A magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck Taiwan on Wednesday morning, injuring many and killing at least seven people, according to official reports. The quake, one of the strongest to hit Taiwan in decades, also led to the temporary closure of TSMC, the world's largest computer chip maker.

Bloomberg reports that TSMC, which makes many of today's leading high-performance computer chips for Nvidia, AMD, Apple, and others, has halted production and evacuated some locations.

The Guardian confirmed to TSMC that employees are now returning to many of its plants in the region, although further testing of the highly sensitive equipment used to produce computer chips is still ongoing.

The following is the full text of that statement: [TSMC's safety systems are operating normally. Preventive measures have been initiated in accordance with procedures and some plants have been evacuated. All employees are safe and those who were evacuated have begun returning to work.

The company is currently reviewing the details of the impact. According to initial inspections, the construction site is normal."

However, the company has decided to temporarily suspend work at the construction site today and will resume work after further inspections."

The company is currently working on the construction of the new building.

It will take some time to assess and understand the impact of the temporary shutdown on the global semiconductor supply chain, but according to Digitimes, Taiwan's Hsinchu Science Park Administration, which oversees the area where most Taiwanese technology companies operate, does not expect any significant impact and that operations are stable.

The eastern part of Taiwan is closest to the epicenter. However, the quake was felt throughout Taiwan; most of TSMC's factories are located on the west side of the island and are earthquake-proofed.

Japan has offered assistance to Taiwan, and Taiwan is rushing to rescue those still trapped by the violent tremors.

While most of the world's semiconductor production is in Taiwan, a few companies involved in chip production - TSMC, Intel, and Samsung - are considering placing their production facilities further overseas. Intel has expanded its facilities in the U.S., Israel, and Ireland, and is building an entirely new factory in Germany; TSMC and Samsung are both building new production capacity in the U.S., and the former is also expanding its capacity in Japan.

Update: Analyst firm TrendForce has released a report on the effects of the earthquake on production lines in Taiwan.

TrendForce confirms that several TSMC facilities were temporarily shut down, but notes that the 4nm process responsible for Nvidia's graphics cards is located in the South Taiwan Science Park, so there was no need to evacuate personnel. The analyst expects the impact on supply to be minimal.

DRAM supply, i.e., Micron's supply, may have been affected by the strong earthquake, but the long-term impact is expected to be minimal.

According to TrendForce, no "significant equipment damage" has been reported so far as a result of inspections at the foundry.