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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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The Chinese? I think their claim to fame is making processes stolen from TSMC work using pre-EUV lithography. Expensive AF because slow but they're making some incredibly small structures considering the tech they have available. Russians are definitely out of the picture they're in the like 90s when it comes to semiconductors and can't even do that at scale.
And honestly I have no idea where OP is even from, "All our chip companies". Certainly not the US not at all all US chip companies are fabless: IBM, Ti and Intel are IDMs. In Germany IDMs predominate, Bosch and Infineon though there's of course also some GlobalFoundries here, that's pure play, so will be the TSMC-Bosch-NXP-Infineon joint venture ESMC. Korea and Japan are also full of IDMs.
Maybe Britain? ARM is fabless, OTOH ARM is hardly British any more.
Amazon is fabless for their chip design unit, there all little mini design units for shit like datacenters.
It's hilarious you're saying that because Intel labelled itself an investor in USA foundry projects you think they are exempt from this. Okay man, go work at the plants in Ohio and Arizona. Oh wait, they don't fucking exist bruh
Intel, Ti and IBM all made chips before pure-play and fabless were even a thing, and are still doing so. Intel has 16 fabs in the US, Ti 8, IBM... oh, they sold their shit, I thought they still had some specialised stuff for their mainframes. Well, whatever.
Of all companies, the likes of Amazon and Google not fabbing their own chips should hardly be surprising. They're data centre operators, they don't even sell chips, if they set up fabs they'd have to start doing that, or compete with TSMC to not have idle capacity standing around costing tons of money. A fab is not like a canteen which you can expect to actually be in use all the time so there's going to be no need to compete in the restaurant business to make it work.
And that's only really looking at logic chips, e.g. Micron also has fabs at home in the US.
None of those companies even make a blip on global chip production though. Are they for research or something? Why should I give a shit about a tiny technically existing fraction of production that will never expand?
Go look at where there has been actual foundry production for decades. None of the companies you mentioned even exist in foundry. Who cares if they have A facility or two? That's just part of figuring out what they're going to order from TSMC.
Your goalposts, they are moving.
The US has the know-how to produce modern chips at scale, or at least not too far behind in strategic terms. You could bring all production home if that's what you wanted, it'd cost a lot of money but it's simply a policy issue. And Amazon wouldn't suddenly start to run fabs they'd hire capacity from Intel or whomever.
...you'd still be reliant on European EUV machines, though. Everyone is, if you intend to produce very modern chips at scale. But if your strategic interest is making sure that the DMV has workstations and the military guidance computers that's not necessary, pre-EUV processes are perfectly adequate.
You are the one moving the goalposts with your boasts about how these companies make up LITERALLY an INFINITESIMAL portion of global chip production. Even if you cut out Samsung and TSMC they wouldn't be global players.
No, we can't just bring all production home lol. We've been saying we will for years. Where is the foundry in Ohio dude? Where is the Arizona foundry that's supposed to bolster TSMC production?
Lol yeah sure go ask ASML how their business is doing rn in light of the US chip war sanctions. European manufacturing is in as dire a state as the US now due to financialization and now the skyrocketing energy costs.
People said this about our military production too. "Oh, Russia messed up now, we're going to get serious and amp up our military production." 🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🗓️🗓️🗓️🗓️ (time loudly passing and nothing happening)
How many times is it going to take for people to learn it gets transmuted directly into stock buybacks lmao? We don't have the electrical grid to build up our manufacturing base in the modern world yet. The US is a giant casino for the elite of our empire full of slums.
You won't hear me disagree with that. But to say, and I quote you directly:
While Intel might very well take the tech crown (gate all around with backside power) from TSMC this year is wildly incorrect.
"Skyrocketing", yeah. Gas looks similar.
And no European manufacturing is not in nearly as dire a state as in the US. For that to be the case we'd have to have as shoddy infrastructure and decades-long underinvestment and offshoring as the US has. The US has in fact a more advanced chip industry than the Europe: We're good at the basic science, we're good at bulk production of specialised stuff, one thing that we're not great at is top-tier CPUs and GPUs, chips that are their own products, what we produce is the usual "the thing that goes into a thing that goes into a thing you buy". Like, random example, pretty much every smartphone in the world uses a Bosch gyroscope and they produce those things in-house.
