Comment by blackoil
Comment by blackoil 5 days ago
Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds if they have confidence in its ability to deliver. These companies will benefit from breaking current monopoly of TSMC.
Comment by blackoil 5 days ago
Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds if they have confidence in its ability to deliver. These companies will benefit from breaking current monopoly of TSMC.
Tech hardware is a cutthroat business, tech companies are gonna order at Intel if it has something that others don't on a business point of view: more performing, cheaper, faster delivery.
The US government can wish and encourage all they want, as long as Samsung, TSMC and any other produces better chips for less, the money will flow there.
Governments can keep companies working for as long as they want. Usually that makes them less competitive over time though and it is all done at the cost of the tax-payer and adjacent industries.
The Chaebol model of Korea is a way to spin it while avoiding the less competitive part by forcing the companies to compete internationally while keeping the domestic market locked into the Chaebol offering.
For example the US gov could force (or subsidize) all datacenters in the US to use intel chips made in intel foundries located in the US. But on the international market intel would need to compete with its rivals.
This is all theoretically possible, but very hard to pull off politically. And it is not necessarily good for the country long term and certainly a tax to the country citizens/adjacent-companies in the short term.
If a government finds a sector or company to have strategic importance they will not let it die. The rest is free-market absolutism that never comes to be. I believe today more than ever the US considers Intel to be of strategic importance.
> the money will flow there
Which money? The CHIPS act [0] isn't only for the ones who produce "better chips for less".
> Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds if they have confidence in its ability to deliver.
Given Apple's history with Intel's ability to deliver, I'm guessing the confidence there isn't high.
I think the theory is that they had an appropriate thermal design for cpus which were supposed to ship but never did.
I wouldn't count on either to save Intel as it still is (i.e with the fab business still attached to the CPU/GPU business). While it's true that having Intel fabs as a second source would be nice for them to alleviate the dependency on TSMC, they are also competing with Intel on the CPU/GPU side.
My guess is, they're gonna let Intel rot a little further while doing their best to pressure for Intel to split off their fab biz (as AMD had done back then), and then invest just in the fab.
> Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds
When the first tough about investing is to go to big corporations and the goverment instead of going to investors is a telling about how nowadays the economy works.
I love that the Orange guy has opened the door to the nationalization of big tech. I hope that the next president is bolder on this regard. If all these companies depend on monopolies to exists, they should be state owned/controlled.
Yeah, everyone is focused on TSMC as the company with the secret sauce, but really it’s Apple. Whichever foundry Apple goes with gets the majority of leading edge transistor volume.
Samsung is already in a much better position for this. They have external customers and experience facilitating them. Unlike Intel's track record which doesn't inspire confidence at all.