Resilience Briefing · Published Jan 15, 2025

Foundry downtime risks

Executive briefing: Foundry downtime remains a material supply-chain risk as natural disasters and utility outages strike concentrated advanced-node capacity. The April 3, 2024 Hualien earthquake in Taiwan paused production at TSMC and other fabs, with some tools requiring multi-day recalibration.

• Immediate impact. TSMC reported that employees were evacuated and some production lines were stopped after the magnitude 7.2 quake; most tools recovered within a day, but a portion of wafers and work-in-progress were scrapped.
• Lead-time effect. Reuters noted the disruption could affect advanced chip deliveries as calibration and yield recovery extended beyond 24 hours.
• Risk concentration. Taiwan hosts over 60% of global advanced foundry capacity, leaving downstream OEMs exposed to seismic and power-outage events without diversified dual-sourcing.

Mitigation moves

• Secure diversified wafer starts across geographies (Korea, U.S., Europe) where process nodes are available.
• Model safety-stock needs for high-value die and CoWoS packages when Taiwan seismic risk rises during reconstruction periods.
• Ask foundry partners for tool-level recovery SLAs and quake-hardened facility upgrades, especially in 5 nm and below lines.

Sources

• Reuters — Powerful quake hits Taiwan, TSMC evacuates some plants (April 3, 2024)
• Reuters — TSMC says some chip production affected by earthquake (April 3, 2024)
• Bloomberg — Taiwan earthquake prompts TSMC evacuation; some production halted (April 3, 2024)

Zeph Tech quantifies foundry downtime exposure and recovery assumptions in supply-risk dashboards.