Does it really matter which country is the headquarters for the corporate owner? It's still a German plant hiring Germans and subject to German laws. The rule of law exists in both Germany and the US. German citizens can invest in Intel. And, in the event of a US/German war, that plant is and will remain German, not American. I think there's an excellent case for distinguishing that from companies from China, where n…
I'd say it's German economic (and more and more political) dominance over the EU and US geopolitical dominance over Germany...
Intel's first fabs outside the US were in Ireland, Israel, and China (since sold). So, false.
Investing 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.
This will not do much with Taiwan being a single source for semiconductor manufacturing supplies. Much of critical blockers for chemicals, consumables, materials will still be in Taiwan just because the semi industry is that huge there. All 300mm fabs working outside of Taiwan are just few shipments of consumables away from stalling all the time. When Russia attacks Ukraine, the 3rd world is fucked. When China attack…
> When China attacks Taiwan, the 1st world is fucked.
China would be shooting themselves in the foot by invading, because it would equally fuck them. I've read in may places that as soon as China invades, Taiwan will blow up all the fabs and supporting supply lines. So even if China takes control of Taiwan, the semiconductor industry will be a smoldering pile of nothingness.
This article[1] does a great job in describing why this would be the case. Even if China prevents the destruction of those fabs and factories, there would still be tons of obstacles.
Investing 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.
I don't think this is why fabs were centralized. I think this is because when you start to decrease node size, the fab costs go up astronomically so to keep the cost in check you need economies of scale and with the current manufacturing techniques you can achieve this by centralizing manufacturing.
Didn't you and parent both say "to keep costs low"?
It's too late for Intel. x86 doesn't have a future, ARM64 SoC architectures like Apple's M1 (TSMC) are the future of computing. Just as fast (and often faster in many benchmarks) with only 20-25% the power consumption and heat. Even Microsoft is preparing for the shift to ARM, at Build 2⁰22 they announced project Voltera, an ARM Windows 11 PC loaded with Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 7 all for ARM to give devs a head s…
And the desktop will die as well. Even the fans of x86 say that it sucks but it still remains the main target for serious software. Microsoft first needs to recapture their developers. They still have those that target their platform with Visual C++.
Desktop will never die.
The form factor might change. We might go from a large box to a docking station for a tablet or laptop, but the mouse + keyboard + monitor(s) is never going away.
Subsidizing an American company is not necessary for Germany's security. In fact, it undermines it.
Would you mind explaining why you think this is the case?
They are dependent on and subservient to the US and its geopolitical interests. We see this right now with Germany self-sabotaging it's own economy and industrial power by cutting off cheap Russian energy at the direction of US policy interests (Nord Stream 2 was agreed upon for years between Russia and Germany but thwarted at every turn, sanctioned etc by US).
Just wait 10 years until we get rid of it again like we did with AMD and Infineon.
This is spot on and I feel a lot of the comments here miss this context. Germany has tried this before and it was a gigantic waste - they build a fab somewhere at massive cost, claim it as victory because it's "invested locally", zero ecosystem materializes around it, and ten years later the fab is obsolete and shuts down. It helps nobody except the chip company.
Erm, maybe I'm out of the loop, but hasn't Dresden developed into a fairly healthy technology "hotspot" (at least for "German standards")?
That has been the prevailing thought since before WWI, but multiple World Wars and Russia's invasion of Ukraine this year have proven otherwise. Do you know who was the biggest trading partner of Nazi Germany on the eve of Operation Barbarossa? You guessed it, the Soviet Union. It was responsible for the vast majority of imports of critical resources like various metals, oil, grain, etc. It didn't stop Hitler. Do you…
The difficult thing about even very good prevention is that the absence of events is difficult to prove. Is interconnection perfect? obviously not. Does interconnection prevent more conflicts vs fully independent nations? Likely yes. I think what we are seeing is societies and governments forgetting how bad wars are for stability, on a backdrop of slowing or reversing quality of life for many modern nations.
Your mistake is believing that financial interdependence is what prevents conflict instead of, say, shared values, political interdependence, cultural exchange, etc. Things that aren't money bind countries together far, far, far stronger than a stack of money ever could. That's the biggest reason why trying to bind Russia financially failed, and why it's been failing with China for the past 20 years. Ideology is such a powerful tool that I don't understand how people still think money is so important.