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Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas

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Re: Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas

#261

Post by drawkbox »

justapassenger wrote: post #28
guai888 wrote: post #18

‘Impossible':TSMC founder Morris Chang on US dreams for onshoring chip supply chain https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4327937 Morris Chang spent 25 years (1958–1983) at Texas Instruments.He knows US very well.

You have to take his words with a grain of salt. Without going into politics, it’s impossible to talk about TSMC without geopolitical context. It’s essential to TSMC survival for their production to physically stay focused in Asia.

Once the chip shortage happened, partially due to geopolitical reasons, that changed everything. The West/US will never fully rely on a single point of failure again no matter how hard the HBS MBAs and Chicago thinking push it to trim and be "efficient". Some industries are too important for other industries and leverage on that over those areas is too risky and costly now.

I'd pay double right now for GPUs directly from the source, not from some sketchy third party.

Right now our EV/auto, space and even AR/XR industries as well as gaming and everything that requires chips, we are at the mercy of an external market that has a slant against the West. It will take some years to get out but we'll never not expect that in the future again. If costs go up costs go up, but availability should never be allowed to be used as leverage again, that is too risky and too costly long term.

Availability that is reliable is always more important than efficiency or cost, because right now lack of availability is costing lots of extra time that has the potential to lose entire industries, that is not acceptable in any way.

Very little margin and too much optimization/efficiency is bad for resilience. Couple that with private equity backed near entire market leverage monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies that control necessary supply and you have trouble.

HBS is even realizing too much optimization/efficiency is a bad thing. The slack/margin is squeezed out and with that, an ability to change vectors quickly. It is the large company/startup agility difference with the added weight of physical/expensive manufacturing.

The High Price of Efficiency, Our Obsession with Efficiency Is Destroying Our Resilience [1]

> Superefficient businesses create the potential for social disorder.

> A superefficient dominant model elevates the risk of catastrophic failure.

> *If a system is highly efficient, odds are that efficient players will game it.*

Hopefully that same mistake is not made in the future. It will take time to build up diversification of market leverage in terms of chips for availability. Hopefully we have learned our lesson about too much concentration, with that comes leverage and sometimes a "gaming" of the market.

This chip shortage, and all the supply chain problems during the pandemic as well, will hopefully introduce more wisdom and knowledge into business institutions that just because things are ok while being overly super efficient, that is almost a bigger risk than higher prices/costs. Competition is a leverage reducer. Margin is a softer ride even if the profit margins aren't as big.

[1] https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-high-price-of-efficiency

Re: Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas

#262

Post by zrm »

josaka wrote: post #69

After the TX grid failure last winter, it's probably not a coincidence that Samsung's new facility will be near ERCOT's operation center in Taylor, which manages the TX grid, and will likely be the last load to shed when the grid's stressed. Used to work in the Austin fab, and the amount of money lost per minute in a power failure is mind boggling. The tax breaks Taylor offered ($314m) are not that different from wha…

Doesn't it cost less than that amount of money to have on-site backup power?

Re: Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas

#263

Post by a45a33s »

throw10920 wrote: post #242
jason-phillips wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you want to do. If you want to work on one of the processes in the fab (metrology, chemical vapor deposition, photolithography, etc) then an engineering degree (especially chemical engineering) may be your best bet. If you want to design the chip architecture, then computer engineering is the degree path you want. Samsung has their own chip design subsidiary in Austin too, over on Highway 360 in we…

I know a few people who went to university near a large Intel campus that was always hiring. These people told me that if you got hired into Intel, it was almost always as a design verification & validation engineer, and that getting an actual design (architecture) job was near impossible (especially as a recent graduate, even with an MS). Is it the same for Samsung?

how could a new grad be qualified to design a new intel chip?

seems like those are necessary stepping stones to learn all the real world issues that would be involved in actually designing a chip.

Re: Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas

#264

Post by dawsmik »

killjoywashere wrote: post #241
wonderwonder wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are setting up fairly close to Tesla. Wonder if they are working on a deal for Tesla to provide battery backup. Interestingly enough Austin, TX appears to be rapidly approaching SF status as a tech hub and may soon surpass them. Its an interesting thing to watch and really gives insight into how politics and taxes affect business and growth.

> Interestingly enough Austin, TX appears to be rapidly approaching SF status as a tech hub and may soon surpass them. Uh, maybe it's time to take a drive through Austin, but that was a pretty sleepy little college town 10 years ago. Most of my family lives in the central Texas region (San Antonio, San Carlos, College Station), and I presently live in Mountain View. I have a hard time believing SF-scale infrastructur…

I think he may have meant in terms of software companies. Many of them do not require a wind tunnel.

