You vastly underestimate the institutional knowledge necessary to operate state of the art fabs. Intel has been at the forefront of the field for decades, and even they are stumbling vs the current challenges. TSMC was founded over 3 decades ago. That it was founded by a TI employee says nothing about the situation today.

The US is subsidizing a TSMC plant here, which should help the situation, as it'll give us access to their engineers and cross pollination. But it's still tiny compared to the need if we want to move the majority of our chip imports to domestic.

I agree that I'm underestimating the startup cost. That's inevitable, I think. I can only counter by saying that I think we're also underestimating the benefits of being self-sustaining at the scale of TSMC, especially with the changing political landscape re: China.