Comment by stinkbeetle

> Doesn't really make sense to me. The whole "sovereign" thing is to basically say you won't be screwed if you go to war with a country tomorrow because you are dependent on their supply chain.

I don't think it is that basic. If anything it's probably more about having protection from trade and sanction threats, and insulation from shortages, supply chain problems.

> Nothing about this changes that IMO. They're still getting the chips fabbed somewhere else and run the same risks.

It certainly changes it. Chip design is of enormous importance and the technology leaders there are concentrated in the USA.

Silicon manufacturing is a different thing. Japan is also trying to bring up sovereign leading(ish) edge manufacturing. Obviously you keep peeling the onion on everything though - to do digital logic they need EDA tools and quite possibly IP blocks for PCI and DDR and so on. To do manufacturing they need scanners from ASML and a process design from IBM and so on... It doesn't mean that because they can't do everything from the ground up that it's pointless. At some point they need to import coal and iron ore and bauxite.