Like I said, I'll believe it when I see it. At the end of the day capitalism rules supreme and trumps jingoistic nationalism. If it's cheaper for Apple and others to build chips overseas then all your devices will continue to have chips made there. I don't see any fundamental change to make labor in America competitive with overseas labor costs. Intel can build as many fancy fabs as they want in Ohio but they will be useless if the cost of living, cost of healthcare, median home price, rent, inflation, etc. continues to skyrocket. It's still too expensive for workers in America and building factories doesn't fix that problem.

People in this thread are a bit clueless on the economics of it.

Many of Intel's existing fabs are in the US, and they've never really stopped building them here - particularly in Oregon and Arizona, and they continue to build there. The only difference is that now they're building on yet another site. The bulk of their fab process R&D is in the US, and they perfect the flow for a given process here and their international fabs then follow suit.

Why do they continue to build in the US? The CEO answered this over and over during his campaign for the CHIPS act: Running fabs is significantly more expensive than labor costs. They don't really save that much by building abroad.

When it comes to cheaper things like packaging, the labor costs do matter, and so they do that abroad.

So no, Ohio won't be foxconned. If Intel doesn't do well, Ohio will be dead, but they're not going to build elsewhere to save on costs. There isn't much to save.

Yes, this is a major unsolved problem to my eye. The cost of living in Columbus - while nowhere near the craziness of coastal cities - is steadily rising. Real estate in surrounding cities is also going up, and it's hard for me to imagine how all those working the jobs that will supposedly be created by the fabs will afford to live near them.

One development in Ohio has been a proposal for a passenger rail line that would connect Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. I'm originally from Crestline - a small town which sits right on the rail line between Columbus and Cleveland, and which used to be a big railroad town. It's interesting to think of how my hometown might change if passenger rail were to actually happen (though I'm skeptical, as versions of this plan have been proposed for decades).

That said, there are some major problems to overcome if we wanted to start doing "state-scale" transportation like that - Columbus is a very car-centric city, and in the scenario where I would move home and ride the train to Columbus when I needed to go to the office, it's very unclear how I'd get from the station to wherever I'm going.

Furthermore, there was just a very public and catastrophic train derailment in Ohio, which can't do much good for public confidence in commuter trains.

Either way, the next decade or so in Ohio will certainly be interesting. Columbus has a burgeoning tech community with lots of VC investment, and while I'm not sure where I'd put the odds, it's not impossible that our little flyover state could become the proverbial "heartland tech hub".

Yeah I lived in Columbus and other parts of Ohio for 15 years or so and it strikes me as bizarre to try to bring industry back. Rubber, steel, automotive, etc. industries were absolutely massive in the 50's, 60's, 70's. But the corporate raiders of the 80s destroyed and sold off all the factories to replace them with cheaper offshore labor. The cost of living in Ohio only continued to go up and most cities in the state are filled with suburbs full of homes now approaching $500k or more. It's just not sustainable or sane to think some new class of factory workers can jump in and live there while being competitive on labor prices.

Yeah, upper middle class people are predictably out of touch with reality. The median household income in Franklin County is only $66k. Yes, stupid zoning made building non-McMansion houses difficult, but that doesn't mean the working class just magically disappeared.

> most cities in the state are filled with suburbs full of homes now approaching $500k or more.

I still get Zillow emails from my time living in the state. $500k is in the rearview mirror. A lot of new developments in the "nicer" suburbs are hitting the $1MM mark. $500k buys you a new home in the far, far suburbs. $250k gets you a 800 sqft 40s-50s ranch in a "crestfallen" neighborhood (and the price history on Zillow will show it as being sold for $60k 10 years ago).

Yeah I lived there when 60k could get you a home and 100k was, "woah there Mr. Mansion-haver" money. My mind boggles at spending 500k there now and barely getting a couple bedrooms. Nowhere in Ohio should it cost that much to have a home.

> capitalism rules supreme and trumps jingoistic nationalism.

I'm not so sure about that. At an individual level sure but we're talking about the USG not a bunch of individuals at a national level. The government has made many decisions to subsidies/backstop local companies in the interest of nationalism.

There's no way it's cheapest for Boeing to make its airplanes in the US.

Janitors for the USG get security clearances.

Farmers (even by state governments) get subsidized to ensure local supply.

If something like the "Freedom Phone" actually used USA parts and was assembled in the USA I could see it becoming the governments defacto corporate phone. Sure, they might become a "Government Contractor" as opposed to an actually competitive company but they would still exist with real buildings and real employees doing real activies which is strictly what we're arguing about. The USG will backstop an inefficient business; Foxconn has no problem not building an inefficient factory.

Deciding to give Intel massive subsidies would require congress to agree and enact legislation, and that isn't happening with it being a politically fractured senate and house. It also isn't exactly sustainable to just keep funneling truckloads of money into Intel to be competitive and kind of pokes a giant hole in the idea that the free market is supreme at solving all problems. In the end subsidies just contribute to rising inflation (it's printing money). The fundamental problems have to be fixed.

> Deciding to give Intel massive subsidies would require congress to agree and enact legislation, and that isn't happening with it being a politically fractured senate and house.

Eh, sure congress has apparently only passed 1 bill so far this year [1] but you can go look up other split years (i.e. 2013 [2]) as a reference. They actually pass a lot of bills despite what people say and the first 4 months of the session are always slow.

Ohio is a R state so republicans won't bring up deficit issues (not that they actually care about them). Democrats (obviously) voted yes on the CHIPs act last year so its not like they're going to change their mind now. The remaining parties aren't a large enough coalition to matter.

> It also isn't exactly sustainable to just keep funneling truckloads of money into Intel to be competitive

Unless you're going to argue the USG is going to become insolvent prior to Intel finishing the fab in Ohio this is an irrelevant argument. The USG will be around longer than it takes to build a fab and as I brought up in my previous comment; plenty of companies are not competitive on a global scale but they still turn a healthy profit because the USG backstops them.

> In the end subsidies just contribute to rising inflation (it's printing money)

Well, you can subsidize something without printing money. I think printing money causing inflation has been trivial disproven though by the 2019 pandemic where governments printed money like mad and no inflation occurred until years after the fact. Unless of course you want to argue the free markets are so inefficient they took 2-3 years to correct for that money printing?

[1]: https://legiscan.com/US/legislation/2023?type=bill&status=pa... [2]: https://legiscan.com/US/legislation/2013?sort=asc&order=Last...