Comment by snakeyjake

The machines and processes needed to package the individual integrated circuits are fantastically expensive but the margins are so low in that step that it's only profitable at massive scales.

So you put the fantastically expensive machines near where most of the customers are and most of the customers are in Asia.

Works the same way with fiber optic cables. Making the long skinny bits is hard and high-margin. Actually turning them into cables is easy and low-margin.

So Corning makes huge spools of fiber optic cable in Arizona, North Carolina, and New York (I think) and ships it off to Taiwan and China where it is made into the cables that you plug into stuff.