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AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more
- notinvsmntadvc 1y agoThis gap is small enough to see a realistic prospect of a war in Taiwan.
- bsder 1y agoIf that's all, that's a really good bargain. A 20% premium for one of the pillars of a modern economy to both repatriate engineering knowledge as well as be significantly less threatenable by your primary geopolitical enemy would be money very well spent.
- Teever 1y agoI wonder if that 20% is a floor or a ceiling too. Like, as more of the supply chain is reshored will that continually increase cost because reshoring is intrinsically less efficient or will it decrease costs because the increased cost of just reshoring the fab part of the supply chain costs more due to less proximity and integration with the existing supply chain?
- nobodyandproud 1y agoI definitely agree, but the next challenge is how to support that long-term investment? Businesses that rely on the chips will see an increase in cost; and that means passing the cost down to their customers (or having less to invest on their own R&D).
- reliabilityguy 1y agoThe question is: what’s AMDs margin? 20% manufacturing cost maybe well below 1% of the total development cost. So, not a deal breaker at all. It seems to me that long term having fabs in the IS is net positive for the economy: more jobs, more localized supply chains, more local expertise, etc etc
- arcanus 1y agoThe manufacturing cost is emphatically not only 1% of the total development cost. Particularly for GPUs, the high bandwidth memory and manufacturing costs are a significant portion of the product price.
- reliabilityguy 1y ago> The manufacturing cost is emphatically not only 1% of the total development cost. I have no idea what is the manufacturing cost of a 800 mm^2 die is, but I am sure it is lower than the development cost. > Particularly for GPUs, the high bandwidth memory and manufacturing costs are a significant portion of the product price. HBM is not manufactured by the GPU vendor, it is an off-the-shelf component that AMD buys like any other company can. Thus, the cost of HBM is tallied in the BOM and integration costs (interposer, packaging, etc).
- bgnn 1y ago800mm^2 die would roughly cost 300-350 usd axcoeding to [1]. That's the Taiwan price and dor N4. This doesn't include the memory or the package. The silicon cost for N3 is close to 2x. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/spitballing-nvidias-gb202-gpu-die-manufacturing-costs-die-could-cost-as-little-as-usd290-to-make https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/spitballing-...
- reliabilityguy 1y agoWell, seems that increase of 20% for US-based manufacturing on a base cost of $350 is $70. MSRP of 5090 is $1,999. So, on shoring will result in 3.5% increase in MSRP, which is nothing.
- bgnn 1y agoThat's for Nvidia GPUs. Margins are much smaller for AMD CPUs.
- ZeroCool2u 1y agoHere's a gift article link to the original Bloomberg source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-23/amd-ceo-su-sees-chips-from-us-tsmc-plant-costing-5-to-20-more?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc1MzM2NTcyMCwiZXhwIjoxNzUzOTcwNTIwLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTWlY4Nk1HUEZITjkwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJBMTc4NDk2MTA2M0M0RDBBQjdCRENDN0NCMEVERDIxRSJ9.qhTZEJ2kJcoBMpIx4oyBhQ3xs3onA77KhFN6Lz4Rb94 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-23/amd-ceo-s...
- snickerdoodle12 1y agohttps://archive.is/HS9Gi https://archive.is/HS9Gi
- gtirloni 1y agoAren't they shipping the chips back to Taiwan for packaging anyway?
- dangus 1y agoEven if they are, it’s a positive. It is potentially worth pointing out that container ships going back to Asia are basically empty, so that return shipping trip is basically free.
- RUnconcerned 1y agoShipping the chips back to Taiwan to be packaged so they can then be shipped back to the United States for sale is a positive? What are you talking about?
- cm2012 1y agoOcean shipping is very very cheap. Less cost in money and energy to ship a chip across the ocean than for you to drive to best buy to buy the phone its in.
- cheschire 1y agoSignificantly more pollution though, right?
