A 7.2 magnitude earthquake rocked Taiwan !!Will IC face shortage again ?

A 7.2 magnitude earthquake rocked Taiwan on Wednesday, the strongest tremor to hit the island in at least 25 years, shaking buildings from their foundations and sparking a?tsunami warning?for the islands of southern Japan and the Philippines

According to reports, the earthquake has caused power outages in some areas of Taipei. A TSMC spokesperson stated that TSMC has evacuated some employees from the production line.

According to Taiwan media, due to the impact of the earthquake, the entire Taiwan high-speed railway line has been suspended, and there has been a power outage in the carriages. The Taipei Metro (subway) has been suspended for 40 minutes.

According to a report from the Hsinchu Science Park Management Bureau in Taiwan, due to the earthquake occurring during working hours, it not only caused traffic chaos within the park, but also led to night shift workers seeking refuge outside the various technology plants. Fortunately, there have been no reports of casualties so far.

Historically, supply of semicondutors will be inflenenced by earthquake

1: 1999 Chiji earthquake in taiwan , leading to a short-term increase in global DRAM prices.

2: 2011 earthquake and tsunami occurred in Northeast Japan had a serious impact on local semiconductor production, leading to the shutdown of some factories and affecting the global supply chain.

3: 2015, earthquake in Taiwan caused the shutdown of TSMC's and Zhongke and Nanke factories, resulting in a 10% to 20% increase in global logic chip prices. In 2018, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake occurred in Hualien County, Taiwan, and MLCC prices soared after the earthquake.

4: 2016, 6.7 magnitude earthquake in KAOHSIUNG. TSMC's two factories have ceased production, resulting in a delay of 10-50 days in the shipment of 120000 wafers. Besides TSMC, there are also 80 semiconductor and optoelectronic device companies affected, leading to subsequent supply shortages.

5: 2020.12.10, a 5.8 magnitude earthquake occurred in Taiwan. The various impacts caused by price increases and shortages of memory and other products at that time.

Today's earthquake as a high magnitude and a core epicenter and also in the begining of Q2 .The TSMC factory in Hualien is of great significance to the company's production capacity and global semiconductor supply chain.

It is bound to have varying degrees of impact on global products such as GPUs, HBMs, DDR6, etc.

How will be semiconductor supply chain inflenced by this earthquake ?Let's wait and see !