Not quite, it costs billions & takes min 2 years to build a new fab & ramp up production. Tsmc expect their next plant to cost $20 billion to build & equip. Tsmc are currently consulting on building a new fab somewhere in the US but they haven’t even bought land yet…. For example.
All the plants are already running at full capacity due to AMD, Nvidia, Microsoft, Sony, 5G, IoT that’s why everything is struggling. All the above except Nvidia come from TSMC, Nvidia uses Samsung 8nm & doesn’t have as high yields as TSMC which is why they have issues (mining aside).
The 6-9 months prediction is because Intel are spinning off their fabs (because they’re in trouble for being stuck at 10nm for years, cpu’s are lagging & investors are going bananas) so those with orders are free to retool their chips for intels process nodes this takes around 6-9 months after which they can start manufacturing them.
Unfortunately switching from Tsmc, global foundries, Samsung, Intel isn’t as easy as just placing an order they each use quite different process modes, often at quite different size anywhere between 5nm & 64nm for example & none of them are cross compatible. So if you want to order chips elsewhere they have to be relaid out for that process which takes some time
Facts are until its easy to switch from one process node to another it’s not possibly to nut elsewhere in an emergency, no one is going to spend millions laying out their silicon on multiple nodes “just in case” & if they don’t they cannot switch easily, if they did & hedged bets by splitting orders 50/50 they’d get terrible pricing for lower numbers.
Also part of the problem is a lot of this stuff is built in older 200mm wafers & as demand was expected to drop for these it’s suddenly surged & there’s no supply nor capacity.
If Global foundries had broke ground on a new fab the day the pandemic hit we’d still be years away from it opening production.
Weve been heading this way for years & years now with all production in one area of the world, run by a few companies with relatively few plants for the entire planet. It’s like the power grid no one worries about that but the number of times a month we get close to brown outs etc due to faults, weather etc & it’s narrowly avoided be rerouting power & buying in from Europe we’ll that’s how the semiconductor market has been for years & years plus with the pandemic & all these manufacturers suddenly releasing next gen stuff AND the growing mining market its finally snapped & revealed how fragile the market is.
Sorry I didn’t mean the above to be rude to your original post I just wanted to add to it how highly complex the problem is & how its really not going away anytime soon. If in my rush to get my thoughts down before my brain breaks again I wrote it in such a way that was not my intent so I apologise in advance if that’s the case.