The plant was intact. Yet production stopped. When a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Japan's Kumamoto Prefecture on the 28th, JASM, TSMC's Japanese subsidiary, evacuated employees, halted production lines, and inspected equipment and cleanrooms. After completing safety checks, production resumed in stages, but the second plant under construction suspended some work in preparation for aftershocks. Sony and Renesas also stopped production for safety inspections. Kumamoto is a symbol of the revival of Japan's semiconductor industry. In this region, dubbed "Silicon Island," the Japanese government poured in massive subsidies to attract TSMC, Sony, and others.
Semiconductor plants are the most sophisticated production facilities in the world. In ultra-fine processes that etch circuits onto areas tens of thousands of times thinner than a human hair, even invisible vibrations can cause defects. The precision of lithography equipment changes with the slightest tremor, and cleanroom yields drop with a single speck of dust. Power cannot be interrupted even briefly, and water must maintain consistent quality. That is why production cannot resume immediately once an earthquake ends.
The semiconductor industry has already exposed its vulnerability several times in the face of natural disasters and fires. Taiwan's massive earthquake in 1999 triggered a global shortage and price surge in PC semiconductors, and last year's strong quake also halted TSMC's production lines, affecting the supply of Nvidia's artificial intelligence (AI) chips. In Korea, a 30-minute power outage at Samsung Electronics' Pyeongtaek plant in 2018 damaged 50,000 to 60,000 NAND flash wafers, wiping out 3.5% of global supply. In 2021, 70,000 wafers were scrapped at the Austin plant, where power was cut off due to a cold snap in Texas. A semiconductor plant is not complete with production equipment alone. The infrastructure that keeps the plant running must be designed together with it.
The Honam semiconductor cluster the government is pursuing must also be designed with precision. Simply building plants does not make a semiconductor powerhouse. Stable power and water, along with the resilience to sustain production even through disasters, must all be in place. In the AI era, semiconductor competition depends not on how many plants are built but on how stably they are operated.
