Comment by lysace
4 days ago
Yes, roughly speaking 1:4 compared to California.
Edit: This is not news. This (combined with their higher EE education) is why Taiwan won IBM PC-clone-related manufacturing in the 80s. And why they now have TSMC.
4 days ago
Yes, roughly speaking 1:4 compared to California.
Edit: This is not news. This (combined with their higher EE education) is why Taiwan won IBM PC-clone-related manufacturing in the 80s. And why they now have TSMC.
Such a great victory for American industry... the future is to bring workers from Taiwan with skills and willingness to receive a fraction of US salaries.
What are your realistic options?
Say TSMC pays supper competitive US salaries to attract US-only labor, higher labor cost which is causing the end product to be more expensive, which makes that fab uncompetitive globally causing Apple to go buying from someone else and TSMC either choosing leaving the US or going bust eating the losses.
You can't compete with lower-wage countries in a globalized world with no trade barriers and no tariffs, when Apple wants higher profits and consumers want lower prices. Something has to give.
You can put tariffs on imported chips to equalize the field, but then iPhones would be more expensive for the average American and Apple's stock would tank.
So, pick your poison.
More automation. Given the chemicals involved in fab work in general I expect this fab is very automated just for safety reasons and so very few employees are needed. Thus the cost of labor isn't a significant factor.
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The problem was never the cost of labor. US tech is already highly profitable and they can pay the full salary if they wish to. But their desire is basically to get a free card to pay lower salaries by any means, so they can send more of those profits to shareholders. The US is essentially a fighting arena between shareholders and workers. The profit is there, it is just a matter of how business want to keep always more of the spoils to themselves.
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What about the US providing actually good education that can produce workers able to compete with Chinese and other Asian countries?
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Rather, sounds like paying the real costs rather than playing games to avoid that.
> You can't compete with lower-wage countries in a globalized world with no trade barriers
I think you’ve correctly identified the solutions.
> when Apple wants higher profits and consumers lower prices
Trump wants chips that say "Made in 'Merica". I dont think cost comes into it that much.
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This solves for the US national security issue; in the event of war between China and Taiwan (and a possible proxy war with US), Taiwan immigration would qualify for asylum.
> This solves for the US national security issue
I mean, maybe it's okay that some other country is better than you at something important. Excuse me but: the arrogance.
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Would that be the thing that Trump says he wants to stop on day one? Those asylum-seekers? The Trump who is inviting Xi to his inauguration?
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How much does salary contribute to the overall cost of operating TSMC? Perplexity said that the average salary of a TSMC employee is $76K a year, and TSMC had about 80K people. So it cost them around $6B a year on salary. In the meantime, their operational cost was about $46B a year, so that's 13%. TSMC shipped about 16 million 12-in wafers. Each 12-inch wafer can make about 300 to 400 chips. Let's say 200 to stay on the conservative side. That will be 3.2B chips a year. That means the cost per chip on salary will be less than $2 a year. It looks HC cost is not that dominant?