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Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

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Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#291

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #109
bluGill wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50k is just a step above McDonalds these days in a lot of areas. Sure minimum wage might be $15k, but realistically nobody pays that little except in very rural areas (if you need a small number of low skilled employees a small rural town is a perfect spot to build - but if you need more than a small number they can't provide more at any price - you will pay more in the city but there are a lot more people around if…

Perhaps - in California. Median US Salary is $59,384. Half of workers make less.

You need to factor in that only ~30% of workers work full-time.

Men with a bachelor's degree who work full-time have a median income is ~$89k - (basically the entire demographic of these TSMC workers).

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#292

Post by BlackSwanMan »

byw wrote: post #191
bugglebeetle wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately housing is super overpriced, due to the Asian mentality resulting in high property ownership. I have no clue what this means and in countries like Japan, housing is a depreciating asset vs. an investment, so…?

More so in the Chinese-speaking world and South Korea because the industrialization/urbanization is more recent, so there's rising demand in the urban areas with high population growth, resulting in high prices. Japan's urbanization stopped long ago, and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough, so the urban areas have stopped growing. The mentality refers to East Asia's deep agrarian root that places high value on…

[dead]

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#293

Post by CPLX »

School-Cotton wrote: post #282
CPLX wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are literally microchips. Tens of thousands of dollars of value in each gram. Shipping cost is fundamentally irrelevant, you can put $100MM worth on a direct flight and have room left over for your family and friends.

Your overall point is probably right, but "tens of thousands of dollars of value in each gram" seems like an exaggeration. How much does one CPU weigh?

Order of magnitude it's within range. A single wafer for something higher end is worth tens of thousands of dollars. So whatever that weighs. It's not much.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#294

Post by CPLX »

tombert wrote: post #278
bun_at_work wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just calling out that worker protections and increased labor costs seem to be the result of workers making more money. As the work force becomes wealthier, they _need_ less money, and their standards rise. This means their labor becomes more expensive and they demand safer workplaces. They demand more time off. This happened in the USA and is currently happening in China and other low-labor-cost nations. I think the…

Sure, but it's worth inquiring why the jobs left in the first place. There's probably a few hundred reasons, but I think the core one was "manufacturing in China is cheaper because labor is cheaper." Even if China starts demanding better worker protection (and they should! I am actually fine with my products costing more if I have a guarantee that the workers were treated well), I think that there's still a reasonabl…

The core reasons the jobs left are industrial and monetary policies.

Or, said another way, because the Chinese prioritized and subsidized manufacturing growth and we did the opposite.

Why? Because it made some specific Americans very rich. It also ruined the lives of many other Americans. While making the country much less resilient to shocks or conflicts.

Which is, of course, the problem.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#295

Post by matwood »

digdigdag wrote: post #35

- 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.

Sure, but this is how a supply chain gets bootstrapped. All those factories in China didn't magically appear one day. Just like they didn't appear when Apple started moving operations to Vietnam. You start piecemeal and build out.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#296

Post by xeromal »

maxglute wrote: post #287
xeromal wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a window where China will have it max capability to invade for the next few years. After that their population is going to start shrinking and every year will be harder than the next to invade.

Except TW TFR even worse than PRC TFR, and ultimately scale effect takes over - PRC with crippled TFR still generates about as much male new borns per year than TW has men 18-40 total. PRC still on trend to generate 3-4x more MEN than US projected to add population per year, incidentally around the same as active duty military... having enough bodies is not going to be an issue for decades. Having enough nukes is.

I'm not arguing against that at all. Just that if the PRC wants it's best chance, the clock is ticking. It becomes more costly the longer they wait.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#297

Post by bitsage »

j_walter wrote: post #23
bitsage wrote: post #8

Funny enough, Fab 21 was announced in May 2020 and completed construction in July 2022, a month before the Chips Act was signed.

What makes you think construction was completed in July 2022? The shell of Phase 1 may have been completed, but even now the construction continues in Phase 1B and Phase 2.

I’m going off the purely structural construction of the first fab. There’s a timeline on TSMC’s site.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#298

Post by adamc »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #259
programmertote wrote: post #185

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…

It's not even brain drain, America's dominance came from the fact that for nearly a century the brightest people in the world were willing to give up everything to come here. That is no longer the case. Today's Einstein probably isn't going to immigrate here.

Einstein didn't emigrate to get rich, he emigrated because the Nazi's took over Germany. Germany had the best universities in the world before they took the path of self-destruction. So that was a second, separate event that helped America.

America stills gets a lot of immigrants.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#299

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

enragedcacti wrote: post #170
digdigdag wrote: post #35

- 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

The hardest part is making the chips, no?

Packaging facilities cost ~20% of a fab, right?

Naively, I'm assuming packaging is also not as complicate and difficult as fabrication.

Surely if they can build a fab in the US, they can build packaging facilities, too.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#300

Post by adamc »

jopsen wrote: post #248
binarymax wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely true, as there weren’t EE jobs here. Now that we’re moving chip manufacturing back, and with programming job market being saturated, perhaps it will shift and EE will pay more due to being more in demand

I suspect the kinds of salaries that's possible in Silicon Valley only happens because: (A) Skills are fairly transferable. (B) There is a lot of employers competing for workers. (C) An awful lot of value is created along the way. If you specialize in some tiny part of chip manufacturing, there aren't many places you can transfer your skills. Even if, in the future, you have multiple chip vendors. They won't all use…

The same analysis makes me doubt those wages are likely to prevail for software engineers. They are the result of a particular time and place.
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