Updated | World's top chip maker TSMC temporarily offline after 7.2 magnitude earthquake strikes Taiwan’s eastern coast

Update on 4/3/2024 10:30 am PST: The Taiwan Central News Agency reports TSMC has been able to confirm the working operation of over 70% of the equipment used for wafer fabrication. The TSMC plants are located on the western coast where the felt quake registered a 4 to 5 magnitude. Key EUV lithography and chip manufacturing machines are undamaged, but some production lines are down due to equipment damage. 

A 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Taiwan’s eastern coast of Hualien at 7:58 am on April 3, 2024 Taiwan time. Taiwan is the main producer of high-end chips used in Apple iPhones to Nvidia GPUs, with TSMC manufacturing the majority of such chips. Nine people have been confirmed dead, over 1,000 are injured, 87,000 people are without power, and several train lines are damaged while aftershocks continue.

Taiwan has become one of the top manufacturers of semiconductors used in graphics cards to phones by manufacturing chips from designs created by other companies. For example, Nvidia designs its GPU chips, but has TSMC make them. Apple does the same for the chips powering its iPhones.

TSMC is critical to the world’s supply of top-end chips because no other manufacturer has the production capacity and capability to make chips using the finest lithography sizes, which lowers power consumption while allowing chips to run faster.

According DigiTimes Asia, an unconfirmed source reports damage to the walls, beams, and columns of TSMC’s Tainan N3 plant. Critically, all EUV machines used to create chips there have been stopped. The same source reports broken pipelines at TSMC’s Hsinchu plant. The production line there has also been halted due to broken silicon wafers that chips are made from. After evacuating its plants, TSMC has said “The company is currently confirming the details of the impact.”

Luckily, Taiwan’s semiconductor production plants are located between 81 to 140 miles (130 km to 220 km) away on the western side of the island. Whether this quake stops semiconductor production for an extended period like Japan’s massive 9.0 magnitude Fukushima quake has yet to be determined.

Readers who are in an earthquake zone should prepare for the next big quake by stocking up on water, food, and a good medical kit (like this at Amazon).