Re:Samsung boosts non-memory chip investment to $151B
by lifeisstillgood on Sunday May 16, 2021 @06:38AM
(#27172696)
The math is complicated
- How much military spending is really what other Western countries would call welfare - not only do you pay the US recruits, they get pensions, they and their families get healthcare etc etc.
- The payback of being the worlds only superpower has been enormous anyway. This is probably a marginal cost.
- It's not entirely clear that building a fab is like dropping a supermarket into place. Whilst in operation they are lights out I sincerely doubt they can be easily replicated - at the very least you will need to just kidnap the whole middle management layer of TSMC and move them to Texas. Which is more or less the current negotiations:-)
In short, yeah the US (and EU) should spend a fortune to build out their own internal chip capacity. Just as we should have done it for oil or electric batteries or ... but we just don't. China however has. Something democracy is good at. Somethings it ain't.
- How much military spending is really what other Western countries would call welfare - not only do you pay the US recruits, they get pensions, they and their families get healthcare etc etc.
- The payback of being the worlds only superpower has been enormous anyway. This is probably a marginal cost.
- It's not entirely clear that building a fab is like dropping a supermarket into place. Whilst in operation they are lights out I sincerely doubt they can be easily replicated - at the very least you will need to just kidnap the whole middle management layer of TSMC and move them to Texas. Which is more or less the current negotiations:-)
In short, yeah the US (and EU) should spend a fortune to build out their own internal chip capacity. Just as we should have done it for oil or electric batteries or ... but we just don't. China however has. Something democracy is good at. Somethings it ain't.
We should fix that :-)