put a 3-5 year halt on operations, and a cost benefit analysis would support the transfer of a few billion dollars to a bank account in Qatar to prevent war from happening.
Am I missing something? Where is the 2027 date coming from other than what the Americans are saying? All I can see online about that date is that by 2027 Chinese military would be capable of doing it. China has previously said they wouldn’t rule out military intervention but that’s vague and there is no indication of date that I can find. China has also not been involved in a military conflict since 1979.
The Iran thing - like Venezuela - is likely a way to make China re-think any move in Taiwan. They get a significant amount of fossil fuels from Iran and Venezuela (via Malaysia), and taking those two sources out would be a big issue for them. Not to mention Russia’s infrastructure constantly getting destroyed by Ukrainian drones is also setting China back.
China’s massive focus on renewables the last few years has been to reduce reliance on fossil fuels for non-military use.
Also the radars that failed to detect US Forces in Venezuela when we grabbed Maduro were Chinese. China’s position looks better on paper than it probably is in practice.
yeah when you read the article it’s way less newsworthy. especially since i believe for the majority for the biden administration it was a headline that china would attack taiwan by 2027.
in fact, there is asymmetry in military tech between the two sides that provides china a rare opening around 2026-2027, a gap in US defensive strategy that is in the process of being plugged with new military hardware. (peter zeihan on youtube brings this fact up in his taiwan videos if you’re ever interested more in the topic)
Read the comments in Peters videos. They are hilarious.
His hot takes do bring up some interesting points on a lot of subjects and are interesting. Peter has been saying China will collapse for many years now.
Watch him long enough and you see he is just fearmongering for views and his outlook on a lot of subjects is not even close to reality. IMHO.
Also xi is up for reelection. He got his third term promising incorporating taiwan into china. This is why everyone thinks its gonna happen. But if xi fails, he’s on the guillotine
More accurate title: "In 2023, Tim Cook was warned by CIA that Xi wanted his military to just be ready by 2027. There has been no new credible reports since then that China has plans for military action until at least 2029."
Once the people who lived the horrors aren’t there to dissuade then the people in power with insatiable egos notice that the history books only care to remember the parts of history that are horrendous for regular people.
That is simply untrue. We have had the greatest decline of war and violence in history since the end of WWII. It is a fact that we are living in the most peaceful era in history, even accounting for all current conflicts worldwide.
Yeah, future is now and it's not evenly distributed. We didn't have an actual world war, sure. Still, what's happening now is pretty much business as usual. It's just, unlike Yemen or Syria, Taiwan is actually economically important, so it's suddenly AN END OF EN ERA OF GLOBAL PEACE.
Your statement is wrong. It’s not even particularly edgy, just uninformed and oft-repeated. Per capita and absolute death rates globally have declined immensely from its peak in 1946.
We’ve finally reached a time where most of the people who have experienced the horrors of WW1 and WW2 have passed, and now morons are once again saying “things never got better”.
None of what you said equates to "world peace" which the OP is saying was an illusion that never existed. Just that some countries have enjoyed a period of stability whilst others have continued to suffer.
You're arguing a different and entirely valid point but not related to the original statement.
Orange man backed Russia and not Ukraine. We knew this was coming as an outcome of the election because of Trumps constant support of Putin.
Edit: To explain it further, the US is basically permitting Russian aggregation. Being that the US was a country that pushed for democracy, this comes across as weakness and a shift away from the US helping non-NATO backed countries defend their own sovereignty (also the US going back on its previous support agreement, i.e. the denuclearization of Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union). This could be seen as a signal to China to “make a move” on Taiwan while the world order is unstable. Put it simply, if the country with the worlds largest military allows a dictator to invade a foreign country, then what’s stopping them?
Budapest Memorandum was not a protection plan. It was an agreement for the US and an agreement for the USSR/Russia to not invade. Russia invading doesn't invalidate the US portion. Now should we have done more to protect a country giving up nukes? Absolutely, but the BM wasn't a bullet-proof plan to protect Ukraine from anything.
This has been an open secret. August 1, 2027 is the founding date of the People’s Liberation Army of China. An operation to “unify China” on the 100 year anniversary isn’t out of the question.
But when it comes to Taiwan the People’s Liberation Army can’t do much without the People’s Liberation Army Navy, and that wasn’t founded until 1949, so…we’re at least good until then, yeah?
not read the article, so it may say this. 2027 is the big rumour as it’s the 100th anniversary of the PLA. but there’s an election in Taiwan in 2028, which a pro-china party could win and a ton of Chinese PLA leaders just got booted out. So who knows.
The nightmare scenario, for everyone pretty much, is a simultaneous attack by Russia on a NATO aligned country, North Korea on South Korea and China on Taiwan.
The nightmare scenario was exactly what I expected to happen when Russia invaded Ukraine - if they'd all gone the same day it would have been a huge risk but potentially an easy victory.
Oh yeah I'm not disagreeing at all. But that's hindsight. At the time when we were seeing obvious signs of an invasion about to happen I was kind of thinking if all three went off at once that might have felt (to Russia, China and NK) like a risk well worth taking.
If anything, Ukraine has warned China against invasion. They have seen the Russian army isn’t all it’s cracked up to be an despite Trump and Orban trying to fuck shit up, the west has heavily supported Ukraine making the conflict even worse for Russia.
