TSMC took just 10 hours after Taiwan's M7.5 earthquake to resume 70-80% operations

Taiwan was rocked by a huge 7.5-magnitude earthquake yesterday, seeing TSMC evacuate its facilities, but the Taiwanese semiconductor giant was back to nearly 70% operations within 10 hours.

Wen-Yee Lee, a Taiwan-based semiconductor reporter, posted on X, providing some updates from TSMC. The company said that "due to safety concerns, TSMC has decided to suspend work at fab construction sites across Taiwan today. Construction will resume after the inspection".

But the latest update from TSMC was extremely positive, with he post explaining: "Based on TSMC's rich experience and capability in earthquake response and disaster prevention, and regular safety drills to ensure full preparedness. Within just 10 hours after the earthquake on April 3rd, the recovery rate of wafer fab equipment has exceeded 70%, and the recovery rate of newly built fabs (such as Fab 18) has exceeded 80%. Although a few pieces of equipment in some areas were damaged, affecting production lines, major machines including all Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment remained undamaged".

• Read more: 7.5 magnitude earthquake hits Taiwan: multiple buildings have fallen
• Read more: TSMC forced to evacuate following 7.4 earthquake in Taiwan

It continued: "TSMC has allocated resources to expedite comprehensive recovery and has resumed operations today, maintaining close communication with our customers. We will continue to closely monitor and communicate directly with our customers about any relevant impacts".

TSMC has some of the most advanced machines and tools on the planet to make chips for companies like AMD, Apple, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Sony, Microsoft, and many others... hopefully, damages were at a low point. Still, it seems TSMC has positive news so far.