- xxs 1y agoSea freight is the least polluting one - due to the extreme amount of cargo. Air is expensive and very pollutant. However, talking about chips that are hundreds of watts each the pollution produced by them is a lot higher than any transport.
- almosthere 1y agoBut the boat is already going back empty
- octopoc 1y agoThe article doesn’t say, but I assume these are SOTA AI chips? If so, it’s a huge deal that American can build them. Another interesting point: > AMD and larger rival Nvidia Corp. recently gained a reprieve on restrictions imposed on shipments of some types of artificial intelligence accelerators to China. It’s still not clear how many licenses will be granted — or how long the companies will be allowed to ship the chips to the country, the biggest market for semiconductors. It sounds like they’re trying to give China some chips but not as many as American allied countries. I wonder if they’re trying to get China “addicted” to western AI chips to hurt Chinese chip manufacturing development?
- dagmx 1y agoThat is their goal because they saw their restrictions had just made China accelerate domestic development instead.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoChina would be stupid to stop the acceleration of its domestic development right now.
- jpgvm 1y agoIf anything I could see the Chinese government moving to blocking import of Nvidia and AMD accelerators as time goes on. They can't afford to right now but you can bet they want to.
- mattnewton 1y agoExactly what most AI researchers would have predicted, if you force like 30% of the worlds top ai researchers to use something other than CUDA, they’ll work on improving the tools for something other than CUDA. It’s wild the same administrations would argue for restricting access to the US market for tariffs to strengthen domestic production, would not believe that severely restricting exports to the Chinese market would strengthen their domestic production
- dhruvmittal 1y agoHonestly I thought they might be even more expensive than this 5%-20%, it's good to see that it's not a 100% more expensive. While it seems we've learned some lessons about supply chain resiliency, I'm sure there's a number that puts the brakes on this thing.
- atonse 1y agoProbably because they aren’t human labor intensive and most of the costs of fabs are in construction and equipment, and almost all of the expensive lithography stuff comes from ASML (a Dutch company)?
- dreamcompiler 1y agoThe EUV light source comes from ASML which is indeed Dutch. Although the technology (zapping tiny droplets of tin with a laser as they fall through space) was largely invented in the US. It's an extremely complicated and expensive kludge but it works. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithogra...
- 3836293648 1y agoThat's quick. Didn't they only start building that factory two or three years ago?
- reliabilityguy 1y agoDiscussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44663074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44663074
- seangrogg 1y agoA 5-20% markup on CPUs isn't the worst thing, but those still need a mobo to socket into and as far as I'm aware we still don't have much capability on the availability of boards. Are there any companies that are spinning up board production, or even just broader consumer electronics in general (arduinos, pis, general controllers and the like)?
- chazeon 1y agoBoards are low tech and low profit, does American company and workers even want to do it?
- actionfromafar 1y agoThe tariffs are apparently going to bring back t-shirt and sneaker production to the US so it can be great again, so why not boards, too.
- bee_rider 1y agoWe’re at least 4 years away from that, as it would require a round of STEM college students to go EE instead of computer science.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoAgreed, though its realistically much more than four. We have to make going to college a good idea again. That's not a cultural shift that'll happen overnight.
- MBCook 1y agoAsk Smoot and Hawley how well that went.
- qzw 1y agoMaybe not, but if the entire country doesn’t have the ability to manufacture it, then it’s still going to be a strategic weakness when push comes to shove. The entire exercise of doing more chip manufacturing in the U.S. is about maintaining national competitiveness and independence. It’s certainly not about cost. So I think it’s a good point that investments should made to be able to onshore the entire stack rather than just the top end.
- CivBase 1y ago5-20% more expensive? That's way cheaper than I expected. That's pretty good, especially for 4nm.
- Workaccount2 1y agoEven 5% more expensive means 80% of people buy the taiwan version for $475 instead of $500. 20% more expensive and 99.9% of people buy the $500 one instead of the $600 one. Never make the mistake of falling for people's virtue signalling and pay attention instead to how they actually apply those virtues (spoiler: saving money is the #1 acted upon virtue, being far stronger than any other).
