There is only 1 winner and 1 loser: Intel.

It's the only chip manufacturer "left" in the US. The argument is national security: the US expects China to invade Taiwan and this will kill TSMC in the process.

Whether this will happen or not can be debated, but this is what the government expects.

> It's the only chip manufacturer "left" in the US

Global Foundries, Micron, and Texas Instruments all come to mind

GF hasn't gone past the 12nm node. TI is at 45nm. Micron is on relatively recent processes, but they make RAM, not logic (which are totally different processes). Intel is the only chip manufacturer left that is working in logic at anything like the leading edge.

GF is a few nodes behind. Micron doesn't make semiconductors, they mostly make flash and whatnot. TI doesn't have the capacity or knowledge to expand to Intel's size/capacity

> TI doesn't have the capacity or knowledge to expand to Intel's size/capacity

I mean, they might if Intel were allowed to fail.

Much more likely that SMIC would, because TI isn't just 15 years behind; it also has the disadvantage of being in the US. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_industry_in_Chin... for a look at what it looks like where conditions are more favorable.

> doesn't make semiconductors, they mostly make flash and whatnot

Um.

All that stuff is still semiconductors, just with different patterns printed on them.

You're right but also wrong. Flash is just semiconductors etched in a different pattern than logic, but you don't print on semiconductors. Semiconductors are 'printed' on wafers via photolithography.

The linked ppt here has a lot of details: https://fabweb.ece.illinois.edu/

Intel's wafers are made of silicon, which is a semiconductor. Silicon on sapphire hasn't been widely used for a long time, if that's what you're thinking of. Photolithography prints resists on semiconductor wafers which are then used to pattern the next process step, such as wet etching, plasma etching, oxide growth, epitaxial polysilicon growth, ion implantation, etc. These mostly remove semiconductor from the wafer or alter its properties.

Interesting, I hadn't known that silicon is itself a semiconductor before all the circuits are added. Am I correct in saying that the etching process transforms a single semiconductor into billions?

No, silicon is still just one semiconductor, just like water is just one liquid. The substrate is still just one piece of silicon, despite having many silicon semiconductor devices fabricated in it. Polysilicon layers may or may not be additional pieces of silicon.

I see! Thanks for the info.

Happy to help!

This is a very wrong take.

Fabs run on data. It takes years to gather that data.

Fabs can't just be repurposed overnight. Yields must be good, which takes data, equipment, etc which is all extremely specialized.

Very ignorant take.

re: Micron - Memory is very different from logic chips. You vast number of repeating cells in memory. If any of them are bad you can just turn them off and bin them as lower capacity. You can do that to some extend with logic chips but not nearly as much as memory.

Yeah terrible position to be when your own government is investing in your competitors' company using your own tax dollars.

As a software engineer, this isn't an entirely new concept.

I think all three of those other companies are also getting CHIPS-act subsidies?

I suppose it could be worse. Still, now the US has a vested interest in seeing Intel crush AMD and others.

They just need to bribe POTUS, and everything will be fine.

AMD is not a chip manufacturer and what “others”?

Right, AMD sold off their foundry business as GlobalFoundries in 02009 to the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund of the UAE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries

"Real men have fabs" (no more, no more).

GF is a zombie company. Micron and TI are both far far away from leading edge. There is only one American company which is both developing and manufacturing leading edge nodes.

> the US expects China to invade Taiwan and this will kill TSMC in the process.

Would it though? The TSMC foundries are pretty much in every continent. Are they just going to stop operating if this happens? Because that seems akin to killing a golden goose.

Also what is up with Global Foundries? I don’t hear a peep about them.

GF is like a decade behind in research. Without years to ramp up and update their fabs they're not relevant.

Probably closer to two decades behind at this point.

Global Foundries is on 12nm. TSMC is at 3.

TSMC gets their machines from ASML who licenses their technology from the Department of Energy. The US will be OK.

If (or when) China invades Taiwan we will be better off than Taiwan but I wouldn't call us "OK" at that point. That will be a major disruption.

It will take decades for the US to get where Taiwan is now in semiconductor manufacturing, if ever. It's not just about building the most advanced chip factory. It's about re-aligning the entire nation's value system and culture to allow such development to happen in the first place.

We complain about the money we spend already. And now we're supposed to subsidize an entire industry to the point where we can build the most complex machines known to civilization at scale in a time-frame that matters to a global conflict that's potentially approaching soon? I don't see it.

> It's about re-aligning the entire nation's value system and culture to allow such development to happen in the first place.

It's taken about 8 years to realign the US from a democracy to a fascist regime, something that was nearly unthinkable. This isn't a hard problem with the right propaganda and manipulation.

