At 756 pages, this looks to be longer than many textbooks. > Microelectronics power all AI, and the United States no longer manufactures the world’s most sophisticated chips. We do not want to overstate the precariousness of our position, but given that the vast majority of cutting-edge chips are produced at a single plant separated by just 110 miles of water from our principal strategic competitor, we must reevaluat…
It really is a concern just how dependent the entire world is on TSMC. "The best human operator cannot defend against multiple machines making thousands of maneuvers per second potentially moving at hypersonic speeds and orchestrated by AI across domains." Attacks by drone swarms are already here. The first one was Syria vs. Russia in 2018.[1] There was an attack on Saudi oil facilities in 2019.[2] Much of this has l…
The strategic concern they are raising is not economic, it's a security issue and the two are quite different. From the strategic security view it doesn't matter so much who makes these products, what matters is ensuring continuity of availability on the one hand and excluding interference or compromises of the integrity of the supply chain on the other. The latter is to do with things like an opponent interfering in the quality of parts, introducing backdoors and such.
In these two views of course on shore manufacturing is easier to secure in both senses, but that's a side effect not an absolute. For example if the USA had sovereign territory next to China, a fab there would still be highly vulnerable to interference in the physical supply while a fab in Canada next to the US border would be much more physically secure from Chinese or Russian interference. From a security perspective there's nothing magical about being on US territory.
A lot of these debates seem to very rapidly pivot into discussions about on shore US manufacturing and falling behind technologically, where what they're really talking about is skills and economic benefits. Those are a very different issue though.
Even looking just at the technology it's not a simple calculation either. The best lithography systems are manufactured in Holland, any fab anywhere wanting to use the best processes is dependent on them and these are the most critical parts of the process. The location of the fab is just one part of the puzzle. In today's highly integrated world no one country can even hope to own all the essential elements in high tech supply, chain. The common simplistic view of iPhone manufacturing is another example of this. The majority of the most advanced components in an iPhone to this day aren't made in China. The camera module in Japanese, the CPUs come from Taiwan, flash memory and batteries mostly from South Korea and Japan I think, Gorilla glass I'm not sure about now, it used to be made in the US. Only final assembly and some low value components are Chinese, and yet iPhones are 'Made in China'. Would moving low value, low skilled final assembly really benefit the USA all that much? That's a more extreme example, but from a supply chain and technology point of view it's the same (to a much lesser extent to be sure) with chip fabs. Critical components come from all sorts of different countries and companies.
So ok building more advanced fabs in the US is a sensible move on a whole variety of axes, but it doesn't solve all of the problems and even when it does, it's not always for the most obvious reasons.