- CivBase 1y agoIf the US can maintain even just 5-10% of production volume, that's a huge win IMO. It means the US has a foundation of knowledge, equipment, and supply chains to expand on in the event of an emergency. Taiwan is in a precarious position, which is a huge liability for "western" powers. And a liability for us is effectively also a liability for Taiwan, considering we are their protectorate. North America and western Europe are comparatively safe.
- rkangel 1y agoIf other people agree with Lia Siu about supply chain resiliency, presumably what will happen is that they buy from both. Maybe they buy more from Taiwan, but the effective price will be somewhere between the two.
- DSingularity 1y agoVirtue signaling? What are you talking about. You seem to have an axe to grind. Cost increase in a single part doesn’t necessarily mean the cost of the device needs to go up. If a CPU costs 120$ instead of 100$ like that of a competing device 300$ device you can always sell yours for 310$ and make less margins. Things have to get subsidized in the short term if we are going to get domestic production up.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
- almosthere 1y ago[flagged]
- jasonlotito 1y agoThis was a result of the Biden's CHIPS and Science Act.
- mindslight 1y agoOne has to wonder if the entire point of killing CHIPS act is so that when some of the results finally come to fruition, CHIPS seems like yesterday's news and Trump gets the credit by default with his attention-span-of-a-fly cheerleaders. Similar shape but different direction from the dynamic Republicans have been playing with inflation for the past several decades - running up the debt with profligate spending, and then when the monetary inflation finally trickles down into consumer price inflation several years later their propaganda machine goes to work pinning it on the Democrat in office.
- almosthere 1y agoHe got TSMC to the US in the first place
- jasonlotito 1y agoJust like he got that Foxconn factory. Right...
- jotux 1y agoTrump specifically called the CHIPS act a “horrible, horrible thing.”
- BrawnyBadger53 1y agoThis factory was built as a part of the CHIPS act, so it's unrelated to him. If anything Trump escalating was probably pretty bad but his willingness to pivot is probably good. I know he shit talks about the chips act though which is definitely a mistake. Seems odd given his platform is about bringing manufacturing to the US.
- nottorp 1y agoSo are they going to try and spread this extra cost to customers worldwide? I'm fine with chips made in Taiwan.
- jajuuka 1y agoYeah this reads like an attempt to push the "made in America" narrative the admin wants. "Things will cost more but it's made in the US" And this is good because...why? It's not about broadening the supply chain to the consumers benefit. It's about avoiding the disaserous tariff strategy which the company isn't even paying in the first place.
- tensor 1y agoWhat would be good for the rest of the world is if there were SOTA chips that were not produced by the US nor Taiwan. Frankly, even the ones produced in Taiwan are under US control. The world needs a healthy diversified CPU/GPU chip market. At least there is ARM on the CPU side, but it's not nearly enough.
- renewiltord 1y agoWhere could it be? The places with abundant energy are where these things establish. US is about at the lower limit. Korea, Taiwan, Japan. China has SMIC and Huawei. But Europe doesn’t have enough energy to run air conditioning. They’d struggle to add more industry. India has power shortages. Africa isn’t reliable. Australia? South America too unstable.
- jajuuka 1y agoThat's a good point. I don't think it's a good idea for corporations to come in and set up stable energy sources to then hoard it themselves. Would be similar to Amazon setting up shop in Cartolandia. And long time investment plans like China's Belt and Road Initiative don't necessarily benefit the host country as much as it benefits the builder. Branching out supply chains and industry is a big problem to solve effectively because it touches so many different pieces.
- timmg 1y agoWhat I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked? Like, will they be able to manufacture chips that compete with TSMC? They used to be a crown-jewel of US tech. But it seems like every time I read the news, they are announcing a delay or shutting down some product.