Yes but it's easy to go from democracy to fascism. It's harder going the other way. It's like going from a clean house to a messy house is much easier than going from a filthy house to a tidy house.

If it was that simple, Intel, Samsung, etc. wouldn't be behind TSMC. There's a lot more to it than just buying an ASML machine.

This shows me you are not aware of just how much work goes into EUV and beyond besides simply buying the machine.

I believe the most modern TSMC fabs outside of Taiwan are in Arizona. They are just moving to 4nm which is nearly 5 years old and just a revision of 5nm which is getting close to 7 years old.

TSMC aims to have N3 in Arizona by 2028 at the earliest which is 6 years after it first released. By that time, TSMC will have released N3X, N2, N2P, N2X, A16, and A14.

TSMC is heavily sponsored by the Taiwanese government and was created with the express purpose of making Taiwan so valuable that the West would be forced to defend them against China. Moving newer processes out of the country is against their national interests and they've made it clear that there's no plan to do that.

The Arizona fab has been mostly a letdown so far and it's not even doing e2e manufacturing - all parts get shipped back to Taiwan for final assembly.

Outside of Taiwan TSMC foundries are just pumping out already developed non leading edge fab processes. Everyone who matters to TSMC tech development is in Taiwan.

The vast majority of TSMC production is in taiwan. If china invades the fabs will be destroyed. They pretty much would be forced to just stop operating, yes.

And the current administration is unlikely to help Taiwan in the event of said invasion.

Quite the opposite. Part of the reason Trump wanted to end the Russia-Ukraine war so bad was because they wanted to gear up for the "big fight". Ukraine simply wasn't a big strategic priority which is why they wanted to either end the war (best case), or shift responsibility over to Europe if that failed.

Lookup Elbridge Colby - served in first Trump admin and now Undersecretary of Defense. Along with Hegseth and JD Vance, they are all that same line of thought

Elaborate a bit more on the last para, please? I know Rubio is a hawk and bannon (who Trump still talks to) wants war

Here's Elbridge Colby on a debate about Ukraine and China

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMRYvl2Jefg

Hegseth on China

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/41... https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/27/asia/pete-hegseth-asia-to...

I don't think the views of all the "high level strategist" types align precisely. But there are very few true isolationists like Rand Paul in the executive branch

I find it doubtful that the current admin would just let China walk in to Taiwan. Trump doesn't want a war, but he's not going to want to get bent over and make the US look weak either.

And its not all that different from Democratic position, its a bit of "Washington Consensus" type of situation, like anti-Communism was during the Cold War. The approach between admins is slightly different however, and the Trump admin doesn't like Europe all that much.

Exactly. Expect to see some kind of additional intervention such as forcing a certain number of chips that currently go to TSMC to go to Intel.

This is my thought on it too. I don't think this is meant to be a political win so much as US intelligence views chip manufacturing extremely strategically. I also don't know about what will happen to TSMC. But the US has been pushing for US made GPUs as well. This goes back to Biden's admin as well.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/us-govt-pushes-nv...

so.. shouldn't US take stake in TSMC instead?

What good would that do if China invades Taiwan?

Texas Instruments and Microchip: Am I a joke to you?

I'm surprised to see on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_Technology that Microchip does in fact have fabs. I thought it was fabless! Its fabs are in the US, but the assembly and test facilities are all across the Pacific.

As far as I know none of them manufacture anything resembling a replacement for a Xeon, which is relevant to national security because those are uses in military applications.

Neither of them make high performance CPUs or GPUs

Yes

If the argument was for protecting Intel, then the US government should be placing huge orders with Intel for solutions that will fund R&D and allow the company to regain its position as a foundry. They should be tapping into the defense budget. DARPA should be involved. This was an opportunity for petty extortion and a step towards socialism.

Government involvement is the fastest way to corrupt the purpose of an organization, hollow out its soul and quickly get rid of all the competant people. There's a reason that the DOGE findings made a laughing stock of government employees.

> There's a reason that the DOGE findings made a laughing stock of government employees

Can you point out which specific findings? Ideally ones that are substantiated and not just one off tweets.

Depends on the implementation.

Switzerland owns its energy companies and its public transport company. Hugely successful.

Huge order for... what? DoD's needs for chips are quite modest in quantity. Truth is that the US Gov doesn't need the volume which requires Intel to keep afloat.

A large bulk of CPU orders comes from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Want to say 50% of all AMD revenue is datacenters, and the Hyperscalers represent the largest chunk of that.

It is not socialism. Socialism is when the workers control the means of production. Not a fat windbag mobster president and his thugs.

And now China knows the US expects this and it also knows the US does not expect to stop China, so China knows that it can expect the US to do very little. It's game theory turtles all the way down...

Edit: I think it's a misconception that China cares much about fabs in Taiwan. It wants unification.

