251–260 of 657 posts
We're living through the silicon age and Intel has made a total dog's breakfast of it. Stagnant revenues, falling profits. Both should have been growing geometrically. Just compare these companies: https://valustox.com/INTC https://valustox.com/AMD https://valustox.com/AVGO https://valustox.com/AMAT Even Qualcomm has seen good growth: https://valustox.com/QCOM This is how it's done: https://valustox.com/NVDA EDIT the…
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You're not wrong, but having an incredibly important dependence on an industry 100 miles off the coast of China (and the target of their increasingly erratic dictator) is worth paying billions to break.
This short-termism seems like it's been America's chief problem through the centuries. "We need slavery - our economy will fall apart without it!" "We need Standard Oil and US Steel - splitting them apart would be a catastrophe!" "We need universal healthcare - a public option would place undue burden on insurance companies!" "We need Boeing - our foreign competitors would eat us up otherwise!" At some point, it's ti…
2 - comparing a minor economic investment ($8B on a $23T gdp) to slavery, and the economic system built on slavery, is the stupidest thing I've read this week, so, well, congrats. I guess?
3 - not a naive economic policy; US government investment built silicon valley and that's going ok.
Those factories will be mostly automated and so the idea that they will come with lots of jobs is misguided. On top of that to the extent this is a good idea the private market have no problem finding the money for that themselves.
The real issue is in the actual materials i.e. rare earth etc which is where the government completely dropped the ball the last 20 years.
8.5B going to the mining industry would make sense not to Intel.
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…
This award isn't about innovation, the best way to do things, or job requirements. This about supply chain security and national defense. So many of our components are made overseas and under governments who are not close allies. This is in order to operate things in our country. When you have the FABs in the US and under US control you can handle international foreign policy and the security of the nation differentl…
And now the taxpayer is on the hook for $8.5B and growing?
There's a certain smell to all this.
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Corporations should only return cash to investors (via dividend or stock buyback) if they do not have a high yield way to invest the money internally. A large stock buyback is the corporation admitting they do not have good uses for the cash. If Intel would take these grants, tax credits, and low interest loans and turn around and increase their dividend or do a large stock buyback then this would be a simple wealth…
I'm not sure if this was your intent, but it sounds like you're describing the world as it actually works. Companies execute stock BuyBacks when they don't have better internal Investments, and that's a good thing! Intel doesn't care about more us-based Fabs, nor are they high yield. This is why the US government has to pay them if the US government wants those things to exist.
This was in fact my intent.
I would just like to highlight there are alternative ways besides grants to encourage Intel to open US based manufacturing. Ultimately it's the tax payer that is funding this grant, so it's important they feel like they are getting a good deal. I think it's also telling that Intel didn't invest the $8.5B themselves when they clearly had the cash just a few years ago.
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…
This award isn't about innovation, the best way to do things, or job requirements. This about supply chain security and national defense. So many of our components are made overseas and under governments who are not close allies. This is in order to operate things in our country. When you have the FABs in the US and under US control you can handle international foreign policy and the security of the nation differentl…
The mining industry needed those money not Intel. It's the mining industry that's been neglected the last 20 years or so.
It will take at least 10 years to get anything resembling chinese supply chain in place.
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> Whether we look back in 20 years and think "wow glad we took that hit upfront" is anyone's guess Globalization is breaking down quickly. Chips are crucial to national security and our economy. The supply chain for advanced chips is heavily dependent on East Asia which is a geopolitical powder keg and a demographic time bomb. The only thing more expensive than whatever we end up with is chips unavailable at any pric…
>Globalization is breaking down quickly Is it? I don't know if there's a concrete way of measuring "amount of globalization", but I'd guess that right now we're probably the most globalized we've ever been. "More things that you use are made outside your own country" has only been growing, and with the advent of full remote companies that also includes much more software than before -- it used to be that only huge co…
I understand why Intel is getting these, but would be nice to see this money go to companies that are still innovating and are somewhere in the US coalition/orbit (TSMC, Samsung, etc.)
Intel is still innovating though? What's with everyone acting like they aren't innovating just because they aren't the leading performance x86 chip manufacturer? They're still shrinking node sizes, they've entered the GPU market, they're opening up their fabs to also make chips for other companies...
Intel's bread and butter has always been x86, but not only is it an ISA that's proving non-ideal for a couple new applications (mobile is ARM, AI is in the GPU or NPUs, etc), AMD is really putting up a good fight in that market too, and the crown has been traded a copule times in the past few years.
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The goal of a corporation is to generate value for shareholders, and we don't give any incentives for them to do otherwise.
I ask again, who are these "shareholders" and why do we continue to play along with this monumental scam?
If they all re-invested all their earnings into growth, wouldn't that mean that every company is growing un-sustainably?
And what is the incentive for investors to fund these companies that never return anything to the investors?
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This award isn't about innovation, the best way to do things, or job requirements. This about supply chain security and national defense. So many of our components are made overseas and under governments who are not close allies. This is in order to operate things in our country. When you have the FABs in the US and under US control you can handle international foreign policy and the security of the nation differentl…
While I agree with you I would say that supply chain is upstream of chip-production. The mining industry needed those money not Intel. It's the mining industry that's been neglected the last 20 years or so. It will take at least 10 years to get anything resembling chinese supply chain in place.