The research capacity for almost everything semiconductors related was almost always in the US, but before the CHIPS act, there wasn't much of an incentive to invest in expanding that capacity here (aside from Texas and Arizona, who had very strong semiconductor public-private programs), because the margins are just too dang low to attract any private investment domestically.
The semiconductor industry is multifaceted, and it's very difficult to be competitive in every single segment of it.
For example, Taiwan does great at fabrication, but is horrid at chip design. Israel and India are major chip design hubs but are horrid at fabrication. Malaysia is THE packaging and testing hub, but weak at fabrication and nonexistent in design.
NY dropped the ball in the 2010s with their Nanotechnology Initiative, because it became a jobs-for-votes scheme in upstate NY, and their key private sector flagships (IBM, AMD, Kodak) collapsed and divested out of the semiconductor industry (eg. IBM Micro + AMD becoming GloFlo, GloFlo and IBM in a decade long legal feud, Kodak's collapse, Apple leaving IBM for Intel and later TSMC).
That is not to say NY's semiconductor industry is dead - it's fairly active, but it's largely legacy nodes targeted at commodified usecases such as Automotive.
The research capacity for almost everything semiconductors related was almost always in the US, but before the CHIPS act, there wasn't much of an incentive to invest in expanding that capacity here (aside from Texas and Arizona, who had very strong semiconductor public-private programs), because the margins are just too dang low to attract any private investment domestically.
The semiconductor industry is multifaceted, and it's very difficult to be competitive in every single segment of it.
For example, Taiwan does great at fabrication, but is horrid at chip design. Israel and India are major chip design hubs but are horrid at fabrication. Malaysia is THE packaging and testing hub, but weak at fabrication and nonexistent in design.
NY?
NY dropped the ball in the 2010s with their Nanotechnology Initiative, because it became a jobs-for-votes scheme in upstate NY, and their key private sector flagships (IBM, AMD, Kodak) collapsed and divested out of the semiconductor industry (eg. IBM Micro + AMD becoming GloFlo, GloFlo and IBM in a decade long legal feud, Kodak's collapse, Apple leaving IBM for Intel and later TSMC).
That is not to say NY's semiconductor industry is dead - it's fairly active, but it's largely legacy nodes targeted at commodified usecases such as Automotive.