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Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

reuters.com

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Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#291

Post by baybal2 »

to11mtm wrote: post #270
fsn4dN69ey wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhhh, makes sense. Also, after reading further, it appears I was wrong - TSMC has some operations in the US including some in Arizona - plus their interest in maintaining friendly terms with the US in order to preserve the existence of Taiwan is also an angle. What still worries me is that ramp up time for fabs like these are on the scale of years - if we assume a fab started right now, we'll be making semiconductor…

> What still worries me is that ramp up time for fabs like these are on the scale of years - if we assume a fab started right now, we'll be making semiconductors in ~2 years at the earliest (very optimistic)? TSMC announced the Arizona fab in May of 2020. They estimate it will be at volume production by 2024. The challenge is that it's not just building the fab, but also the lead times for all of the equipment involv…

Totally correct, by 2024 a 20k wpm N5 fab will not be able to break even unless wafers would cost $50k+.

Who will be billed for this negative equity?

TSMC's economists certainly know what they do when they put a $12B investment: this can only happen with US government guarantee, thus taxpayers paying.

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#292

Post by [deleted] »

vmception wrote: post #64
xgulfie wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protip: Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's ethical or good

I didn't make any statement on that and you are assuming that the lack of signaling means acceptance. I said onshore banks open accounts for many entity types that are not limited to just humans or just businesses from the 50 states. The prior poster assumed a bank in another country was necessary, which can be very difficult to open and maintain for a US citizen owner of an offshore company.

[deleted]

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#293

Post by ClumsyPilot »

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #290
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see, if we had 0 pages of regulations, then banks would be ethical, then they would not create CDOs and then synthetic CDOs and destroy globaln economy.

Strawman argument.

You mean the one about 100,000 pages? How is that of any relevance to CDOs?

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#295

Post by dang »

depressedpanda wrote: post #240
dang wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Industry critique" fills virtually every HN thread. With suppression like that, who needs amplifiers? Most people who see a moderation decision they dislike leap straight to the idea that the moderators secretly hold $VIEW, ignoring (or not noticing) all the moderation decisions going the opposite way. In reality, we just don't care— I don't have words to describe how profoundly we don't care about commenter opinion…

I think you're doing a great job, but if that job burdens you with existential weariness maybe you should look for something else to do, for your own sake? This is just a commenter opinion, though, so feel free to not care about it :-)

Thanks! - all of you who replied were being kind. Even lvs was being kind—it's all relative :)

I'm fine and didn't mean the comment to sound complainy. The reason I put it that way is that the alternative (going on about how little I care what people post) would have sounded like a putdown, which would be worse.

It's just hard to communicate this phenomenon—the desensitizing effect of sheer quantity on the brain—in a way that captures what it feels like. Having the inside of one's brain sandblasted is the closest I've gotten so far. Imagine that your fingertips were sandblasted for years - they'd get pretty desensitized. Well, that's the reaction I have to commenter opinions.

Note: I'm not saying that makes me/us unbiased; bias has many forms, and "I am not biased" would be a dumb thing to say in any case, since it is often unconscious. I am, though, saying that commenters who rush to "you just disagree with my opinions!" as an explanation for moderator action do not know what they're talking about—not in the putdown sense, but quite literally.

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#296

Post by RhodoGSA »

chii wrote: post #274
RhodoGSA wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has too much USD denominated debt to last against a protracted trade war.

That's not really true - china uses the USD they own to peg the RMB to enhance their export. In times of war, this USD debt is going to be a liability for china, since the US can just refuse to repay it (and after all, what else is china going to do about? Declare war again?).

https://www.lynalden.com/global-dollar-short-squeeze/

Kind of explains the problems with China having too much USD debt. Even without times of war.

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#297

Post by LdSGSgvupDV »

It would only help with 10nm+. I don't think throwing the money into the industry could solve the shortage of 10nm-. The real problem is lack of top 20% engineers in this industry. The salary for hardware engineer is uncompetitive with software engineer in US.

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#298

Post by lvs »

dang wrote: post #224
lvs wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt a thankless job, but your claims to being unbiased are obviously going to be faced with skepticism when you label industry critique as "predictable" or "mean" and censor it. It's your perception that it fills every thread, but my perception is that the industry cheerleading in this community is wildly untethered. I think you probably wouldn't deny that your goal is to stem generalized negativity, based on th…

It's not possible to be consistent because it's physically not possible to read everything, or even close. I'm sure you're right that there are tropes of reaction in particular areas that deserve to get moderated by the same principles (of avoiding repetition etc.) and I don't doubt that you see some of them more clearly than I do. If you want to help with that, you could let us know when you see them, particularly w…

Sometimes a thoughtful critique can be obvious and widely held, as I think it was here. Endeavoring to belabor a simple argument or feign a unique thought process has little intrinsic value. Sometimes a spade is a spade, and that should be OK -- if indeed the goal is to be intellectually honest. But perhaps the goal is to steer the good fortunes of the tech industry and venture capitalists and the investor class, and that certainly would not surprise me greatly on an internet forum run by a venture capital firm.

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#299

Post by robbrown451 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #177
robbrown451 wrote: post #31

To all those saying that those companies can afford it themselves, remember that there are reasons they don't. The economics don't add up. Companies tend to do what is in their economic interest to do. Something like this can change the economics, which could be a good thing.

"To all those saying that those companies can afford it themselves, remember that there are reasons they don't." This sounds a lot like "God moves in mysterious ways and has a plan for everyone, everything happens for a reason". No actual analysis and reasoning required. This free market religion is what gave us 2008 and will keep giving.

I'm confused, my comment you replied to was the opposite of free market religion. Also kind of the opposite of "mysterious ways."

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#300

Post by robbrown451 »

throwaway481048 wrote: post #62
robbrown451 wrote: post #31

To all those saying that those companies can afford it themselves, remember that there are reasons they don't. The economics don't add up. Companies tend to do what is in their economic interest to do. Something like this can change the economics, which could be a good thing.

Can you please elaborate? I struggle to discern the ultimate effect of private capital versus government funds in this situation. Ideally, a business’ problems are handled by itself, not via the federal government using taxpayer monies.

Obviously there is a difference in that private capital invests in what will help that particular company, while government funds should go toward what benefits the nation as a whole. A company might say "we won't bother investing, let our competition invest, and we'll just get the components from whoever will sell them to us cheapest." That can make sense individually (and especially in the short term), but as a whole (whether talking about industry as a whole, or nation as a whole), they are worse off.

Essentially, a prisoner's dilemma.

There is also the fact that American companies are competing against Chinese companies, where the government can subsidize various Chinese companies and initiatives. China is communist, of course, which does sort of favor this sort of thing. If the US was to close itself off to China, then it's a lot easier to be 100% capitalist as in your ideal scenario.

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