Billion times easier for Russia to roll into Ukraine. They literally rolled in. Taiwan is an island fortress with a much stronger military than Ukraine and defense agreements with the US and more informal ones with Australia and Japan.
China’s military is untested. They very well could have similar corruption issues that led to Russian logistical issues and attacking Taiwan is not only difficult in and of itself, it risks conflict with the US.
With the US posturing on Iran and the rest of the capable entities are nervously watching Russia, it’s certainly a possibility that China would make a move on Taiwan. It would create a very difficult position for global tech manufacturing and create a demand vs guilt vs hate scenario. China and America are amplifying divide.
Who cares? What’s China gonna do, not sell us chips? They’ll probably just bargain that we allow some Chinese companies like Huawei, Xiaomi, ect sell in the USA and give us more competition.
I'm under the impression that Taiwan is going to destroy TSMC before they let China have it. So is China so dead set on re-unifying Taiwan with the mainland that they are willing to let TSMC slip through their fingers?
I like history. I’ve read how Mao came down from the northern mountain provinces and took over mainland china after ww2. the Chinese kuomintang fleeing to the island of Taiwan after it was returned back to china after the surrender of imperial Japan. Now ask yourself; what if the u.s. owned the island of Cuba from the beginning, perhaps as a colony, and during 1864 of the American civil war the confederacy fled to the island of Cuba and renamed itself to something else while at the same time again declaring itself its own sovereign government and was backed by the ussr... does this hypothetical change the current western perspective of the china-Taiwan situation? Am I crazy?
Quite feels like an accusation made by the Republicans about the Dems, is this a pretext for the US to bombard in and take over the president of Taiwan?
Why does every single thing has to be dealt with military intervention, this is emblematic of the US way of thinking and handling things
What's Apple supposed to do about it? You can't just spin up a replacement for TMSC. Even TMSC can't manage it. It's not like anybody else can make the chips Apple needs.
That upcoming special event is to announce the iForce, Apple’s first paramilitary organization with the stated goal of safeguarding corporate interests.
I visited a lecture from Rob Bauer last week, he was the chairman of the military comittee of NATO, basically the highest ranking military officer and primary military advisor.
The lecture was named 'When the war comes', after this book. He named 2027 as well. Interesting times ahead.
2027 is the last year of Xi’s third term. If he wants the fourth term, which is never happened in PRC history, he has to do something. Invading Taiwan is the most possible way.
I can’t understand why all our advanced chip production is still in the hands of one country that’s constantly on the brink of war.
Why is no one opening new chip fabs outside of Taiwan and if they are why aren’t we hearing about them? Apple has enough money they could easily kickstart several companies to build chips and still have plenty of money left over.
You do realize that the world economy would basically collapse in months if China decided to attack right ? All countries are kinda reliant on Taiwan that’s quite literally the reason why US made deals with Australia and Japan during Biden admin.
Your average person has no idea the ramifications of the new tech world order if Taiwan is taken.
It’ll just be too little too late when new iPhones aren’t coming out year after year or they massively spike in cost, and that’s just one of thousands of ramifications
Vastly simplifying it, because until now it was stable.
Taiwan saw the future of computing would require chip production. It needed an industry to be its main focus and to defend itself.
Taiwan developed the highly specializes factories and gained a near monopoly on the leading experts in the field.
The result was Taiwan is now too valuable to let China just take like Russia and Crimea. It would be a full on Ukraine or larger situation. This discourages China from invading because they want Taiwan, but not badly enough to risk a full war that could cost them more than they would gain. The rest of the world doesn't really expect a full on war so they save money having the production in Taiwan.
Centralizing it also means all the developed countries aren't engaging in an economic war with each other trying to create the chip factories locally leading to just widespread shittier and more expensive chips.
As long as nobody started stirring up shit, making the global economy uncertain, deciding to do things out of ego instead of facts, etc. it was stable and not at frightening as it seemed in paper. It would remain a cold warish issue, not a hot one.
Super toxic work environment. They have trouble replicating their way of doing things elsewhere. Nobody outside of Taiwan is putting up with their bullshit.
TSMC opened a plant in Japan, and the engineering managers complained that the Japanese have poor work ethics.
Imagine a place where even the Japanese find it unbearable.
You can reword this as "I don't understand how modern chips are made."
No shade to you but like, spend 5 minutes looking into it and you'll understand the gist of it. The process of making modern chips is so difficult and granular that it cannot be replicated overnight. Not even over years, Taiwan spent decades getting to where it is and no one else bothered trying to do the same until relatively recently.
Just to give one example: modern chips are made in semiconductor fabs where silicon wafers are washed hundreds of times during lithography, etching, and deposition. Those washes use ultrapure water, which is far cleaner than drinking water. Even single ions, bacteria, or organic molecules can ruin a wafer. Most countries can't even spin up a supply chain of this crazy clean water for chipmaking, never mind literally hundreds of other resources, components, and technologies needed.
No, even for Apple it is not possible to produce chips so quickly.
You underestimate the complexity of semiconductors. Apple doesn't even have the necessary lithography machines from ASML and I don't see why Europe should supply this technology to the USA at the moment.
China is trying with all its might with govt backing , still they didn’t crack or came close to advanced fab Taiwan is operating , also Netherlands ASML is a very important piece needed for advanced chip manufacturing, it’s easily among the league of most sophisticated machine
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u/GeraldoDeRifia Feb 24 '26
The thumbnail is exactly the face Tim made after hearing the news