- akdev1l 1y agoTldr; yes they are kind of cooked
- echelon 1y agoWhy is the government bailing them out then? Is that just good money thrown after bad? Regardless, it seems like the company leadership should be gutted (the same could be said of Boeing) and the company given over to a new technically-grounded leadership team.
- vFunct 1y agoI'm surprised the US just doesn't fund a new fab company or consortium, like Japan did with Rapidus. But I guess "too much socialism"
- sudofail 1y agoA lot of countries honestly should be taking this approach. Fabrication is just too important for national security. At least some domestic production is critical.
- epistasis 1y agoI don't think the current Republican leadership has any opposition at all to handing over lots of government money to large business to do things! The problem is that they are far too incompetent and have zero clue about tech, and only understand real estate, that simplest of business that can be executed with mere lizard-brain intelligence. Tech is also about small startups disrupting large giants, which is completely antithetical to current Republican leadership ideals, where the wealthiest get all gains, regardless of who does the work. It will take many years of full-on Democratic leadership to reconfigure the Republican Party back to a somewhat innovation-friendly business party. Meanwhile the Democrats, under Biden, were by far some of the most business-friendly politicians we have seen in perhaps a century, spurring massive investment in factories and industry, mostly across red states. But because it's a politically incorrect fact, it never gets reported.
- linuxftw 1y agoThis is why tariffs matter. Despite the US having much higher wages, and likely property and infrastructure costs, manufacturing is only 5-20% more for these high tech products. Corporations outsourced not because they couldn't compete, but because why leave 10% on the table when we can reward the executives with that cash instead of the labor?
- impossiblefork 1y agoSame thing with Nokia. They still had factories in Finland in the 2010s. They were profitable, but margins were better on the factories in Asia.
- dagmx 1y agoThese plants have nothing to do with tariffs though? They were in development prior to any tariffs and were partially funded by the CHIPS act. If anything, that’s the opposite of tariffs…
- linuxftw 1y agoMy point is, the cost of goods being produced in the US is not dramatically higher, as outlined in the article. Even very basic tariffs would level the playing field and bring economic benefits domestically, without a major impact to the consumer.
- dagmx 1y agoThat assumes you have the means to bring the production domestically first. This is a confluence of the previous administration having the forethought to do this, before the current administration tried to kill the CHIPS act. If they hadn’t done that, you likely wouldn’t have seen domestic production able to satisfy the needs. Tariffs alone are a misguided cudgel. Also your comment about a “major impact to the consumer” ignores that this is an increase in cost just for the silicon. There’s a lot of tariffs on different parts of the actual product.
- runako 1y ago
- calvinmorrison 1y agoThe US cost of stationing forces, patrols, and readiness in the pacific is probably 20-40 billion USD per year. cut that huge subsidy and Taiwan ceases to exist within several years. 5%? we should really evaluate if we need a long term dependency on taiwan. It would probably be better to evacuate them all.
- lenerdenator 1y agoThere's a lot more to the American defensive posture in the Pacific than threatening PRC with MAD if they invade Taiwan.
- DSingularity 1y agoAmerican defensive posture can center around Hawaii and mainland USA will be just fine.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoSure if we just compelety ignore our treaty partners in Japan, Philipines, India, Korea and US territories in Guam, Samoa, Marianas... or bases like Diego Garcia.
- criddell 1y agoThat certainly doesn't sound as unlikely as it once did...
- tencentshill 1y agoBut what have they done for Trump lately?
- latchkey 1y agoI run an AMD NeoCloud. People are extremely price sensitive and due to the competitive nature of the industry, I'll likely be the one absorbing this increased cost.
- okasaki 1y agoYour rent is now 20% higher but it's worth it because the landlord is an American.
- jabjq 1y agoThis comparison is quite absurd.
- msgodel 1y agoYou don't import apartments or even the materials used to manufacture them. Arguing tariffs drive rent prices rather than the cost of luxury consumption and corporate capex any more than the progressive income tax does is absurd.
