Taiwan's meteorological department said that this is the "921 earthquake" after 25 years of the largest earthquake, the next three days there may be a magnitude 7 earthquake.
Comprehensive Taiwan media back to the news, the earthquake has caused power outages in some areas of Taipei. TSMC said earlier that in order to ensure the safety of personnel, according to the company's internal procedures, part of the plant has been evacuated, the work safety system is normal, the current personnel are safe and began to return to work one after another, the details are yet to be confirmed.
TSMC plant is currently part of the quartz tube rupture and online wafers have been partially destroyed, part of the machine has been suspended to do downtime inspection to avoid offset. In addition, TSMC plant construction site condition check preliminary normal, but safety considerations have decided to stop work today across Taiwan site, to be checked before construction.
Hsinchu Science Park Administration said that the park's Kyungwon Electronics, Damai technology plant has returned the entire plant personnel to evacuate, Jhunan Park, TSMC part of the preventive shutdown, Qun Chong photoelectric part of the shutdown, Hsinchu Park, AUO, UMC, Macronix, power returns normal. UMC said that the staff of Hsinchu and Nanke were evacuated in accordance with operational standards, and the personnel were safe, the plant facilities were normal, the machines were partially shut down, and the engineering colleagues were working hard to take inventory and restore the machines.
In terms of storage, Huabang Electric said that all personnel are safe, plant facilities are operating normally, and the actual impact is being assessed. Nanya Tech said that personnel are confirmed to be safe, some machines are down for preventive purposes, and safety inspections are currently underway. Micron said the company is evaluating business operations and supply chain, all employees are safe.
Taiwan is covered with TSMC's advanced wafer processing, CoWoS packaging capacity, the earthquake will have an impact on the GPU and AI arithmetic chip production capacity; in addition there are other mature process wafer foundry, NAND flash and DRAM memory wafers and modules and other production capacity, is also within the scope of the impact.
The fab is a 24-hour non-stop operation, the earthquake in the production line wafers, inevitably have to do scrap processing. Emergency shutdown after the resumption of production, equipment debugging also need time. To TSMC legal person's estimate, will affect the number of hours of work in 6 hours or less, the impact on TSMC's second-quarter financial results of about 60 million U.S. dollars, the overall impact is limited. According to this analysis, if the final impact is limited to a few hours, then the overall supply of chips is not back to have a great impact.
But there are also analyzed that the production delay caused by equipment overhaul, will make the supply of NVIDIA GPU chips affected, with the current tight situation of demand exceeds supply, any change may cause a more serious shortage of price increases. In addition, storage equipment as long as the face of an earthquake of more than 5 magnitude, it must be overhauled and debugging, the length of more than 3 months broken 1 month, for the memory is in the cycle of price increases, may also play a role in boosting.
Earthquakes have a huge impact on the chip industry, as far as Taiwan in 1999, "921 earthquake" after the memory surge, near the beginning of the beginning of the year, the earthquake in Japan led to Murata inductance factory directly shut down in May, a time inductance materials are hot. For this strong earthquake, semiconductor companies generally have good hardware facilities, can minimize the impact, but for the short-term impact, still need to be ready to meet.
