I did some materials engineering coursework in college, and I think your comment significantly underestimates the technical complexity of <100nm process node manufacturing.

We had many brilliant minds working on these problems for decades, but it took time, skill, effort, and money over these decades to achieve each milestone of development. Now each of these firms (and each of their suppliers) has trade secrets that go deep, and barring some unlikely breakthrough of brilliance, these secrets can't be independently discovered by the brightest minds in any less than the time it already took to discover and develop them in the first place.

There's also the problem of supply chains -- modern fab tech requires a ton of downstream tech: the fab machines, the parts in them, and the places those parts were developed and manufactured... and the machines that were required there as well (repeat...). Also the raw materials, especially rare earth minerals.

> Semiconductor engineering is complex, but probably not so complex that your average Math Olympiad couldn't pick it up in a month or two.

We have a chip shortage going on for months now, if all it took was two months and a bunch of smart people, those billions of dollars in chip orders would've made it happen. That tells me it has to be a bit more complex than you think.

Has any major organization started or entered the semiconductor fab space in the past year? From speaking with industry analysts, my understanding is we could spin up additional capacity. The issue is that most everyone fears the shortage will be over after the Covid supply chain disruptions, and therefore any new investments will not recoup their necessarily long payback periods.

This is a very different calculus than a WW2 type scenario. Fully mobilized, the government would almost certainly pay up for microchip capacity today, regardless of the long-term payback residual.

If there was evidence of deep-pocketed firms trying and failing to get into semiconductor fab in 2020, I'd change my opinion. Like if Google or Amazon were trying to open their own fab plants, but were failing, then I might suspect that a WW2 fully mobilized war effort would run into difficulties. But as far as I can tell, the issue is that nobody wants to jump into the fab business, regardless of the temporarily higher profits over the next 2-4 quarters.

A 10nm/7nm fab costs $10B and takes years to build, assuming you've got a process which works - developing that from scratch will take you a decade before you can even design the fab. You could compare the enterprise to a smaller scale NASA.

It's not a question of knowing how to build industrial capacity, it is actually building that capacity. Before you can build a fab, you need to build all the machines that go into a fab, and before that all the machines for building those machines, and so on and so forth. 9 women can't make a baby in a month, at some point you come across steps that just take time.