Or do we seriously expect that US companies will generate significant demand even though TSMC and Samsung are already building heavily subsidized fabs in the US?
Intel says they're going for two factories of 20 bln indeed [1], Samsung for 17 bln in Taylor, Texas [2], and Micron claims to go for 100 bln (over time) in Clay, New York [3].
> Why invest 20 billion dollars [...] to create supply without demand?
Why do we have to pay about 5 dollars per month for a VPS with only 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, and 10 GB storage? I'm certainly hoping these specs to all increase 10-fold over the next 10 years for the same price.
[1]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...
[2]: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-announce...
[3]: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
Look at the machine you can build for one months’ typical AWS cost for a medium size SaaS company.
Cloud also charges insanely high rates for bandwidth.
It's quite low, but the real costs are on datacenter space and connectivity anyway, I have no idea what their cost structure looks like.
I would expect any real user to switch into renting servers as soon as small VPSs aren't enough. (But yes, the fact that there is a market of large VPSs tells people don't to that. I don't think I will ever understand this, as I don't understand most people usage of AWS.)
Yes I think so, presuming that there is not an over-supply of capacity.
US companies would much rather rely on an EU country than one that is being threatened with invasion over a small gap of sea. US local supply will never be enough.
Agreed
> US local supply will never be enough.
But you won't just have US supply. You'll have US and Taiwanese supply, and I don't believe that Taiwan will happily let TSMC (the only cutting edge foundry left in the world, when you take Samsungs abysmal yields into account) build foundry redundancy in the western world.
But we'll see, you could definitely end up being right. I just hope we'll invest at least an equal amount of money into chip design.
Besides, the cost of designs pales in comparison to the cost of producing locally.
It's not necessarily about supply and demand. These past few years have shown what shortages of chips can do to the supply chain. It's a strategic vulnerability if Europe does not at least think about this.
On the other hand, if people are trying to build the cutting-edge, there might not be as much local demand since it is probably only needed for the latest IT equipment, most of which is built in the Far East.
Was austerity broad-based or specifically targeted toward industrial areas? I'd always assumed austerity meant cutting back on public benefits/pensions/etc. but not strategic areas like this which is why I'm curious.
Asianometry has a great video on YouTube detailing the creation of TSMC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fVrWDdll0g
_leading-edge chip manufacturing_ must be seen like "defence": making money out of it is optional, but it has to stay _really_ leading-edge and should be ready to produce at scale for other failing "friendly" part of the world. Since South-Korea and Taiwan did just that, and the others not, they are now alone on the global market.
To believe the "supply/demand" rule of the economy can magically make the money flow decently and properly is _REALLY_ dangerous, it cannot apply to everything.
It's tied into the culture, tbh, but you know, at least make it easier for someone to start, fail and start again.
Even forming a company is a major struggle compared to US, UK. Nevermind the insanity after a bankruptcy.
Sole proprietorship is still very common, and of course when you are in trouble with that, you are in trouble.
I am not trying to absolve Greece from its liabilities, just pointing out that Greece is a bad example for austerity not playing a significant role in slowing industrial development.
Source: I am Greek living in Greece.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/407/503/119...
Asia has what some would call almost slave labor and a complete lack of care for workers. Many countries don’t care about pollution either.
US and European countries will gladly clean up manufacturing at home while shifting to countries who could care less about employees or environmental impacts.
I could believe EU has some stricter environmental regulations than both, though
Many, many Europeans do work in factories. Just task the Germans.
What's wrong with working in chip factories anyway? They produce some of the highest margin products in the world and since they are highly automated, working in a chip factory requires certain knowledge and education on physics, quality assurance, automation, material science, and certainly give you experience that makes you a valuable worker with future perspects rather than a replaceable cog in a dead end job as is the case for the Europeans working in most other factories that are a few steps away from being off-shored to lower cost areas.
For this industry, you want as many verticals as you can to ensure supply. Have the early parts of the chain is great, but producing the end product is necessary too.
You also see this problem the other way around, when a US company produces a chip design, but then actually gets it fabricated, packaged, integrated into a product, boxed, all in another country
wasn't really a "donation" it had strings attached which is why ASML wasn't allowed to export to China, the US has all the say at the end of the day
Fun fact by the way, at some point Japan and Europe were very close in state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing while the US didn’t have the capabilities anymore because it was outcompeted by Japan. At that point, the US donated funds and 20 years of research to ASML since it was better than letting Japan win the race, according to Chip War by Chris Miller.