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I think you’re partly wrong on chip factories. While most new plants have been opened in Asia in the past few years, there are major plants under construction i

I think you’re partly wrong on chip factories. While most new plants have been opened in Asia in the past few years, there are major plants under construction in the US by both Intel and TSMC [0]. Additionally, the US still has a large number of fabrication plants [1]. And US-based semiconductor companies handled around 48% of the global market share in 2019 [2]. So I think it’s not true to say that US had completely lost its edge with semiconductors, nor that the US moved all its manufacturing capacity to Asia. The US has been and is still competing to be one of the largest players in the semiconductor industry, even if it might not be first place anymore. And I think it’s fair to question whether the US needs to be in absolute first place. Asian countries have significantly more population and therefore need for semiconductors compared to the US, so it makes sense that eventually, manufacturing capacity would be more relative to local population levels. - 0: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/semiconductor-fabs-dotting-arizona-silicon-desert/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/semiconductor-fabs-dot..., https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Intel-breaks-ground-on-20bn-Arizona-chip-plants-in-battle-with-TSMC https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Intel-b... - 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... - 2: https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2020-SIA-State-of-the-Industry-Report-FINAL-1.pdf https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/20...

supergeek133 5y ago
Thanks for the correction on the chip factories, and I agree with your last point about "needing to be in first place" but this pandemic has surely made it more evident how quickly we can be disrupted by either an Act of God or a country just waking up one day and deciding they no longer want to sell us things.
gavin_gee 5y ago
The intel investment is too little too late to have any impact on the current shortage.
bradknowles 5y ago
It takes years to open a new chip factory. And the kinds of chip factories that get opened here in the US are unlikely to be the kind required to solve the problem that the car manufacturers are having, because they’re looking at old technology commodity chips that no one here in the US would want to make. That is unless you’re wiling to pay 10-100x more for them, through contracts that require you exclusively make and supply them here in the US, much like the US military does for chips that they really care about. But then it would take years for those kinds of contracts to make their way through all the various intermediaries, and third, fourth, and fifth parties, etc…. There’s lots of problems inside this “Perfect Global Multi-Year Hurricane” of supply chains.

supergeek133 5y ago

Thanks for the correction on the chip factories, and I agree with your last point about "needing to be in first place" but this pandemic has surely made it more evident how quickly we can be disrupted by either an Act of God or a country just waking up one day and deciding they no longer want to sell us things.

gavin_gee 5y ago

The intel investment is too little too late to have any impact on the current shortage.

bradknowles 5y ago

It takes years to open a new chip factory. And the kinds of chip factories that get opened here in the US are unlikely to be the kind required to solve the problem that the car manufacturers are having, because they’re looking at old technology commodity chips that no one here in the US would want to make. That is unless you’re wiling to pay 10-100x more for them, through contracts that require you exclusively make and supply them here in the US, much like the US military does for chips that they really care about. But then it would take years for those kinds of contracts to make their way through all the various intermediaries, and third, fourth, and fifth parties, etc…. There’s lots of problems inside this “Perfect Global Multi-Year Hurricane” of supply chains.