- rozap 1y agoI feel like covid was only yesterday, yet it seems people have already forgotten the lessons we learned about lack of supply chain resilience. Resilience comes at a cost, and that cost is efficiency. That is the tradeoff being made here. It's not just that people want to light money on fire, or some misguided maga "buy american" nonsense. Especially silly when the chance of China invading Taiwan is very nonzero.
- reverendsteveii 1y agoIf they were worth it you'd already have been buying them. With that being said, glad to hear a CEO say "we have to consider the resiliency of the supply chain" because JIT as a manufacturing philosophy is revealing itself to be what it always was: exceedingly fragile, barely adequate when everything is working perfectly and subject to massive, multiplicative disruptions when everything is not working perfectly.
- elcritch 1y agoFunny, it's not that different to programming in Node or browsers. The JIT is awesome, but theres so many stories of fragile performance pits.
- reverendsteveii 1y agothe concept is the same: do you do work in advance and bear the cost of storing it and maybe not using it, or do you do work as-needed and hope that the additional cost of trying to deliver immediately is less than the cost of storage and overrun? the answer seems to be the same, too, "depends on whether you have resources to spare and whether the environment is stable enough to count on immediate delivery"
- yapyap 1y agoOf course the AMD CEO would say that, they need to remain in a positive light of the mob boss President otherwise they will be taxed and or sued. You see it with Columbia university and that network television network that got sued
- knorker 1y ago5%-20% sounds like a MUCH lower premium than I expected. And yes, no matter what you think of America First (I'm not even American), that sounds very much worth it.
- dathinab 1y agoYou can get much more then a 5%-20% higher price from the kind of customers which really care about US production (I mean like government, CIA, NSA, which also get stuff like AMD systems with hyper threading disabled or special treatment wrt. management units in a CPU etc. I don't mean people caring for the US, for that target group, from what I have seen over the years, I guess, 5% can work 20% is tricky).
- aylmao 1y agoI see the point being made here, and yeah 5%-20% extra for what amounts to insurance against geopolitics isn't too bad, but doesn't this all fall apart when China catches up? That 5%-20% is worth it now because no one else can fabricate competing chips. In a competitive market, 5%-20% can be the difference between having the price edge or not. I understand why the USA wants TSMC to manufacture outside of Taiwan, but perhaps it makes sense to move it not the USA but, say, Mexico? Chinese car companies seem to be slowly but surely rolling American car companies in international markets with great value at low prices. The move in this market evidently isn't to move manufacturing away from Mexico at a 5%-20% increase in price. In the chip market there's less immediate competition, but I can only imagine it'll come. Hopefully economies of scale would have removed this extra 5%-20% by the time China catches up?
- righthand 1y agoWhere will they get the water in Mexico?
- ergocoder 1y agoWith China, the issue isn't really the quality of the product. It's the geopolitical issues. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other countries even Philippines and Vietnam don't want to depend too much on China. A lot of island disputes and so on and so forth. My guess right now is that China will never catch up because Europe, US, Australia, and many other developing countries will avoid depending on China critically. This doesn't mean 0% would buy from China but it'll never become a critical dependency.
- zeroCalories 1y agoIt's a real shame that the U.S is alienating it's allies through aggressive economic policy. Maybe we'll find ourselves on the wrong side of that economically resilient policy.
- dathinab 1y ago> My guess right now is that China will never catch up because [..] The problem China is big enough to catch up just by it depending on itself + some cheap mass consumer market outlets to even further scale production. Like they have 1408 Million people ~3times the US and their education system tries (at least of paper) to give everyone a chance to reach silence excellence iff (and only iff) they are noticeable above average (but also due to the form of their education system for people which certain kinds of approaches to thinking which is a major handicap they gave themself accidentally). Like either way with that population size, priority on catching up on chip production, willingness to steal science (through it's not like the US doesn't have a habit for that, too) it's just a matter of time until they have some truly genius people put into the right kind of position with the right kind of resources which will close the gap step by step.
