4 ms·

Smart to buy a preexisting fab. From what I understand via from various blogs and YouTube research, building a Feb even if your not doing cutting edge tech like

Smart to buy a preexisting fab. From what I understand via from various blogs and YouTube research, building a Feb even if your not doing cutting edge tech like tsmc, say going with an openpdk, still requires that special infrastructure. You need seismic dampening for the fab and to be located in a low activity region preferably, you need cheap water that can be refines, you need affordable electricity, and then supporting infrastructure to get the chemicals, the water, the machines delivered. Doing all of this isn't cheap and I'd bet is a lot of paperwork. Imagine going to some rural area and trying to build a fab, chances are the town has no clue what your impact or needs are and you would be spending lots of money to basically speed up development of the area. Side not to Semiconductors fab, where do you even buy one. Sure you can buy talent or machinery and then hire engineers to help get everything working, but if you wanted to for some reason buy a fan that already exists, say just the fab location and the equipment, how do you know what company to approach that might even consider selling. Who can even afford these purchases except massive fortune 500 company's breaking a piggy bank, or some massive credit institution, which I doubt would even do this because it would probably be a massive loan to any buyer. Seems like you need to have the money to build part of a fab if you want to buy one, idk who would even consider loaning that amount of money to a third party.

spacebanana7 2y ago
> Seems like you need to have the money to build part of a fab if you want to buy one, idk who would even consider loaning that amount of money to a third party Governments are happy to subsidise fabs, and VCs are even happier to invest in AI flavoured semiconductors if you can market it that way.
quacksilver 2y ago
Also, they bought a fab, and by extension a bunch of knowledgeable employees who can work it and are eligible for UK security clearances. Once the knowledge of the workers is gone then it would be really hard to spin something up in country, and being the UK we would likely be forced to buy stuff from the US (or go to the far east anyway). If you built a fab in country then you would probably have to get staff from an existing fab to help run it and iron out any issues and gradually switch them out for local staff.

spacebanana7 2y ago

> Seems like you need to have the money to build part of a fab if you want to buy one, idk who would even consider loaning that amount of money to a third party Governments are happy to subsidise fabs, and VCs are even happier to invest in AI flavoured semiconductors if you can market it that way.

quacksilver 2y ago

Also, they bought a fab, and by extension a bunch of knowledgeable employees who can work it and are eligible for UK security clearances. Once the knowledge of the workers is gone then it would be really hard to spin something up in country, and being the UK we would likely be forced to buy stuff from the US (or go to the far east anyway). If you built a fab in country then you would probably have to get staff from an existing fab to help run it and iron out any issues and gradually switch them out for local staff.