When the 3060s are flying off the shelves at $1000+ and AMD raised their prices by 50% over the previous generation, why the fuck is there any need for government funding? It's an obscenely profitable business.
Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production
151–160 of 301 posts
Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production
#152To all those saying that those companies can afford it themselves, remember that there are reasons they don't. The economics don't add up. Companies tend to do what is in their economic interest to do. Something like this can change the economics, which could be a good thing.
> Companies tend to do what is in their economic interest to do
It will be in their economic interest when the PLA will show up at TSMC's door. Of course, that won't probably happen in the next few quarters, so on that you are correct, it's not in their short economic interest.
What these companies are basically doing is asking the US government to subsidise the costs incurred by geo-politics.
Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production
#153This coalition seems to want both research and physical infrastructure across many process nodes. Fabs are expensive, so I hope Assembly-Test-Mark-Pack gets a look too. Not sure what happens to research IP sourced from domestic investment, or how this doesn’t overlap existing defense supply chain efforts.
From their letter: “Manufacturing incentives funded by Congress should focus on filling key gaps in our domestic semiconductor ecosystem and cover the full range of semiconductor technologies and process nodes – from legacy to leading-edge – relied on by industry, the military, and critical infrastructure.”
So... give us your semiconductor ecosystem gap analysis, SIAC :)
Source: Former semiconductor analyst / planner when domestic fabs went out of style.
Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production
#154@dang, > All: this thread got a flash flood of angry-predictable-obvious comments. Please don't post those! They're really bad for this site. The issue with such points isn't that they're wrong, it's that they're not interesting. Nothing predictable and obvious is. We want interesting conversation here, and that comes from curiosity. If you're feeling agitation rather than curiosity, please wait until that polarity f…
The ideology of the tech elite is to see themselves as cool, detached, rational observers of the world. So when people feel regular human emotions in response to things, they need some way to deride them for it.
Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft had 526 billion dollars between the four of them in cash reserves. Presumably they would cooperate and do something about it if they saw the current situation as too risky?
They are doing something -- forming a lobby group to get the government to pay for it. That's much cheaper than actually paying for it themselves.
It also gets the actual foundry a pretty sharp knife to cut through the pesky red tape/law when they do start looking for prospective sites.
Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production
#156Couldn't disagree more. We throw tons of money at people who contribute nothing, I've no problem seeing that much money allocated to something worthwhile even if the profits aren't public. The value is the security and the supply chain, it's still more then what we get for helping dregs.
Then stop giving money to dregs. Yet more government excess is not the solution, even if this case of spending is slightly less bad than most of the others.
Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production
#157Couldn't this be a positive long term benefit of Corona? A push back against globalisation and more domestic production in each region of the world.
Globalization has benefits too, like preventing world war due to heavy interdependencies.
The same discourse was made before WW1, and we all know how that turned out. As far as I could tell the world was even more globalised back then, at least for the elites.
Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production
#158If the US tax payer gets a significant stake in the chip fab venture, I would be OK with this. We want to secure national security via chip manufacturing and you want billions of dollars? Give us some upside. I don't want to hear it creates jobs, it generates blah blah blah, a real equity stake and possibly repayment of the capital. Creating jobs should be a happy by-product of subsidizing an industry that is probabl…
Government subsidies protecting industries rarely pay off in a peaceful world to the entire country. I personally get nothing out of Chevron getting tax breaks. However, if those incentives meant supply was harder to disrupt, and in a war time the country has better access to fuel, then it does seem like a worthwhile trade off.
In this case, the risk is that China literally takes over (one way or another) the vast majority of supply of semiconductors to specifically harm western companies (or countries in a war setting). In that scenario, are you still worried about unequal kick backs or are you happy that the nation has access to the chips it needs for industry and defense?
Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production
#159Well, TSMC had 2020 revenue in the 30 giga-$ range. Even a few 3% sales tax on that revenue would pay for a 5 giga-$ investment in 5 years. (or a few F-35's / year) That's grossly optimistic numbers, given US labor costs, startup costs, etc, but it's also potentially a reasonable investment that would be sustained by domestic and international purchases (one would hope).
TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation) is a foreign company that operates entirely overseas - why would the US have authority to tax them? If anything I'd imagine they'd be against this proposal.
Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production
#160Couldn't disagree more. We throw tons of money at people who contribute nothing, I've no problem seeing that much money allocated to something worthwhile even if the profits aren't public. The value is the security and the supply chain, it's still more then what we get for helping dregs.
Then stop giving money to dregs. Yet more government excess is not the solution, even if this case of spending is slightly less bad than most of the others.
I would if the money wasn't taken forcefully through my taxes. It's hardly excess for one of the most important assets a country can have right now and it beats the hell out of seeing the money go to yet another useless social welfare program for fuckups.