Yeah, but that info isn't in this dump.

Most of it probably isn't even on paper but in the minds of their top employees.

If that's true those employees could be kidnapped for a high ransom...

You would need most of the people. One high level person is meaningless. Sure you can say "Dave" knows everything, but any smart company knows Dave could retire, or die at anytime and so the important stuff he knows is spread among a bunch of other people. Often it is also written down, just not in an easy format.

Institutional knowledge is more akin to the ship of Theseus. Good companies know this, after all, even super knowledgeable employees sometimes look the wrong way when crossing the street.

That's a much higher bar than hacking into some computers. And also, as people pointed, unless you are wholesale kidnapping enough people to fill a prison, it doesn't work like that.

I'm aware of their position; The info in this dump is probably worth little not nothing, but, the interesting conversation to me is whether even if someone did get some of their secret sauce, could they really build another TSMC, or even something similar?

Sure, given a billion dollar budget, few years to work, and a legal environment that lets them use those stolen secrets. It can't be done cheap, overnight, or where the legal environment doesn't allow it. Really only China, while plenty of places have smart engineers, the rest cannot get the rest together (and if they tried it would kill their economy).

Note that TSMC depends on other companies for various parts. Without those they need even more money and time to duplicate it all. There is nothing they are doing that you can't hire engineers to duplicate. They figured it out, so anyone could. However it isn't easy, we could be talking about hundreds of billions of dollars.

A billion dollars is not enough. The cutting edge tech for euv lithography isn’t even TSMCs.

TSMC does not have secrets that put them ahead. It’s all about the culture of operations efficiency and just being first to invest in actually implementing cutting edge tech.

The lithography is one of the technologies needed that if they can't get can bump this up to a lot more than a billion dollar. It can still be duplicated, but it will take more time and $$$.

Hell no.

ASML is the only company that sells certain equipment needed for photolithography. These machines are physically large and sell for hundreds of millions of dollars. Their export is regulated by multiple governments and international treaties. There are intelligence agencies tracking every single one of those machines and ensuring they don't fall into the wrong hands.

This is just one fatal flaw with the plan.

> they have technology and manufacturing processes literally no one else has

What, not even ASML that literally sells them that tech?:) No need to over dramatize.

I mean maybe but that is completely unrelated to what OP is asking. He's questioning whether they would have the ability and the authority to move that amount of money to a criminal.