If you need chips from Taiwan, ship them before November.
This does not constitute business advice. I'm pretty sure my liability insurance wouldn't cover that. Plus – as with all things geopolitics these days – it’s impossible to predict the future with any degree of certainty.
That said, were I in a business that relies on buying chips from Taiwan (which likely includes Nvidia’s GPUs made by TSMC), I'd be chartering planes and leaning hard on export-clearance agents right now, while charting a course towards using only silicon made in mainland China.
Because, somewhere in mid-November, things might get weird again.
It felt like a rare, unequivocal diplomatic victory for South Africa when Taiwan, within days of announcing it, "suspended" its decision to throttle the supply of chips to SA. However, as the dust has settled, it now looks as if that was genuinely a postponement rather than a cancellation.
If you haven't been following, Taiwan's economic affairs ministry said on 23 September that the country would impose an approval process on shipments to South Africa (starting in November, which is important, in retrospect), before the foreign affairs ministry announced, on 25 September, that the process had been halted.
As a rule of thumb, when something could be ascribed to either conspiracy or government incompetence, the answer is always government incompetence. So, clearly, this was a case of one government department failing to talk to another government department, until South Africa phoned up the right people, used the right mixture of politeness and shoutiness to get things done, and put a stop to it.
Liaison office tiff
Except for that timing. Taiwan and South Africa have been fighting about the demand to relocate a Taipei liaison office, which is, of course, totally nothing resembling an embassy, out of Pretoria since 2024.
This was also the first time Taiwan seemed ready to pull the trigger on chip diplomacy – its single most important weapon as it struggles to maintain some kind of diplomatic relationship with one-China policy countries, such as South Africa.
So, out of nowhere, Taiwan suddenly had a bureaucratic failure that caused a misfire of that crucial weapon. Or was it? Perhaps Taiwan used South Africa to send a blunt message to the US, whose demand that the majority of chips destined for American shores must not be manufactured beyond those shores.
Or, perhaps, Taiwan was looking towards Xi Jinping's expected visit to South Africa in late November and wanted to send a message to India too.
China's leader visiting a country that has a totally-not-an-embassy Taiwanese mission in the capital city is an embarrassment for both guest and host. The only question is whether China will raise the matter privately or publicly, and if South Africa will be worried about Donald Trump's baleful gaze at that time.
But it gets vastly complicated within that moment. Everything can pivot on Xi's immediate political needs, the state of the Trump-Taiwan relationship, and South Africa's read of the political atmospheres in Washington and Beijing. Xi is spinning a very large number of plates simultaneously, Trump is mind-bendingly capricious, and South Africa's diplomatic intelligence is a laughingstock.
Anything could happen, including South Africa sending a bulldozer through the tennis courts of the de facto Taiwanese ambassadorial residence in Waterkloof Ridge.
We could have predicted that much as of, as it happens, early in September. That's when Xi's schedule shook out. A couple of weeks before Taiwan fired a shot across South Africa's bow.
September is also when we started to see a tangible new surge in Taiwan-India relations, with all kinds of talk around rare earth minerals, investment, and generally clubbing together to deal with US demands to step back from China.
That is the root of the most interesting theory I've heard on Taiwan's threat about chips for SA: that it was actually about India. If Taiwan feels forced to pull the trigger in November and starve South Africa of chips, the "I" in BRICS will get dragged in. Floating the idea early, in the way Taiwan did, will give a runway to help smooth things over with India.
Hence: get your chips while you can. This thing is far from over.
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