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Ocean shipping is very very cheap. Less cost in money and energy to ship a chip across the ocean than for you to drive to best buy to buy the phone its in.
Significantly more pollution though, right?
What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked? Like, will they be able to manufacture chips that compete with TSMC? They used to be a crown-jewel of US tech. But it seems like every time I read the news, they are announcing a delay or shutting down some product.
Intel is more than just fabs. AMD spun off digital foundry forever ago and just uses TSMC, no reason Intel couldn’t do the same. At this point their fabs are a liability. They have a new leader who’s from a semiconductor manufacturing background so I have some faith they’ll give up on the pursuit of next gen fabs and focus instead on their IP. There’s a huge opportunity in their GPU segment. They’ve gone from a joke…
If everyone chases higher margin and ditches their fabs what kind of industry are we left with? One giant fab company like TSMC? That sounds healthy!
You see it with Columbia university and that network television network that got sued
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How does this scale? TSMC can't literally be the only fab in the world...
They're the only fab company in the world with the technology to allow Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to compete with each other on the playing field they do.
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How does this scale? TSMC can't literally be the only fab in the world...
They aren't. Samsung comes in a close second in terms of tech. GloFo is also still floating around though lagging pretty bad AFAIK. Micron has it's own fabs that they are actively developing (in fact, they are building new facilities right now). What TSMC is is cutting edge. That's why everyone that needs top performance uses them.
Your rent is now 20% higher but it's worth it because the landlord is an American.
Especially silly when the chance of China invading Taiwan is very nonzero.
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Tariffs don't work to bring manufacturing back home if they change every 2 weeks and are sure to disappear in 4 years You need to have reasonable certainty that your factory is going to be profitable on a 20+ year horizon to commit into building a production line. I don't understand how MAGAs don't get that.
You think a CPU factory won’t be profitable for 20 years? MAGA movement won’t listen to you here if we can’t even agree on basic facts.
When you offshore a production facility, it's not about being profitable, it's that it can be more profitable elsewhere.
If you have no guarantee that the tariffs will still be there to artificially maintain your profitability so high, then you don't build.
I think we can agree on the facts there
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Intel's fab issues are overstated in my opinion. They were stuck on 14nm for a very long time because they bit off too much with 10nm. People act like that means ALL research in nodes smaller than 10nm must have stopped, but that's simply not true as research into tech and materials needed for smaller nodes happens in parallel. It's also noteworthy that GAAFET being a complete redesign of major parts of the manufactu…
They just farmed out the compute section of Nova Lake to TSMC which is a sad statement (probably a good business decision, though).
There is talk about the next version of Arc using 18a. If it does, I'd expect Intel to move that generation's compute tiles to 18a as well.
What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked? Like, will they be able to manufacture chips that compete with TSMC? They used to be a crown-jewel of US tech. But it seems like every time I read the news, they are announcing a delay or shutting down some product.
Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply is terminal decline.
This is why tariffs matter. Despite the US having much higher wages, and likely property and infrastructure costs, manufacturing is only 5-20% more for these high tech products. Corporations outsourced not because they couldn't compete, but because why leave 10% on the table when we can reward the executives with that cash instead of the labor?
Blaming tariffs when it was the greed of Wall Street, private equity, hedge funds, "corporate raiders" that ultimately shipped manufacturing overseas. All of this under decades of psuedo-economic theory called neoclassical economics. Then this is taken further under neoliberal economic policy — "reagonomics" and "trickle down economics". These greedy fucks in the 1970s sold out current generations so they could min/m…
I'm not attempting to assign blame to one political party or another. Reasonable tariffs to protect domestic labor should be a bi-partisan issue.