It also means that China can expect the destruction of Taiwan's fabs to hurt the US less than China.

Combine that with the US's ability to unilaterally destroy Taiwan's fabs, and it sways the calculation a bit

I see it different. The loser is the taxpayers. The loser is the market, which is less and less free. When there’s no incentive to run your company correctly… we get another company not run correctly.

How to run a company correctly?

The only charitable answer I could give is national security reasons for having domestic chip production, and even that could be accomplished in ways that don’t require the federal government having an ownership stake in Intel. For example, I don’t think the federal government has ownership stakes in Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, despite those companies’ dependence on the military.

There’s a legal precedent that’s no doubt being abused. The Lima tank factory and Watervliet arsenal, for example are owned by the US government.

I don't expect a good reason given the history of this Administration, but a reason in my mind to save Intel is there's only 3 license holders for x86 CPUs. Intel, AMD (American), and VIA (Taiwanese). A dead Intel leaves a single American company that is able to make x86 processors, and a monopoly for actually good x86 CPUs. But somehow I suspect there's no logical reason for this besides lining the pockets of those in the Administration.

A dead Intel could open the door to have more then three license holders. Isn't Intel the reason there are only three license holders?

The major patents on all the most important parts of x86 expired years ago now. Nobody wants to take on a legacy ISA with tons of footguns everywhere when newer ISAs have learned a lot of lessons from x86 about how to do things better.

What is missing is that Intel has US based foundries and US based talent.

Why would the ISA matter to the government? I could see this being about Intel's physical manufacturing capabilities, but the ISA should be pretty irrelevant. Recompile what code you can, run the rest via qemu-user-static.

While there are other good reasons to save Intel, if it went under, someone could still buy the license. I can’t imagine why anyone would want a license to x86 in 2025. It’s not like all of the companies designing custom chips are going to be falling over themselves to design use the x86 ISA.

What about Hygon?

I haven't heard of them until this comment, but reading through Wikipedia, and a techpowerup article, I'm not seeing that they actually own a license to manufacture x86 cpus freely. It seems like they were able to due to it being a partnership with AMD. I could easily be wrong though.

From my vague understanding I thought that Hygon is able to build atop Zen 1 IP that AMD gave Hygon, although they can't get anything newer because of restrictions on doing business with China.

Hygon still seems to be making x86 CPUs: https://www.techpowerup.com/336529/hygon-prepares-128-core-5....

I hope this is not the reason. I think x86 is a deadend technology. ARM's energy superiority makes it a better choice. x86 only still being used due to legacy/backwards compatibility but thats changing. Apple moved completely away from x86. Theres more and more ARM based windows computers being sold. Theres no x86 chips in phones.

This isn't a generalizable problem. There just aren't many companies that would be in a comparable situation to Intel.

Intel is:

* Critical to national security

* An advanced, industry that's extremely hard to spin up

* Essentially, one of two companies in it's industry.

Very few other companies meet all of those criteria.

What beats Boeing or Apple then so as to put Intel over the top of these guys?

Intel wanted the 9 billion in CHIP Act money that was being withheld and was willing to make a deal for 10% equity in order to get it.

You are asking why save Intel of all chip manufacturers, and the answer is because there aren't any other major chip manufacturers in the US.

AMD no longer has a fab. TSMC dominates the global market and basically has no competition.

In the event that Taiwan is invaded, the US would suddenly have a huge problem getting access to any kind of high end chips, be they CPUs or GPUs. This would be a major problem economically and militarily for the US.

Some caveats: Due to the chip act, TSMC does now have fabs Arizona, though I'm not sure what their capacity is. TI, and some others building lower end components also have fabs I believe. For x86, high end ARM, and GPU's, virtually all of that is manufactured by TSMC right now, mostly in Taiwan.

> TSMC does now have fabs Arizona, though I'm not sure what their capacity is.

180,000 wafers a year. Globally they do 17 million. They announced first profit yesterday.

In the event that Taiwan is invaded, the EVERYONE would suddenly have a huge problem getting access to any kind of high end chips, be they CPUs or GPUs.

China would not takeover TSMC intact. Even if they did, they would not be able to operate it for quite some time (years), if ever.

This is a sure giveaway that the US military depends on Intel. It is the only major chip producer that has fabs in the US, and it is also the creator of the x86 architecture. That would mean that without Intel the military would become dependent on chips from Chinese Taiwan.

Not just the military, but the majority of consumer devices as well.

With Intel maintained, if China invades Taiwan and takes TSMC the US will still be able to make usable processors. They won't be the latest and greatest like TSMC, but they will be good enough. Maybe not the most powerful or efficient, but still rather close.

