Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
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Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
1–10 of 593 posts
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#2Investing in local chip fabs is long overdue. These are incredibly important for geopolitical stability and should be distributed world-wide. We've centralized too many fabs in too few places in the search for low cost.
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#3Honestly, this is good policy. We can't have our complete global supply chain held over our heads when China goes and does something crazy inevitably.
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#4Just wait 10 years until we get rid of it again like we did with AMD and Infineon.
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#5Honestly, this is good policy. We can't have our complete global supply chain held over our heads when China goes and does something crazy inevitably.
This is a very bad policy. We should instead invest in local companies, not a American monopoly like Intel.
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#6I honestly think this is something the UK should be doing too, however with the current political environment it wouldn’t be possible.
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#7Honestly, this is good policy. We can't have our complete global supply chain held over our heads when China goes and does something crazy inevitably.
Pssst! Don't tell anyone I told you: they are already doing crazy stuff, but we shouldn't complain too loudly, or else...
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#8Honestly, this is good policy. We can't have our complete global supply chain held over our heads when China goes and does something crazy inevitably.
This is a very bad policy. We should instead invest in local companies, not a American monopoly like Intel.
Why? Germany doesn’t pursue political objectivity anyway.
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#9Investing in local chip fabs is long overdue. These are incredibly important for geopolitical stability and should be distributed world-wide. We've centralized too many fabs in too few places in the search for low cost.
Why is the local fab specifically important? They're still going to fly the wafers to Malaysia or wherever for packaging, right? And the tools and chemicals will all be made elsewhere, won't they? It's not as simple as having a steady supply of apples from your local orchard.
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#10Once again EU taxpayer money bankrolling US tech dominance. When will we ever learn to build up our domestic tech industry?
And before the chip hipsters crawl all over my back to prove we ackshually have a powerful domestic semi industry, please name me another EU company, other than ASML (a company 90% of people here never heard of before the chip shortage), that has the same margins, dominance and ability to shape the market, as much as the US based Intel, Quallcomm, AMD, Nvidia, Apple. I'll wait.
The thing is, other than ASML, most of our domestic semi companies (NXP, ST, Ericsson, Nordic, Infineon, Bosch, AMS, etc.) are only competing for relatively low margin chips with high competition, therefore bring home relatively little money, compared to their US counterparts which have monopolized high margin sectors (general compute, AI, graphics, etc) and rake in the big bucks.
Don't get me wrong, it's great we have our own semi industry, and we make great chips to boot, but I wish we could do more high margin products, as Chinese companies are hot on our heels with massive support from their government.
Remember the failed attempt from the merger of ST-Ericsson to take on QUALCOMM's ARM Snapdragon SoCs and modems in the mobile space 10 years ago? I was talking to a former Dutch manager who had a stint there and his reply dropped my jaw: "Yeah, that merger was never meant to ship any chips that can beat Quallcomm, it was just a vehicle designed to suck up as money as possible and funnel it into the right pockets, while some managers pad their resumes so they can move up at other companies later."
Source: Former EU semi engineer.