No company is going to come out of someone’s garage and build a chip fab.
The only good news is that C-level suite can continue to do the same shit over and over again.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ta...
If it were that easy, Apple, Amazon, Google AMD, Nvidia, etc who all design their own chips would have done it.
Companies are run to make a profit… they don’t care about sovereignty as long as the money is coming in.
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.
Was.
He kind of had everything going: extremely clever and motivated, cooperation with his parents (who also worked in the industry), access to equipment. Kind of hard to improve on that.
He was able to replicate most of Intel's SOTA process... from 50 years ago. That's more than almost everyone else has managed in their garage but that's about the best you can expect without insane capex and ramp up (and again, it's not like he didn't have access to capital, it just wasn't monetary.) Even still it took five or so years to work everything out.
The SOTA today is really kind of insane. It's right at the frontier of what all of humanity is capable of. Of course as time goes on we'll push that out and today's SOTA is tomorrow's commodity but that won't change everyone's concern with being unable to replicate the contemporary best process.
The reality is all our "defense" needs (and arguably most other needs too) are far more than adequately met with processes a decade old now. It's really not the big deal everyone makes it out to be.
are you worried that china will invade taiwan, and then somehow taiwan will still be around to prevent the US fabs from making the best chips?
its a bit far fetched
> In total, U.S. government economic bailouts related to the 2008 financial crisis had federal outflows (expenditures, loans, and investments) of $633.6 billion and inflows (funds returned to the Treasury as interest, dividends, fees, or stock warrant repurchases) of $754.8 billion, for a net profit of $121 billion
TSMC can’t do it either without xUV lithography machines made by ASML in the Netherlands.
Furthermore there isn’t anything magical about about the current generation of chips that couldn’t be replicated at at a scale of 12 or 15 or 20 nanometers - it’s just that scaling down to that small allows for a greater density of transistors per wafer and thus increased power efficiency. An AI supercomputer could be built with chips with bigger transistors than 3nm it would just run hotter.
And investing in intel aside, one of Nvidias great competitive moats is CUDA and that’s software not hardware.
And Apple needs their chips fabbed, so why not have Apple invest $50B into Intel? Nvidia could afford to chip in too. These companies that face a huge amount of geopolitical risk because they've put all of their eggs in the TSMC basket should have to pay for this not US taxpayers.
TBF garage fabs -are- a thing but it’s in the hundreds of nanometers scale. Thin film technology is also promising for low tech tape outs, but neither of those is going to be practical for anything better than 1980/90s tech. A modern die would be in the square meters range on those process densities, and could never achieve ghz speeds.
That said, there are a ton of scrappy companies sending out designs to 30-100nm scale fabs, companies with 5-10 employees cranking out cool designs and custom silicon… but they are still sending their tape-outs to giant companies to fab, just on their old, obsolete machines.
Silicon foundries are incredibly capital intensive, and short SOTA process lifespans burn through that investment at a frantic pace.
the threat Taiwan faces is existential, and one of the only things that the US has at stake are these chips
You have proposed a “free market” system in which if you choose the wrong competitor you can be forced to bail out the chosen one. The economics of that don’t work at all.
There are governments which can take a stake and be ok, and then there are governments which are setting up to set money on fire.
You let them fail because that ensures that everyone else in the economy fixes their shit and stays competitive. America developed more world class successes, by getting out of the way and letting badly run firms fail.
Especially since NVIDIA is a competitor.
You can buy one, if a suitable one exists, but there isn’t spare stock sitting around; the lead time is long, especially for high end nodes.
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".
Right, this is why I think in-sourcing chip manufacture is totally viable (that is, if we were actually interested in that and not just using it as an excuse for corruption). The interesting exceptions I've heard about are things like, IIRC, high-power local AI for autonomous drones. But for SAMs and such, old tech will probably do it.
https://semiwiki.com/forum/threads/how-to-build-a-20-billion...
The very subsidies Intel now has to pay with shares for? How is that a subsidy? Companies now and in the future would be very concerned before taking any US subsidies because the terms can always change after the fact.
It's not like you can just look at the plans for a chip fab and copy/paste it into a new location and hire people to fill in who will have any idea how to work it.
Isn’t that exactly what the “too big to fail” bailouts were, in practice?
