Chip manufacturers in Taiwan have reportedly made a faster recovery than expected following on from a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Prices are unlikely to surge as feared last week, meaning the rates of gaming RAM and CPUs shouldn’t be impacted.
We previously reported on how the earthquakes would surge chip prices but that’s now unlikely to be the case. As reported by PC Gamer, it’s been alleged that over 80% of production from TSMC was back up and running within 10 hours of the initial quake hitting the factories. This is likely because the country’s semiconductor manufacturing plants are not located in the Eastern region where the earthquakes were at their strongest.
The overall damage has been said to be less than 1% according to TrendForce which also includes Micron, Nanya, and Windbond, all of which reportedly made a full recovery by April 8 (five days after the earthquakes hit). It’s a similar story for Samsung and SK Hynix as well which saw its DRAM manufacturing initially halted but with minimal impact to production. That means we likely aren’t going to need to shell out additionally for the best gaming RAM and the best SSDs for gaming.
How the earthquakes could have impacted chip prices
Were it not for the fast recovery from Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturers, we would likely have seen the prices of RAM, CPUs, and SSDs skyrocket as demand would have outstripped supply considerably. This is in contrast to the current state of these computing components which are seeing some of their largest discounts to date. Speaking to TSMC, who makes the chipsets for both the AMD Radeon RX 7000 and Nvidia RTX 40 series, any disruption could have seen GPUs increase, too.
That’s very much a worst-case scenario but it could have been on the cards given the magnitude of the earthquakes which hit Taiwan. However, it’s worth outlining that this is far from the most important thing when it comes to what’s happened. According to Reuters, 16 people have unfortunately lost their lives and over 1,000 people are believed to be injured, as it’s the strongest earthquake to hit the country in over 25 years. We hope those injured will make just as fast of a recovery.