- proee 1y agoCapital expenditures are the dominant cost for semi fabs. Labor is actually relatively small. For example, "just" a tester machine, which tests parts before final, cost $5-10M each, and there are usually rows of these machines as far as the eye can see.
- viktorcode 1y agoI see what she did here. That's just for silicone, not for the ready to use product. I expect the final US-made CPU available for sale cost to jump significantly higher than 20%
- jt2190 1y ago> “I think the economics of it are we have to consider the resiliency of the supply chain, I think we learned that during the pandemic — the idea that you think about your supply chains not just by the lowest cost, but also about reliability, about resiliency, and all those things. I think that’s how we’re thinking about U.S. manufacturing,” [AMD CEO Lia Su] said to Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow. This almost sounds verbatim what U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told Bloomberg yesterday, so take the headline phrase “worth it” in that context.
- tehjoker 1y agoWorth remembering that in the medium term, chip manufacturing will become so expensive only one leading edge provider will remain and they will require the entire world market to remain profitable.
- mmmBacon 1y agoThe article doesn’t say why the chips have a cost difference. The wafer cost of advanced nodes is ~$30k per wafer. Is the wafer cost different or is the yield different and hence the reason for the variance of 5-20%? All else being equal (same die size/design on same process) I suspect that a large part of the cost difference is yielded cost due to maturity of operations at the Arizona fab. Taiwan has had many years to optimize operations. You see this for any product initially when it moves to a new production site.
- zhobbs 1y agoThe article quotes the CEO saying yield is comparable: >TSMC’s new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield — the amount of good chips a production run produces per batch — Su told the audience at the forum.
- mmmBacon 1y agoThe overhead cost of a fab is fixed. So hard to understand why that would have such a wide variance. It may be true that the facility hasn’t been fully amortized so in principle it’s more expensive to make chips there. I can understand it being more expensive for many reasons. However I wouldn’t expect the cost difference to have a large variance. 5-20% is a very large range if the yields are comparable.
- dclowd9901 1y agoI would have to think personnel cost, no? I'm assuming American pay rates are higher than Taiwan's. More cynically, perhaps the DoD is getting a sweetheart deal and TSMC is passing the cost onto customers.
- ethan_smith 1y agoThe 5-20% range likely reflects TSMC's yield learning curve in Arizona, with costs trending toward the lower end as the fab matures and defect densities approach those of Taiwan's established facilities.
- bgnn 1y ago
- alexnewman 1y agoThis is a crazy article. Its title is gonzo . She was clearly spitballing. All of Bloomberg is dumber by reading this title
- ranger_danger 1y agoAnd the machines that makes these "US" chips... where do they come from?
- trynumber9 1y agoIt's international but I wonder how many people know that about third of ASML scanners and steppers are made in Connecticut. And all their light sources are made by ex-Cymer in San Diego.
- dclowd9901 1y ago> “What I really like about the AI action plan is that it’s quite actionable,” [AMD's CEO] said. I couldn't help but laugh. And they say software engineers are replaceable by AI.
- aiauthoritydev 1y agoHard to tell. In this hardware space, there is a lag of few years. We would know for certain in 5 years.
- asdfman123 1y agoIt's funny that this is why "we can't build things here" and also why the world's two biggest powers are at a standoff: 5-20% more expensive prices for just one type of thing
- Seanambers 1y agoThis is from the All in session? ; https://youtu.be/9WkGNe27r_Q?si=w5BE2tZKdFcI6aC1&t=812 https://youtu.be/9WkGNe27r_Q?si=w5BE2tZKdFcI6aC1&t=812
- avhception 1y agoIf that is the cost of keeping the value within the western economies, we should pay. Plain and simple. I'd even argue it's cheap.
- fishsticks89 1y agoIf something happens to Taiwan, we won't regret being able to produce these chips domestically. If AI keeps growing like it does, it might even trigger a conflict.
