this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
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I work in semiconductors, and I don't think the numbers are necessarily unfair. There are a lot of small companies and academic research labs receiving funding from the CHIPS act, and their work gets done faster when there are fabs in the country to tape out their designs.
Can't say I know a ton about the industry but it's wild how many fabless companies are so influential. So much of business is vertical integration, yet many of the biggest names in chips are fabless
Chip fabs simply do not work at a small scale, if you want to sell them at anything resembling a reasonable cost. Modern chip lithography takes a truly titanic amount of capital to set up, and it takes years. And by then the industry has moved on.
look at how much a new fab costs now.
Yeah, I don't know what people expected.
Building production capability is obscenely expensive and can inherently really only be done by a handful of companies at a time if they want any hope of getting their investment back. They need a crazy amount of volume to pay for that facility. You can't invest tax dollars in 100 facilities. It doesn't work.