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These chips are still sent to Taiwan for packing, so it's a good step but not a complete step.
How does this make any financial sense?
Shipping cost is fundamentally irrelevant, you can put $100MM worth on a direct flight and have room left over for your family and friends.
- Over 50% of the workers flew in from Taiwan to work on this plant and make these chips. - The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as there are no facilities here with such a capability. Made in america is a hard sell. But at least showing the glaring STEM field gap in the U.S. is a start to finally addressing the brain drain.
The 'brain drain' (as you refer to it) stems from intelligent/motivated grads in the US for the last two decades (at least) pursuing more lucrative fields like finance and adtech (re: Google, Facebook). Or some pursue management route (attending big MBA schools and switching to management roles where they climb corporate ladder). In other words, there are not a lot of college/grad students who want to pursue traditio…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does this make any financial sense?
This is how most modern supply chains look like. Plus, chips are small in size and cost a lot so you can fit a lot in a container. Per unit shipping costs probably come out to be pretty low. Especially when compared to the political costs and risks associated with not onshoring.
Guys these are microchips on wafers. You can put a million dollars worth in your jacket pocket. They aren't being shipped in containers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 'brain drain' (as you refer to it) stems from intelligent/motivated grads in the US for the last two decades (at least) pursuing more lucrative fields like finance and adtech (re: Google, Facebook). Or some pursue management route (attending big MBA schools and switching to management roles where they climb corporate ladder). In other words, there are not a lot of college/grad students who want to pursue traditio…
Alternate explanation: electrical engineering is actually really hard and some parts of computer science look comparatively easier. Plus coding is startups is cool, EE is still nerd as in Nerd.
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It's also highly-skilled, yet very boring work. The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong. US PhDs typically have other options and would consider this sort of work a waste of their time.
> every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong This works in Taiwan. It doesn’t in America. The Taiwanese workers will help transfer knowledge to American workers; it will be the joint responsibility of them both to come up with how those processes are adapted for American preferences. (Probably more automation, rotatio…
Being on call 24/7 to troubleshoot million dollar pieces of equipment sounded like a poor life choice, so I didn't take it. But Intel also hasn't exactly done great since then...
- Over 50% of the workers flew in from Taiwan to work on this plant and make these chips. - The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as there are no facilities here with such a capability. Made in america is a hard sell. But at least showing the glaring STEM field gap in the U.S. is a start to finally addressing the brain drain.
made in america is also a federally defined standard that these chips categorically fail to meet. assembled in the united states is more appropriate, and even then if you didnt hire americans to do it, what was the point? this is starting to feel like the best of intentions that has spiraled into a political theatricality where close-enough will be good-enough. given the current state of declining US college enrollme…
Also, over half of the employees are local hires and the ratio will increase as more of the fab spins up. IMO it would be much worse political theatre to delay and balloon the cost of the project by forcing TSMC to exclusively use a workforce that has no experience with the companies tools and processes.
- Over 50% of the workers flew in from Taiwan to work on this plant and make these chips. - The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as there are no facilities here with such a capability. Made in america is a hard sell. But at least showing the glaring STEM field gap in the U.S. is a start to finally addressing the brain drain.
The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as packaging partner Amkor's facility in Arizona won't be ready until 2027*. I'm not sure the cause of the delta but it could be in part because Fab 21 got back on schedule rather impressively following earlier delays. * updated to reflect newer article that Amkor's facility is delayed beyond late-2025
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To ship things to/from these fabs by sea you have to add the cost of shipping by truck between Phoenix and (presumably) LA. Not sure how big of a difference that makes.
Chips are small, so one truck once a few days may suffice.
The interest you'd pay just losing a couple days in transit time would exceed the cost of purchasing a dedicated private jet and the crew to fly it.