But that doesn't mean that the US is fucked, in the least: If need be it would be able to spring back to life quite quickly, Thing is, needs do not be, so if your worry is elite casinos maybe don't focus so much on chips and incorrect statements about US capacity there but said elite casino directly.
Yeah the casino bit is the most important part for sure. In light of how financialized everything is, huge costs, massively inflated financial asset & real estate prices etc, labor costs, it's more likely for Detroit to spring back into being an industrial hub.
We focus all of our political energy on monopolizing the top of the value chain TSMC is a part of and we can't replace it with our own production bc it's so crucial for cutting costs down. They can't even expand the production for lower end chips (ROI isn't there) now so Russia and China are gonna scoop up orders from expansion in the many industries that use them (low end chips were like 20% of TSMC's revenue recently, iirc). Which will help them develop their higher end foundries which they definitely can make I mean Rosatom produces super high quality Xray mirrors and the Chinese govt won't balk at industrial investment or high tech training programs.
ASML's whole position in this convoluted supply chain means they only make those shipping container sized thingies with the rube goldberg machine of mirrors hooked up to a gallium plasma light thingy, and that ultimately limits the minimum nanometer size of the circuits made in the fabrication units they ship out. If I'm getting that right 🤪. This is really futuristic stuff I'm talking about now but the next-next gen fabrication units beyond Russia and China catching up could even be hooked up to a particle accelerator. That's pretty hard to export in the same way.
I just don't see how we can politically or financially solve these problems in the US or EU lol. We're kind of caught by the balls as workers no?
You don't need to fab chips to have a job. Let the Taiwanese have their speciality you have yours what's wrong with that.
Also TSMC's company culture is excessively Confucian you probably wouldn't want to work there anyway. It's not just the company and culture that makes the company but also things like Taiwanese universities churning out masses of highly-skilled electrical engineers, basically the only reason TSMC even agreed to that European joint-venture is because Dresden's universities have been focussed on that exact field for decades, even before reunification. For a similar reason you couldn't just take Zeiss and move it out of Jena: They need the local university to funnel students into their workforce. There's no better place to study optics in the world than Jena.
Which actually brings me to another point: All these are labour aristocracy jobs, not just trained but highly educated, comparable to a doctor at a hospital. They have a lobby, they have a good bargaining position. Worrying about them won't do anything for the burger flipper at your local fast-food joint who tends to have neither. It also won't really do much for the injection moulding machine operator producing tea sieves (sorry I was just admiring one it has stainless steel mesh embedded in it, not easy to produce, made in Germany, not cheap but oh gods is that thing worth the extra three bucks (it was five)).
sure, they're labor aristocracy jobs bc they're at the tip top of the global supply chain, but most people do not partake in that at all, or management etc, or legal/medical/whatever other high end shit, and 50% of the US is in crappy service work like mcdonalds literally.
no matter what industry you work in you can only be pessimistic here lmao unless you're like in finance or useless c suite shit
i'm not crying for the TSMC foundry or trying to work there. i hope the NATO+ intelligence services edge from high end chip production being under our control is unseated, it would be good for all of us
what's going on with TSMC is indicative of wider issues with all kinds of US industries I'm in solar and frankly I plan to gtfo in the long term to a more interesting area of development. I don't expect it to make my life easier per se but there are a lot of reasons.
Aaaaaa once upon a time Germany was world leader in solar. Then a conservative government came along and slashed subsidies in ways that noone could adopt to (mostly because suddenly, against everyone's expectations, and without tapering) and now the US of all places has more of a market share, though the bulk of course is Chinese -- who bought German tech for cheap at bankruptcy auctions.
All that is certainly annoying, OTOH you gotta admit that keeping walking after shotgunning your own feet several times in a row does mean that you have some rather solid feet.
Solar here makes me so pissed since you know Texas could be a magnificent location but instead it's such a libertarian shithole lmao
Oh also insurance prices and shit like that here are a nightmare. Legal is too obviously. That's why Nike could never just move all their production here even thought it would be trivial to teach people to make shoes. The convoluted global supply chain is the whole point
Neither does TSMC, high end chips is just a tiny part of the number of chips (albeit an important and lucrative part of the market).
TSMC is alone at the top is because it's so damn expensive and the market is not that big, there's basically no place for a competitor. Anyone trying to dethrone them has to have very deep pockets and a good reason not to simply buy from TSMC. The Chinese might be able to pull it off, they have the money and a good reason.