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Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants

nytimes.com

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Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants

#371

Post by lupire »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #220
adolph wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A baby can't be made in one month just because you had the money to hire 9 surrogates. Many processes do not scale just because a money spigot turned on. What most often does scale as quickly as monetary availability is fraud, waste and abuse.

There are thousands of items on the agenda in the present day, everything from better open source LLMs to moon-base railway designs, so even if 99% of these turn out to be duds that can’t be budged, there are still sufficiently many remaining to absorb all bonafide super-geniuses on Earth several times over.

That's exactly the problem. We don't have an abundant supply of supergeniuses

Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants

#372

Post by araes »

rhelz wrote: post #299
pwthornton wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is way bigger than trade policies. Intel was the world leader in chip-making until fairly recently. Steve Jobs wanted them to build the iPhone chips because they were a generation or two ahead of any other fab in the world. Today, Intel is no longer leading the world in chip fab process. Intel at the time wasn't interested in fabing ARM chips, and the rest is history. Intel and American fabs fell behind for a nu…

> Intel at the time wasn't interested in fabing ARM chips, and the rest is history. Fun fact, in the late 90's, Intel was the biggest manufacturer of ARM chips. I was there at the time, and I wrote lots of software to aid in their design. What happened to Intel was twofold: The first problem was that Robert Noyce, Andy Grove, And Gordon Moore died. Each one was a once-in-century intellect, and it took Intel a while t…

> would for years have had such a huge opportunity cost, that the shareholders would have sued, and with cause.

I've been considering the Intel issue (had family there) and the other post in the thread mention the decade of misses.

This actually seems like one of the most reasonable rationales that I don't hear mentioned very often. You might want to do something, yet your hands our tied, because the investors will sue for poor leadership.

Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants

#373

Post by stock_toaster »

randerson wrote: post #115

Intel could have funded this themselves many times over if they'd reinvested their profits instead of paying huge buybacks and dividends.

I'm fine with dividends, but less ok with stock buybacks. I feel like buybacks lead to perverse incentives and even _greater_ levels of short-term thinking.

Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants

#375

Post by dheera »

orangecat wrote: post #353
dheera wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dividends don't make you any money because the rest of the passive-aggressive investors downvote the stock price by exactly the dividend amount when dividends are given. If everyone agreed to maintain the stock price when dividends were issued, the dividends would be useful.

the rest of the passive-aggressive investors downvote the stock price by exactly the dividend amount when dividends are given This is the expected result if markets are correctly pricing stocks. The value of a company is its assets plus its future income streams. When a company pays a dividend, its cash assets decrease, so the value of its stock should decrease by that same amount.

But that way dividends are useless though.

I'd much rather dividends be issued on random dates to random shareholders so that the market cannot predict when they happen, just a bunch of random people anonymously get dividends deposited each time, and as long as you stay invested for a long time you get dividends at the same average rate as everyone else.

Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants

#376

Post by rhelz »

andyferris wrote: post #344
rhelz wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say: > It's also interesting that Intel made some specific bad technical choices. That's like saying Saudi Arabia made some bad policy decisions. If you are in Saudi Arabia, nothing has a higher return on investment than petroleum. If you invest in anything else, you are leaving money---A LOT of money--on the table. The result is that capital is drained out of any other business, and the country gets so dependent…

Was it not possible to build two fabs and make $48 billion?

What would you do? Build two fabs and make $48 billion, or build two fabs and make $80 billion?

It might be hard to remember now, but Intel was in the position NVIDIA is today: they could sell absolutely every x86 processor they could make, at pretty much any price they cared to name.

So even if Intel could have built another fab (which, btw, it couldn't, the world only graduates so many solid-state physics Ph.D.'s per year) but even if they could, they would STILL have used it to make x86 chips. Literally (not metaphorically or hyperbolically) nothing else they could manufacture would have as high a return on investment as making x86 chips did.

Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants

#377

Post by MichaelZuo »

lupire wrote: post #371
MichaelZuo wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are thousands of items on the agenda in the present day, everything from better open source LLMs to moon-base railway designs, so even if 99% of these turn out to be duds that can’t be budged, there are still sufficiently many remaining to absorb all bonafide super-geniuses on Earth several times over.

That's exactly the problem. We don't have an abundant supply of supergeniuses

If there was an ‘abundant supply’ most of them wouldn’t be considered such any longer, just regular geniuses, because the population average would have been raised up.

Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants

#378

Post by Aloisius »

BeetleB wrote: post #333
Aloisius wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies also do buybacks to get a greater ownership stake. Greater ownership stake in what? Companies, at least in the US, can't own themselves. Stock buybacks merely reduce outstanding shares effectively increasing the percentage of the company owned remaining shareholders.

> Companies, at least in the US, can't own themselves. These are technicalities: The point was to prevent things like hostile takeovers: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/economics-econometrics-...

Sure, but we get the same thing with dividends.

If we eliminated stock buybacks tomorrow, little would be lost other than insiders wouldn't be able to use buybacks to unduly enrich themselves and people having to pay some capital gains taxes.

Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants

#379

Post by edgyquant »

pwthornton wrote: post #274
rhelz wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How did this happen in the first place? By not pursuing protectionist public policies. > the taxpayer is on the hook for $8.5B $8.5B is a big price tag, but whether the government should spend it or not depends on whether or not the investment pays off.

This is way bigger than trade policies. Intel was the world leader in chip-making until fairly recently. Steve Jobs wanted them to build the iPhone chips because they were a generation or two ahead of any other fab in the world. Today, Intel is no longer leading the world in chip fab process. Intel at the time wasn't interested in fabing ARM chips, and the rest is history. Intel and American fabs fell behind for a nu…

The same with auto manufacturing: lack of real competition bred complacency and then real competition came along.

Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants

#380

Post by gentleman11 »

gen220 wrote: post #347
rhelz wrote: post #132

WRT to lack of a skilled workforce, here is an interesting anecdote. I remember back in the late 90's, Intel had to fire most line workers in their FABS, and hire people with Ph.D.'s in solid-state physics. I actually knew one of these people who were fired: She was our housecleaner. And--like the supper-smart garbage man of the Dilbert Cartoons, she was very smart. Smarter than me. I know because she helped me solve…

It wasn't just intel, it was every semi-conductor manufacturer in the valley (hence the inability to find other work). They closed because it was cheaper to build in other countries, or to outsource from contractors who build in other countries (where organized labor doesn't exist). The U.S. lost thousands of high-paying (and tax-paying) labor positions and atrophied the skills that went with them. Intel profited fro…

How long until all those new workers are laid off again as intel goes back to overseas fabs?
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