Comment by tjwebbnorfolk
21 hours ago
It is not a straw man.
There is no amount of scrappy cleverness that gets you from zero to manufacturing cutting-edge chips without shitloads of capital investment, years/decades of R&D, a huge manufacturing workforce, and big contracts.
There's no such thing as starting small and scaling in that business.
You don't think $8.9B would do it?
This link contains a graph of fab costs over time. It looks like 9 billion might get you a cutting edge fab 15-20 years ago. but that's just the fab.
https://semiwiki.com/forum/threads/how-to-build-a-20-billion...
TSMC has already put $65B into the Phoenix fab and is adding at least that much more, so no. You're off by an order of magnitude.
TSMC's estimated costs in 2020, were $12 billion for their first fab. In 2025, their updated estimates were $65 billion for the first three fabs and $165 billion for when they get to six such facilities. So, $8.9B is a lot of money, but isn't anywhere close to getting to the equivalent to what TSMC has in Taiwan.
> getting to the equivalent to what TSMC has in Taiwan
That wasn't the question. The question, at least for me, is can you build non-zero chip production, enough to start building out a sustainable business. Obviously you're not going to compete with TSMC on day one, but there's a wide spectrum between that and "garage".
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