this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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It makes no sense to open a fab in the US.
You'd be surprised at how many fabs there are in the US.
And so on. The US has a lot of fabs. For best countries in the world to build a new fab, the US would rank somewhere between first and third place — and I think there's a strong argument for the answer being "first place." Unlike Taiwan and South Korea, US fab jobs and experience are not almost entirely dominated by one or two companies. The US isn't located in one of the most geopolitically risky parts of the developed world. The US has a huge population and plenty of money to put into fab expansion.
The only issues here are (a) the US has gotten worse and worse at large scale construction projects, and (b) TSMC wants to pay workers like shit and treat them even worse, which doesn't fly for technically skilled US workers. You can treat US technical workers workers poorly, but not as poorly as in much of Asia, and you definitely cannot do it without paying them very well.
yet every device you use comes from TSMC 🤣
Almost all RAM comes from #1: Samsung (aka: Korea) and #2: Crucial/Micron (aka: USA).
TSMC has strong logic chips, but it takes more than just logic to make a computer. USA is no slouch either on Logic (Intel is down the street, also in Arizona).
Aside from Intel / Arizona... TI (from Texas) is a giant in automotive microcontrollers, power-transistors and the like. If you're getting electricity of any kind (power-supplies, electric vehicles, switching terminals of electric lines), its probably going through a TI transistor with power-controllers / TI-microcontrollers in between.
USA absolutely has tons of chip talent. TSMC may be the top, but lets not pretend that USA is some kind of technological slouch. Arizona has plenty of talent, there's plenty of talent in New York (Buffalo / GloFo) and Texas (TI) as well in this field. Lets not be so self-deprecating here...
Um, hard disagree. It makes a lot of sense if we don’t want to entirely be dependent on China for silicon production. Gets a little fuzzy because this is a foreign company, but the plant is still on US soil. We need to make semi-conductors in the US or we can never maintain independence from China. Our dependency on China still may be too far gone, but this is at least an attempt to remain independent from arguably our largest world adversary. Remember how the world’s hardware supply chain slowed to a molasses pace because of COVID? That’s why it’s smart to build in the US.