I would rather have Intel go bankrupt, sell profitable pieces to private buyers, and if there are any pieces that are not profitable but crucial to national interests, create a company out of them and have the government buy them. This way you are not propping up a dysfunctional behemoth.
Things must die in order for new better things to take their place. This applies to companies as well.
The public sector is great at two things: (1) getting literally millions of people to show up to work and do well-defined jobs (i.e. nothing outside the lines) that do not change from year to year, and (2) dumping billions into research, with very little of (2) affecting (1). Critically, the public sector has extraordinary difficulty with the agility needed for iterative product development.
If companies get to a certain size and their day-to-day operations are more-or-less fundamentally the same year-after-year, yeah there's an argument for nationalizing them. You see this in arguments to nationalize segments from oil refineries, apartment construction, and airlines. There's something coarse about caretaker CEOs and private shareholders getting rich, instead of the public purse, off the economic rents thrown off from a mature machine that doesn't have much more, if any, room for growth. But the key question is whether the potential for growth has been fully exploited or not; if it hasn't been, then the government certainly won't succeed at exploiting additional growth, and it's better for the company to stay in private hands, which will be motivated to privatize the wealth from achieving that growth, and the government will be paid more in taxes if they succeed.
That's why I'm not convinced chip manufacturing is there when there is still yearly research into reducing process sizes. Maybe there's a case for nationalizing the foundry lines producing older, larger processes that are used in current weapons designs, but that's not the case for nationalizing the whole company.
US needed functional railroads and they took over the rr companies.
It is possible to nationalize a company, though. For example, Saudi Aramco is owned by the state.
How is that not common/collective control of the means of production?
Government benefits through one, generating employment - direct and indirect employment, raising taxes through personal taxes (indirectly impacting tax collection) or second the country being at the forefront of the innovation etc. That is how average tax payer was supposed to benefit.
But I guess trying to nationalize companies and "benefiting" from company profits was something people were missing. How did no one see that? Ah yes, third world countries try this routinely for "national security" and it always leads to moral hazard pointed out by the person above you.
This isn't nationalizing it though, this is just an investment into it. Investments aren't bad.
Unfortunately, this is in a country that China is threatening to takeover while building the largest bomb shelters and field hospitals right across the strait.
China is forcing us to invest kind of like they are forced to prop up Huawei to make GPUs for deepseek. Conflict makes irrational actions happen.
BUT - all you then need to do is create a Delaware LLC that buys the strategic stock, which is owned by $SCARY_FOREIGNERS
The problem with government taking stakes in private companies is that it creates moral hazard. By taking ownership in Intel, the government has effectively "propped it up". This means that Intel competitors that made less risky decisions to remain solvent are now losing; their bet was Intel was operating poorly, and instead of capitalizing on Intel's downfall so they can fill the gap, the government has plugged the gap. This action distorts markets away from their competitive equilibrium. In the process it generates moral hazard and deadweight loss.
Investments by the government can make sense, but generally it makes the most sense when investments support public goods (arguably also when supporting goods/services that the private market would not). Cpus are neither.
Just like the SVB bailout, or Freddie/Fannie/Sallie establisments, this is bad.
Not true. Intel failed because it failed to deliver its own products on its own timelines.
TSMC was behind until Intel failed on its own. No government’s involvement changed things.
Nobody is entering the chip making business and growing to a size and scale to compete with Intel in 2025. If they collapse tomorrow there aren’t going to be startups filling in the gaps, there’s just going to be massive shortages of chips and chaos.
No, they did not. The government paid less than Softbank that also just purchased a stake. Unless forced, Intel could have likely gotten a better deal.
I said if by some magic Intel ceased to exist tomorrow, there wouldn't be some startup just filling the gap. So the idea that government investment in Intel somehow prevents a startup competitor is just nonsense. To compete with Intel would require trillions in investment and probably a decade+ of time to build the requisite organization and talent.
The government investment to prevent the catastrophe that would result in them declaring bankruptcy and the subsequent breakup of their assets has no bearing on whether or not a startup could replace them.
It could be extremely lucrative if they get it right.
Simply trying to copy TSMC would also be a poor strategy.
Companies have "core competencies" (or should). The manufacture (not design) of high-end silicon has never been one for any of these companies except Intel, and they have just lost big time.
> strategically valuable to the US
Yeah, they don't care.