- kulahan 1y agoAh yes, Taiwán - that famously stable nation with no existential threats to its very existence. I don’t think this is an “if” situation, but rather a “when”. There is no question in my mind - it’s simply too attractive to China. It may not come through all out war, but they will eventually claim what they feel is theirs. They operate on much more manageable time scales.
- Gee101 1y agoWhat is interesting is if the world is not that reliant on Taiwan chips anymore would China really care that much about Taiwan?
- Zaiberia 1y agoYes, they would. However, if Taiwan wasn’t as important to the world because of their chips then the world would probably not care as much about what communist China wants to do to them.
- kortilla 1y agoProbably, my understanding is that the primary reason China cares about Taiwan is internal pressure about the separatism. The power Taiwan has is the only reason they haven’t acted.
- 2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
- esaym 1y agoOh I'll have to pay $330 instead of $300 for my CPU. The horror!
- AlwaysRock 1y agoThat's all? No way.
- uses 1y agoDoesn't this type of thing prove that we can just... start manufacturing things domestically if we really wanted to? Which would presumably be when it actually makes sense to do so? But it mostly doesn't right now, so we mostly don't. There are certainly benefits to being able to make something down the block and quickly iterate. But that's a different thing from industrial scale production. And if we really wanted that benefit wouldn't we just... do it?
- ei8ths 1y agoI'll pay 5-20% more knowing my fellow americans made it
- temptemptemp111 1y ago[dead]
- hankman86 1y agoSeems like a low price to pay for eliminating the risk to have your production facilities overrun by Chinese invaders.
- mrheosuper 1y agoIs the whole toolchain in US, or only TSMC ?, how about packaging ? 5%-20% is surprisingly cheap imo.
- jm4 1y agoThat actually isn’t too bad, assuming it’s true. I would certainly pay 5% and probably 20% more for a product made here by American workers getting fair wages versus an overseas factory. I’ll believe it when I see it because I have a hard time believing this is possible. I would like to be proven wrong.
- gkanai 1y agoThat seems like a reasonable price premium to pay for having given up fabbing in the US previously and now paying to catch up.
- ErrorNoBrain 1y agoAs a non-american... i'd prefer taiwan over the US...
- piyushpr134 1y agoUS can simply put 20% tariffs on taiwan/chinese chips and this would be absorbed
- epolanski 1y agoAnd how does that make american IT companies with datacenters, etc, more competitive?
- jeroenhd 1y agoIn the short term, chips would just be 5-20% more expensive in the US compared to anywhere else. They'd need to raise the tariffs a bit more, though, to make sure there's incentive to increase production to a level that can satisfy demand. In the long term, it would provide the US with an independent source of chips, and eventually allow them to let go of any plants to protect Taiwan from China.
- epolanski 1y agoYou haven't answered: how do american datacenters stay competitive? In Europe or Japan I can already build much cheaper, workforce is cheaper, now even hardware is cheaper. How does data centers in US stay competitive? Why would Google or others build their new AI infrastructure in Ohio rather than elsewhere?
