Was.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.