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U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

cnbc.com

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Re: U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

#401

Post by philistine »

bongodongobob wrote: post #395
ch4s3 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d really rather we didn’t bail out these companies at all. It clearly creates moral hazard and makes it hard for better run companies to enter markets.

Well as much as you don't like it, companies this big failing is terrible for the economy and in this case, national security to a degree. I'm of the thinking that when your company gets to a certain size we'd be well off nationalizing. Apple has more money than some nation states. Something that huge has the potential to affect global politics. There's lots of other reasons too, but this isn't like letting the corne…

As a non-American, a big part of the appeal of American companies was their independence from the American government.

Was.

Re: U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

#402

Post by ants_everywhere »

jjcm wrote: post #199

In general I would rather the government take a stake in corporations they're bailing out. I think the "too big to fail" bailouts in the past should have come with more of a cost for the business, so on one hand I'm glad this is finally happening. On the other hand, I wish it were a more formalized process rather than this politicized "our president made a deal to save america!" / "Intel is back and the government is…

They're converting a grant, so Intel is worse off due to this move.

The only real benefit I can see is it looks more revenue neutral because the government getting something of value and Trump is unpopular for spending so much money on unfunded tax cuts.

Re: U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

#405

Post by gizajob »

JustExAWS wrote: post #287
ch4s3 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d really rather we didn’t bail out these companies at all. It clearly creates moral hazard and makes it hard for better run companies to enter markets.

Chip manufacturing is too important for the US. We can’t be completely dependent on Taiwan. Nothing against Taiwan, it’s one attack away from being obliterated by China. No company is going to come out of someone’s garage and build a chip fab.

Nvidia has a market cap of 4.5 trillion dollars and everyone is committing hundreds of billions to AI CapEx in their direction - they can afford to organise chip fabs if it really came to it. Ok TSMC and ASML would need to be on board but it could be done. Should be done in fact because even a simple SWOT analysis would show the risk to their business.

Re: U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

#406

Post by gizajob »

scarface_74 wrote: post #326
charliea0 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can definitely offer subsidies for manufacturing in the US - we've already gotten TSMC to open several fabs.

And it’s still owned by a foreign country and Taiwan is restricting TSMC from manufacturing their most advanced processors from being manufactured in the US. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ta...

Same as the US is restricting sale of Nvidia chips to China.

Re: U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

#407

Post by msgodel »

andrewflnr wrote: post #337
JustExAWS wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chip manufacturing is too important for the US. We can’t be completely dependent on Taiwan. Nothing against Taiwan, it’s one attack away from being obliterated by China. No company is going to come out of someone’s garage and build a chip fab.

"Someone's garage" is a straw man. There must be people here who could, with adequate funding, build a smallish but viable chip manufacturing company.

I think one of the people who got closest to that was Sam Zeloof.

He kind of had everything going: extremely clever and motivated, cooperation with his parents (who also worked in the industry), access to equipment. Kind of hard to improve on that.

He was able to replicate most of Intel's SOTA process... from 50 years ago. That's more than almost everyone else has managed in their garage but that's about the best you can expect without insane capex and ramp up (and again, it's not like he didn't have access to capital, it just wasn't monetary.) Even still it took five or so years to work everything out.

The SOTA today is really kind of insane. It's right at the frontier of what all of humanity is capable of. Of course as time goes on we'll push that out and today's SOTA is tomorrow's commodity but that won't change everyone's concern with being unable to replicate the contemporary best process.

The reality is all our "defense" needs (and arguably most other needs too) are far more than adequately met with processes a decade old now. It's really not the big deal everyone makes it out to be.

Re: U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

#408

Post by gizajob »

scarface_74 wrote: post #350
andrewflnr wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Someone's garage" is a straw man. There must be people here who could, with adequate funding, build a smallish but viable chip manufacturing company.

There is no such thing as a “smallish” chip manufacturer that can manufacture leading edge chips. It’s about scale. If it were that easy, Apple, Amazon, Google AMD, Nvidia, etc who all design their own chips would have done it.

I agree but by the same logic intel could have done it and didn’t manage to so far.

Re: U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

#409

Post by cyberax »

ivewonyoung wrote: post #322
sergiomattei wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers me is the double standard. When the public asks for fully publicly-owned railways, universal healthcare, or any basic social safety assurances—“socialism”. When a megacorporation struggles, immediately to the rescue.

One big difference is management control. People feel that government administered services tend to have poor management and citizen services more often than not. One big example is the DMV since almost every has experience dealing with it, long queue times are almost universal because no one gives a crap and it's very hard to fire a government employee. Or the passport issuance, or applying for permits. Or unemploym…

In my entire life, I spent much less time in DMV offices than on the line calling AT&T's customer support.

USPS has also been great overall.

Re: U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

#410

Post by cyberax »

ivewonyoung wrote: post #322
sergiomattei wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers me is the double standard. When the public asks for fully publicly-owned railways, universal healthcare, or any basic social safety assurances—“socialism”. When a megacorporation struggles, immediately to the rescue.

One big difference is management control. People feel that government administered services tend to have poor management and citizen services more often than not. One big example is the DMV since almost every has experience dealing with it, long queue times are almost universal because no one gives a crap and it's very hard to fire a government employee. Or the passport issuance, or applying for permits. Or unemploym…

And BTW, I agree that Social Security overhead is unacceptable. It should be privatized and increased to at least $500 billion to be comparable with health insurance companies.

It's not acceptable at all to make private companies look bad.

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