- fykem 1y agoNothing but delusion. Time to throw a wrench into this party. 1. The estimates are never accurate; after subsidies dry up expect 50-200%. 2. I will buy used before I buy new to cut costs. 3. American manufacturing is trash; I will never buy GM/Ford/Chrysler/Tesla; no matter how much you try to force me to. Intel falls into this category. I'm supposed to just accept on faith that building a tsmc fab in the US is going to "just werk"? Nah. 4. I don't care if it's "Made in America"; what I care about is price to quality and performance ratio. Which as we all know the Americans have gave up on (ahem Ford and only manufacturing trucks, etc). Intel has been getting it's asshole rocked the past couple years and it has home field advantage. 5. I care what Linux runs; and if China and RISC-V take off and are lower price point I'll buy that before I spend anything on US "American made chips". 6. I don't care about "ccp bad"; fuck off with your propaganda. You realize Taiwan is an island state of China right? Seems like good idea to let them setup shop in US? Good job you played yourself. 7. The "rare earths" to make these chips come mostly from China. China will counter like they already have screwing over Micron and Intel (and soon tsmc). 8. Apple will mark up whole price; not just chip price. The consumer will pay for the entire shift of the supply chain not just the cost to manufacture. Even in best case of 5% your 2,000 laptop is now minimum 2,100; yea, the average American can afford that... People can't even afford to eat fast food anymore and some idiots in here think they can pay more for something they don't give a shit about? Lol 9. You first; just like with the idiots that bought Teslas (which are the lowest and worst in quality of all cars manufactured). Meanwhile I'm still driving my second car (Japanese btw) after having bought in 2019 (and the one before lasted 20 years). 10. This reeks of the anti Honda shit I would see during 2008 PvP of US auto industry because they failed to innovate. And guess what no propaganda saved them and they still can't compete in the market. 11. Intel is on life support, and tsmc is supposed to what...? Like I said it's nothing but delusion.
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- michaelsshaw 1y agoI was going to post pretty much this, but you have already done it for me. Well spoken. You fuck, hard.
- a3w 1y agoAMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing ]5,20[ % more (bloomberg.com) there I fixed it.
- loxs 1y agoIf it's only 20%, it's a no-brainer.
- sylware 1y agoA14 process?
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- lugu 1y agoSupposing TSMC has similar margin and cost structure for chips made in the US and Taiwan, what does a 5-20% price increase means in term of production cost?
- skeezyboy 1y agoshweet land of liberty!
- jgalt212 1y agoAMD never should have given up their fabs. Things that look like efficiency gains often increase your business risk.
- alberth 1y agoA lot of people misunderstand why companies outsource to Asia. It’s not just about cost—it’s actually more so about manufacturing expertise. Asia has a massive pool of highly skilled manufacturing talent, and that kind of deep expertise is something the U.S. is quickly forgetting. So my question is: with TSMC building a fab in the U.S., are Americans actually getting retrained in real manufacturing skills? Or are they just being taught to push the buttons TSMC tells them to push?
- api 1y agoWas the US ever a major manufacturer of even pre-IC solid state electronics? I was born in 1978 and was really into Heathkits and breadboard projects and stuff when I was a child and early teen. My dad was (and still is) an analog electronic engineer and gave me lots of surplus oscilloscopes and frequency counters and other coolness too. I distinctly remember often seeing "Made in Korea," "Made in Japan," "Made in Taiwan," etc. on circuit boards and chassis assemblies. The single word "Korea" was very common on components. This would have mostly been stuff from the late 1970s and 1980s. At the very least it seems like electronics from at least the early-mid solid state era onward into the IC era has always been a globalized industry with a globalized supply chain. I feel like you've got to go back to vacuum tubes to find self-contained nationalized electronics industries. Back then as now a lot of stuff was designed in the USA and Europe but manufactured elsewhere. Just like Asia has a ton of top tier manufacturing and logistics talent, the US and Europe have a ton of top tier design engineering and coding talent. I still do agree that there is strategic value in making sure the US at least has some domestic capacity to manufacture leading-edge chips and electronics, not just to maintain some talent here but in case a major global conflict breaks out that deeply fractures all these supply chains. Same for Europe and any other country. China meanwhile would do well to develop its own domestic software and design talent pool.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoIt was called silicon valley for a reason. From the 1950s until the 1980s, the US was the dominate manufacturer of integrated circuits and the the origin of most fo the technology. Everything started to globalize starting in the late 1970s to early 1980s which really kicked off with the end of the gold standard and the Volker Shock. The Japanese and Germans, which had IC industry already, picked up steam and started to export as the economics changed. China, Korea, Vietnam, etc. are recent entries (2000s)
- ksynwa 1y agoThis was always going to be the case. The question is whether this is still going to be true five or ten years down the line.
- leric 1y ago[dead]