In 2015-2020 the left snickered and sneered at the suggestion that manufacturing could be brought back home.
"The Left" - if they snickered, isn't any smarter than "The Mn" on his weird lab leak stuff.
The CHIPs act will be trumpeted high and wide, and it's cool if there are some good paying semiconductor jobs in PennOhitucky. But it doesn't untangle us from China. The chips currently manufactured at TSMC still go to China to be assembled, and there are other non TSMC parts that end up on those boards, the CHIPs act isn't covering capacitors, resistors, green plastic, etc...
The reasons that TSMC became the big merchant semi vendor are twofold. Back in the day, people who made chips all built their own fabs. My first job at DEC Hudson was in a facility where we designed the chips in one building and the Fab was next door. But back then, companies that fabricated parts were the only customer of the Fab, and the real margins that paid back the cost of the Fab was selling 200k computers to a bank and making endless streams of money in software and services. IBM, DEC, Wang, SUN, HP, etc...
The PC revolution flipped the script - where Intel was just making and selling chips, as was AMD and TI. These were huge companies selling big volumes to pay down the fab.
But the next revolution where you get things like iPhones and Garmin watches and the like - for a long time Apple didn't even design their own CPUs, let alone manufacture them. But the CPUs were designed by smaller companies that didn't own Fabs, who were more nimble as higher priced semiconductors started being placed into cars, phones, etc... But TI and Intel aren't merchant semiconductor vendors, they don't sell fab capacity, they sell chips.
To add to it, building a fab has gotten more expensive in the US because they aren't exactly the best neighbor. Like coal mines, they provide a lot of jobs but come with a lot of nasty cancer causing stuff. Costs, time, permitting. The time line to build a fab is long, the pay back period is long. The only way a new merchant fab happens in the US is with Government support (CHIPs act) and the happenstance that Intel, the US company with the best fab experience, is falling behind in the design space.
Don't think I'm correct? This guy knows what he's talking about.
Thousands of parts on our boards. EIGHT come from TSMC. So even if the H100s are made by Intel, they still get shipped to China and manufactured with a lot of other overseas parts.
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