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Chip manufacturing is too important for the US. We can’t be completely dependent on Taiwan. Nothing against Taiwan, it’s one attack away from being obliterate
by JustExAWS 1y ago
Chip manufacturing is too important for the US. We can’t be completely dependent on Taiwan. Nothing against Taiwan, it’s one attack away from being obliterated by China.
No company is going to come out of someone’s garage and build a chip fab.
- charliea0 1y agoWe can definitely offer subsidies for manufacturing in the US - we've already gotten TSMC to open several fabs.
- scarface_74 1y agoAnd it’s still owned by a foreign country and Taiwan is restricting TSMC from manufacturing their most advanced processors from being manufactured in the US. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/taiwans-government-strengthens-silicon-shield-restricts-exports-of-tsmcs-most-advanced-process-technologies https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ta...
- gizajob 1y agoSame as the US is restricting sale of Nvidia chips to China.
- 8note 1y agothis is not to say that intel will be manufacturing competitive chips to what TSMC is. are you worried that china will invade taiwan, and then somehow taiwan will still be around to prevent the US fabs from making the best chips? its a bit far fetched
- raw_anon_1111 1y agoIf Intel isn’t manufacturing chips, what US manufacturer comes close? You can’t just build a close to leading edge manufacturing facility in a month
- Citizen8396 1y agoit's not like the technology to produce these chips are a drop-in replacement the threat Taiwan faces is existential, and one of the only things that the US has at stake are these chips
- re-thc 1y ago> We can definitely offer subsidies for manufacturing in the US The very subsidies Intel now has to pay with shares for? How is that a subsidy? Companies now and in the future would be very concerned before taking any US subsidies because the terms can always change after the fact.
- thayne 1y agoSo we give a bunch of money to a company with a history of mismanagement and out sourcing chip manufacturing?
- zombiwoof 1y ago[dead]
- andrewflnr 1y ago"Someone's garage" is a straw man. There must be people here who could, with adequate funding, build a smallish but viable chip manufacturing company.
- scarface_74 1y agoThere is no such thing as a “smallish” chip manufacturer that can manufacture leading edge chips. It’s about scale. If it were that easy, Apple, Amazon, Google AMD, Nvidia, etc who all design their own chips would have done it.
- alfiedotwtf 1y agoFlip side: why would Apple, Amazon, Google, AMD, NVIDIA etc build their own when they can outsource it cheaper? Companies are run to make a profit… they don’t care about sovereignty as long as the money is coming in.
- x2tyfi 1y agoBecause it’s extremely lucrative and strategically valuable to the US
- alfiedotwtf 1y ago… but the shareholders are global?! That’s not really a compelling argument unless you made it a requirement that all major/strategic companies must have 100% domestic ownership! BUT - all you then need to do is create a Delaware LLC that buys the strategic stock, which is owned by $SCARY_FOREIGNERS
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago> Because it’s extremely lucrative It could be extremely lucrative if they get it right. Simply trying to copy TSMC would also be a poor strategy. Companies have "core competencies" (or should). The manufacture (not design) of high-end silicon has never been one for any of these companies except Intel, and they have just lost big time. > strategically valuable to the US Yeah, they don't care.
- gizajob 1y agoNvidia has a market cap of 4.5 trillion dollars and everyone is committing hundreds of billions to AI CapEx in their direction - they can afford to organise chip fabs if it really came to it. Ok TSMC and ASML would need to be on board but it could be done. Should be done in fact because even a simple SWOT analysis would show the risk to their business.
- viraptor 1y agoIf Taiwan becomes practically inaccessible, is there any way another country can setup a competing fab (for the latest generation of chip sizes) without years of R&D? As far as I understand, the practical knowledge of how to do it doesn't exist right now. (Neither does the prerequisite tooling)
- gizajob 1y agoGiven there’s fabs doing essentially the same thing elsewhere then yes. Getting down to 3nm and the technology and secrets that involves would take a while though. TSMC can’t do it either without xUV lithography machines made by ASML in the Netherlands. Furthermore there isn’t anything magical about about the current generation of chips that couldn’t be replicated at at a scale of 12 or 15 or 20 nanometers - it’s just that scaling down to that small allows for a greater density of transistors per wafer and thus increased power efficiency. An AI supercomputer could be built with chips with bigger transistors than 3nm it would just run hotter. And investing in intel aside, one of Nvidias great competitive moats is CUDA and that’s software not hardware.
- viraptor 1y agoI meant specifically for a given small size. Sure larger ones can be and are produced elsewhere. But how many years behind is everyone else if they can't get any help at all from the current companies.
- pfannkuchen 1y agoAren’t the actual machines used in the fabs still made in Germany?
- TacticalCoder 1y ago[dead]
- freeopinion 1y agoNobody is going to swoop in and buy a distressed company that owns a bunch of fabs then turn it around if that company keeps getting bailed out.
- pfannkuchen 1y agoRight it would make a lot more sense to let this happen and then restrict that the buyers be American (or European, I guess).