HPE's investment is an additional incentive for the US to involve itself if matters get out of hand.

Climate change ? Pah. Humanitarian aide to hurricane-striken Puerto Rico ? Please.

Billions invested by US companies in danger of Chinese grab ? WAR !

This time, there is little evidence to show that the US are the warmongers.. I don't think they are expecting to come off well this time, if/when that happens.

A bunch of peasants sitting on vast oil reserves and they'll happily go to war, but china? I don't think so..

With HPE's legendary luck, doesn't this move increase the likelihood that China will choose to invade Taiwan just as soon as HPE completes its purchases?

"Annexation" my friends, not "reunification". The ROC (Taiwan) has never been governed by the PRC for a single minute but "reunification" implies that the ROC has split from the PRC and needs to be reunified.

Annexation like Germany annexed Poland in 1939, more like...

Poland didn't exist before WW1**, there was a land border between Russia and Germany. Poland got rolled over in 1939 because it was in the way, the real target of the Germans was Russia (the goal was to annex all territory up to the Urals, depopulate to about one third and use that population as slaves to work the land and factories). People (including the Russians) kept dropping hints about this but they were just too arrogant to see reality.

Polish PoWs were badly treated by the Germans because according to their doctrine "Poland didn't exist" so was not party to the Geneva Conventions.

(Sorry to bug you with history and stuff but its common and completely fallacious practice to misinterpret historical events in one context to try to prove a point in another.)(I'd stick to tech stuff.....)

(**Go back a bit further, though....it really got screwed because the Grand Duchy of Poland allied itself with Napoleon. But let's stick to servers.....)

I don't quite understand your comment about "they were just too arrogant to see reality." Are you talking about the Poles?

I would have thought the Poles had a very good view of reality - they were terrified of the Soviet Union and it was the betrayal of Poland by the SU that lead in part, to its rapid collapse. To sort of copy a German phrase with considerably more accuracy "Stabbed in the back".

Of course for the minimum of 22000 intelectuals including officers, civil dignitaries, priests etc., they weren't just stabbed in the back but also shot in the neck.

As you say:

" its [a] common and completely fallacious practice to misinterpret historical events in one context to try to prove a point in another".

If you want to get pedantic about it Tiawan is where the Chinese leadership retired to when the PLA overrun the rest of China so strictly speaking mainland China are 'rogue' provinces and China's the actual, real, China. This was actually the situation for many decades after 1949 but practical considerations finally led to the recognition of China and the effective demotion of Taiwan from 'country' to 'not quite a country'.

I fully expect Taiwan to be absorbed by the rest of China but I don't think its going to happen for many decades. The reason is just straightforward economics China's economy is rapidly closing on the US's in size and their rapidly increasing capabilities in technology means that whatever HPE can field can be out-fielded by whatever China's equivalent is. (This is effectively what happened with Huawei.) We (the US) then counter with sanctions and other restrictions, bureaucratic moves that will only have a temporary effect because they alter the business calculus of where to put resources. (Build versus Buy -- we're forcing them to 'build' because we're preventing them from 'buying'.) Once this transition is over we effectively lose not just our soft power but our export market -- we'll find that our product offerings are uncompetitive, they're both outdated and expensive. We might want to buy American but the rest of the world,not so much. Tiawan will then find its natural business and trading partner is the rest of China.

Russia is important here. Its primarily and Asian country although we're used to thinking of it as European. China represents a market for its goods and services, 'the West' can't seem to stop needling it so Russians, being first and foremost pragmatists, will ignore 'the West' and just focus on relations with China. Together these two countries have direct and indirect borders with much of Europe and Asia so they're well placed to keep growing regardless of what we do.

We should focus on our own development -- mind our own business -- but I think we've forgotten how to.

History it is history, it is time to sight next future how an world around great place of total "coopetition", the significant and final goal of human race it is advance on...although their advance now will be an "unique and single step".

The island now known as Taiwan was historically part of China until Japan grabbed it as one of the outcomes of the Sino-Japanese War.

Power rules!

First Texas, now Taiwan. I'm not sure which is the bigger strategic risk.

I am wondering if backups of the Taiwanese chip industries servers, all their blueprints and standby plans to rebuild the plants are stored in an Arizona underground vault somewhere. So that the plants can be instantly rebuilt elsewhere on the globe once the self-destruct detonators have been triggered in Taiwan...

Considering China's been agitating Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, I still think it's monumental stupidity that no-one seems to be thinking about moving some of the supply chain back to countries that China isn't close enough to bully or block off from the rest of the world.