The fabs are in Taiwan. The people who operate the fabs are in Taiwan.
The people who do the R&D for all the processes live in Taiwan. The people who create the Intellectual Property live in Taiwan.
Analogously, many decades ago Mitsubishi Group, a Japanese company, bought Rockefeller Center. Ha ha. Good luck with that. If things didn't work out it's not like they could disassemble 30 Rock and put it on a boat to Japan. Unsurprisingly they no longer own it.
It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships.
TSMC's assets are in fabs that are difficult to disassemble without great expense. And the other important assets go home every night. "Foreign investment" isn't able to spirit them out of the country.
TSMC is a Taiwanese company. Who gives a fuck what some bookkeeping entries in some computer ledgers say about "foreign investment".
> It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships.
> I found a Wikipedia discussion, but it is by no means dispositive:
It seems fairly so on the claim that Japan bought the el, dismantled it, and shipped the steel home; it is less dispositive on the question of whether some of the steel either reached Japan or freed up other steel for shipment to Japan when it was dismantled by it's actual civic owners, who had no connection to Japan.
Shareholders of such things are sometimes proxies for the true powers hidden behind. Money is not a democracy. There are national interests at stake here, and then I'm not talking about Taiwan's national interest.
Shareholders typically don't vote on things like that directly, but they can vote for Directors who usually have the power to fire/hire CEO's who then make decisions like new locations.
