It's going to be a while before we are not depending on China. If you look at this 2020 Apple List of Suppliers: https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supp... you can see the large variety of companies they they rely on for manufacturing. Plugging this into Excel, you get the following distribution: Country Count: China 156 Japan 40 US 30 Taiwan 26 South Korea 23 Vietnam 21 Malaysia 15 Philippines 1…
China 156 Japan 40 US 30 Taiwan 26 South Korea 23 Vietnam 21 Malaysia 15 Philippines 15 Thailand 15 Singapore 14 India 9 Germany 8 United Kingdom 4 Austria 3 Mexico 3 Belgium 2 Brazil 2 Czech Republic 2 France 2 Indonesia 2 Australia 1 Cambodia 1 Costa Rica 1 Finland 1 Ireland 1 Israel 1 Italy 1 Malta 1 Netherlands 1 Norway 1
Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
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Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#242Investing 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.
Will it make much of a difference, though? Sure they can fabricate the chips, but a lot of the raw material needed will come from places like China.
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Intel is investing in ARM/RISC-V and x86 will be with us a bit longer (probably even 10+years). I would be more concerned about AMD then I'm about Intel tbh.
AMD recently acquired Xilinx, who makes ARM SoCs https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc.html
The Xilinx devices above are also FPGAs with ARM cores (a natural evolution from FPGAs with soft cores, MicroBlaze in the case of Xilinx and Nios in the case of Altera).
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will it make much of a difference, though? Sure they can fabricate the chips, but a lot of the raw material needed will come from places like China.
Right now, the raw material will come from China because that's where the resources are developed. But once a fab is in place, it makes sense to push more to develop local resources, or at least among more diverse allies. It doesn't make sense to do that now, because you'd just be shipping local resources to a foreign fab, so that's still a bottleneck. But I think having a local fab is the tipping-point.
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#245Investing 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.
Will it make much of a difference, though? Sure they can fabricate the chips, but a lot of the raw material needed will come from places like China.
Norway is the fifth largest exporter of Quartz. Turkey is third. I think there's enough Quartz in Europe for silicon.
For silicon wafer manufacturing there's Okmetic Oy in Finland and Siltronic AG in Germany.
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
I talked to Chinese people about Taiwan. They are very emotional about it (anger and hate). Don’t expect China to act logical.
Please don't make such generalizations. The average Chinese person is no more responsible for Chinese foreign policy than the average American is for American foreign policy.
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#247It will be clear that this money was wasted within ten years. What a government needs to do to attract real manufacturing entrepreneurs: - pro family policies (for people) - pro immigration (for people) - cut environmental laws (for capex make-right) - cut business taxes (for gm make-right) - cut personal taxes (for people) - fight back against china-sponsored economic maneuvering at the multilateral level (to create…
I'm with you on all but this. Cleaning up the environment is a very expensive, time consuming process. There's still about 20 superfund sites in Santa Clara County due to its heyday of tech manufacturing.
Our local community has been fighting for the cleanup of a 60 year old disaster. That they agreed to clean up 20 years ago. But they've barely started.
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is very important for national stability. A highly-interconnected global economy is arguably better at securing international stability.
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Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
No but it is the monopoly supplier of the single most important device for fabs. If ASML (and all their knowledge) disappeared off the face of the earth today progress in semiconductors would probably be set back a decade or two. The fact they are a single company in one country that the global industry depends on for progress in semis should be of concern.
Would it be? Or would it be one step back for a few years and then two steps forward by the 10 year mark due to renewed competition?
Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
#250Intel spent tens of billions on stock buybacks and now they're getting subsidies to build fabs. Why does the middle class taxpayer have to bail everyone out, with lower living standards due to taxation and inflation.