The Great Hardware Shortage of 2020 and beyond has hit all levels of the supply chain, but a new dawn may be dawning: according to an article in TheEdgeMarkets, TSMC (the leading chipmaker for most of the top fabless hardware companies) is now planning to invest $100 billion in semiconductor plans to invest $100 billion over the next three years to expand its manufacturing and new technology research capabilities. [Even top companies like AMD and Nvidia were unable to meet the rapid increase in consumer demand during the pandemic. We have seen resellers using bots to buy up this latest generation of GPUs, as the industry battles a supply shortage of GDDR6, worse to avoid an onslaught from cryptocurrency miners.

The uproar resulted in pre-built PCs shipping without GPUs and a ridiculous back-and-forth regarding Nvidia's attempt to thwart crypto miners by adding a hash rate limiter to the RTX 3060.

If this were not enough, many counties across Taiwan are currently experiencing the worst drought in over half a century, with red alerts in effect. This means that TSMC and other Taiwanese wafer makers are under additional stress that could adversely affect their supply chains.

Despite this, the chip manufacturing industry appears to be blossoming. With GLOBALFOUNDRIES doubling its expansion funding this year and TSMC planning to invest $100 billion over the next few years, things are looking up. The semiconductor manufacturing industry will bounce back, but it is unclear how long it will take for the supply shortage to be resolved.

Hopefully, it will ease in the coming months, but it will likely be a slow and steady process as opposed to a flood of hardware into the market. Slow and steady, as they used to say.