251–260 of 593 posts
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It's about national security. A fab is necessary for national security
Subsidizing an American company is not necessary for Germany's security. In fact, it undermines it.
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There's no contradiction in interconnected economies being both better for global stability and more volatile to global instability. On a populist level, these kinds of questions are always presented as either-or, when in reality it is a pretty delicate balancing act. No, we shouldn't be completely reliant on potentially adversarial states for our basic well-being, but intertwined economies change the cost-benefit-an…
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Why? Germany doesn’t pursue political objectivity anyway.
I don't want my tax money filling the coffers of an American monopoly.
They don't even have all of the x86 market. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/335650-amd-achieves-al...
Wow. For those old (or well-read enough in history) enough to have a sense of just how dominant Germany once was, world-wide, in science, technology, chemistry, optics, etc. etc....this news feels kinda like a tombstone of German identity.
They're still have world leaders in power semiconductors with Bosch and Infineon.
This isn't the only fab in Germany btw. Global Foundries has a fab in Dresden doing advanced low-power FDSOI ICs.
You can't expect a single country to lead a majority of technical fields forever. That's unrealistic. I'd say Germany is doing completely fine.
Just wait 10 years until we get rid of it again like we did with AMD and Infineon.
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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.
Seems to me that most software is horribly inefficient anyway. If push came to shove we might just consider making better software?
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What makes Taiwan inherently better than somewhere else ? If it's just for historical and/or economical reason I don't see why Europe or the US couldn't build their own chemical plants. You have to start somewhere, it took us decades to delocalise everything to Asia, it'll take decades to build these industries locally.
You have just asked why we can't "just move manufacturing out of China:" There are no individual chemical plants, there are huge chemical complexes owned by many companies with own well guarded know hows. There may be 2-4 suppliers in a row producing some intermediary product used in making of only 1 output. Just to make the semiconductor grade hyperpure propanol you need ultrapure catalysts, ultrapure sulphuric acid…
I think decades is a stretch. Keep in mind most of these chains sprung up in the last 3 decades organically in Taiwan and China (and many of them are still elsewhere-- e.g. BASF is still a titan.)
If it's a national priority, you can get some production going a lot faster than this.
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…
Intel 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.
This sounds almost like a parody of an uninformed rant against capitalism. Stock buybacks are a simple standard way to distribute company profit to it's owners (alternative options are dividends, retaining the profits in the balance sheet, or reinvesting them). This is decided by Intel's management and overseen by the board who represent the interest of the stock owners (who are widely dispersed and include lots of p…