Comment by bigyabai
16 hours ago
The government support should have come in the form of a real competitor. Intel got this way because they had no competition - nobody thought a domestic EULV manufacturer would be an American prerogative in 20 years. All the customers for dense silicon were fine importing it from Taiwan.
Pouring more money into a proven dumpster fire won't put out the fire. This is the protectionist just-desert of refusing to regulate the top-dog competitors into a position where they're afraid to rest on their laurels. If we want an American lithography powerhouse, buying Intel stock rewards exactly the wrong incentives.
What’s your suggested remedy?
Deregulate RISC-V, threaten Intel with loss of IP if they can't profit on fabs, threaten to cut Softbank off of American companies if Masayoshi Son won't onshore RISC manufacturing.
There's soft-power coercion left on the table, the only thing we buy with Intel stock is a C-suite's dinner bill.
So tell me your plan that would create a competitor for Intel from scratch that could be making decent chips in 5 years? 10 years?
Given the circumstances and the relatively low dollars involved, it would be interesting to see the experiment: $10B darpa program to establish a scalable fab ecosystem in 5 years via consortium.
This was how the internet was created, darpa stitched together dozens of performers to get the key ingredients (eg bbn gateways, academic subnets, experimental applications, protocol research.
They even led the last ditch marketing Hail Mary after years of no-one caring about the program besides the zillions of engineers from all around building it by organizing a press day in a hotel ballroom for a demo day.
As a taxpayer I’d strongly support 5B/.1% of the fed budget for a few years just to learn what happens in the attempt.
$5B wouldn’t be nearly enough to create a leading edge fab. Estimated cost for TSMC is $20B.
China has been trying and failing to build a competitive fab for years, has the rare earth minerals in its back yard, etc and can’t do it.
The second issue is, who exactly is going to use these fabs once they are built. One issue that Intel has is that its “customer service” sucks. TSMC will bend over backwards as a partner. No one wants to work with Intel.
Can you imagine Apple or Nvidia wanting to work with a government owned chip fab?
Is it too much "magic" for the moneyed geniuses down at Apple? Or is technology not quite their wheelhouse anymore?
Do you apply the same standard to Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Tesla who are all trillion dollar market cap companies (besides AMD) who design their own chips and they are manufactured by TSMC - or for Tesla moving to Samsung