Re: Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas

#265

Post by dawsmik »

picardo wrote: post #224
wonderwonder wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are setting up fairly close to Tesla. Wonder if they are working on a deal for Tesla to provide battery backup. Interestingly enough Austin, TX appears to be rapidly approaching SF status as a tech hub and may soon surpass them. Its an interesting thing to watch and really gives insight into how politics and taxes affect business and growth.

What are some interesting startups in Austin area?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Hills

Re: Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas

#266

Post by adrianmonk »

tyingq wrote: post #175
bell-cot wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This...but did Samsung quietly negotiate a "any further energy supply f*ck-ups are 100% on YOUR dime" deal with the State of Texas, or what? By several accounts, the TX grid got darn close to collapse last winter - at which point "ERCOT Op Center is next door, and we get top priority" would not get you a single erg.

FWIW, the problem wasn't a generalized grid management problem. It was a failure to properly winterize gas plants for rare freezing events. The Texas grid itself is in reasonable shape as far as I know.

Also, as I understand it, there's another "grid" which failed, which is the network of natural gas wells and pipelines. Natural gas wasn't being pulled out of the ground and pumped to the electric generation plants.

Apparently natural gas isn't easy to store, so basically there's not a lot of buffer, and everything needs to stay online or there won't be any natural gas to burn at power plants even if they were winterized, which some of them were.

I think some power plants may have even just shut down because natural gas was available but too expensive, and they weren't under a legal obligation to keep producing electricity.

Point being, to solve the problem, winterization of plants is just part of the problem.

Re: Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas

#267

Post by tw04 »

trasz wrote: post #192
tw04 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The easiest (and probably the only) way to prevent a war with China is to convince the US to not start it. Yes, if there's one thing we should have learned from WWII, it's that capitulating to land-grabs results in the bad-actor stopping. If we just let them take over the entirety of the South China Sea, Taiwan, and maybe just half of the African nations they've been lending money to who will never be able to repay…

Until you realize that you are fine with the same stuff being done by US.

Your response has literally 0 substance. Ignoring the fact that whataboutism is a tired and lazy rebuttal, remind me which country has the US has annexed in the last decade, or whatever you’re trying to claim. I haven’t heard Canada or Mexico complain that they’re concerned we’re going to invade.

Re: Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas

#268

Post by joe5150 »

killjoywashere wrote: post #241
wonderwonder wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are setting up fairly close to Tesla. Wonder if they are working on a deal for Tesla to provide battery backup. Interestingly enough Austin, TX appears to be rapidly approaching SF status as a tech hub and may soon surpass them. Its an interesting thing to watch and really gives insight into how politics and taxes affect business and growth.

> Interestingly enough Austin, TX appears to be rapidly approaching SF status as a tech hub and may soon surpass them. Uh, maybe it's time to take a drive through Austin, but that was a pretty sleepy little college town 10 years ago. Most of my family lives in the central Texas region (San Antonio, San Carlos, College Station), and I presently live in Mountain View. I have a hard time believing SF-scale infrastructur…

I don't think wind tunnels (of which these seem like fundamentally different types) are a great example for this argument.

Re: Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas

#269

Post by wonderwonder »

nodicksplease wrote: post #229
wonderwonder wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make what up, The Tesla link? I just asked the question, I have no info either way, notice I said "Wonder if".

> rapidly approaching sf status. That should be a quantifiable metric?

Austin has seen a 40+ % increase in tech jobs in a decade and has recently attracted major companies like Tesla and oracle to headquarter there while the majority of FAANG companies are building large campuses there.

This site does a pretty good job: https://sfciti.org/sf-tech-exodus/

Article from the SF Chronicle: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Austin-COVID-tec...

Hopefully that addresses your question as to why I hold this opinion.

Re: Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas

#270

Post by jason-phillips »

throw10920 wrote: post #242
jason-phillips wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you want to do. If you want to work on one of the processes in the fab (metrology, chemical vapor deposition, photolithography, etc) then an engineering degree (especially chemical engineering) may be your best bet. If you want to design the chip architecture, then computer engineering is the degree path you want. Samsung has their own chip design subsidiary in Austin too, over on Highway 360 in we…

I know a few people who went to university near a large Intel campus that was always hiring. These people told me that if you got hired into Intel, it was almost always as a design verification & validation engineer, and that getting an actual design (architecture) job was near impossible (especially as a recent graduate, even with an MS). Is it the same for Samsung?

In the Austin area for Samsung, there is an order of magnitude more staff dedicated to verification and validation as part of the manufacturing process than chip design. My perception was that the chip design folks (SARC) are like the golden children of the ecosystem. Their salaries reflect that it's obviously a more competitive, demanding environment. I don't know how hard it would be for a fab engineer to transfer positions from SAS to SARC, but I do remember that it was not a common occurrence.
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