My only worry is this will mean management will start resting on their laurels and things will just continue to deteriorate. Or maybe the government can convince them to get rid of the bad management and start thinking more long term and less about immediate profits.

>This is a sure giveaway that the US military depends on Intel.

"Giveaway?" This isn't some secret, everyone knows the military depends on x86 processors, and having a company that can produce them domestically is a national security concern.

They are the only US company that can produce cutting edge chips now and realistically within the next 15+ years. It doesn’t matter that TSMC produces chips in the US. That is nice for the short term but doesn’t do much for the US in the long term if TSMC falls under China’s influence.

Intel is in the midst of a dramatic turnaround and huge shift in strategy. It might fail. But if they succeed it puts Intel and the US in a much stronger position in terms of technology and military leadership.

It mattered for China to have Apple/Foxconn/etc assemble phones in China. By this same logic, won’t TSMC have more tacit knowledge to offer America than Intel, even if their independence is short-lived?

Why would TSMC or Taiwan want to give that information to the United States? There is a strategic reason why TSMC does not build their latest nodes and processes in the United States and why their R&D happens in Taiwan. They want / need The United States to protect Taiwan and their interests. It opens up strategic options for the United States if Intel or another US based company can produce cutting edge chips in the ballpark of TSMC.

They supply components for the defense industry, where foreign production isn't a viable option. No one bank is more important than that. This is also why Micron is getting a free fab for strategic redundancy despite no clear reason why they would need 2x capacity after onshoring back to Boise.

Free market capitalism is great until you’re about to be the big Loser. And then the big dog steps in and yells for time out.

I think if this was a domestic thing it would be all kinds of dumb and wrong. But as a US National Security thing, it makes sense if you’re of the mind that significant intervention is fine when it’s in your country’s best interest.

The next phase is watching the U.S. government keep Intel on a palliative drip of softball contracts and tax dollars. I guess there’s a fair argument that this form of bail out could help Intel thrive again… or at least secure a domestic supply of chips for natsec reasons?

This government? Bribe them on the side.

I take that back. It's the old one you bribe on the side, this one you can bribe in the open.

What other US based chip manufacturers are there?

>Wouldnt it be like 25 years too late, with Intel and its heydays !?

wtf? what do you mean, they're like less than 1 year behind TSMC when it comes to leading node

(disclosure Intel Shareholder) I don't think they are one year behind. I think it is more than one year and for a long time they have not been closing in.

If they actually release Panther Lake on 18A this year, so one year to fix yield should be reasonable assumption, right?

x86

Because Dump personally pictures being able to instruct all personal computers to "dont do woke"

The end result is more like all the rich people take their cash and jump off the top of the pyramid as it crumbles

> How does Govt picking winners and losers going to help?

By ensuring that the US retains at least the ability to manufacture second tier CPUs vs complete reliance on Asia? This doesn't seem unreasonable.

Maybe Intel should have invested in the USA instead of Israel.

Achieving that doesn't need to take the form of a 10% stake in a flailing company.

The US can't employ poverty-tier labor to enable competitive margins, though. American businesses and global trade partners already largely reject Intel's foundry services.

Labor is not the key factor driving chip prices or performance. Fabs are highly automated and filled with extremely precise machinery. The maintenance and upkeep of machinery, the yield per wafer, and consumer demand drive the prices. Labor is basically a rounding error.

Doesn't matter. All of the US's advanced weaponry systems now use "state of the art" electronic systems, which in the context of defense only means "not decades out of date." Two or three generations old is perfectly fine. The military does not need the latest and greatest CPUs and GPUs going into the iPhone 17 or whatever, but it does need the equivalent of the chip in the iPhone 12 or iPhone 8 or whatever for integration into next generation weapons systems.

But if all of our advanced weaponry used chips from Taiwan or Korea, for example, then the strategic implications for war in East Asia would be radically different. People are right to say that China could engage in war over Taiwan for chips, but for the wrong reasons. It's not that they want access to the fabs (they'd love it, but they're not stupid and they know the fabs and know-how would be destroyed in the war), but it would deny the US defense industry access to those fabs.

If US missiles or drones use chips from TSMC, and TSMC is in occupied territory or a war zone... the US can't make more missiles or drones. And no matter how powerful your starting position is, you can't wage war without the ability to replenish your stockpiles. It's the bitter lesson Germany learned in both world wars.

China wants hegemony in Asia, and to remove the influence of the US, Japan, and their allies within what they perceive as their exclusive sphere of influence. How to achieve that? Invade Taiwan, which eliminates western access to TSMC one way or another, effectively blockading western defense industry from the core things they need to resupply their militaries in a war. Like WW1 all over again, a "preemptive war" becomes the game-theoretic optimal outcome, and the world suffers.

How to counter that? The US and its allies need to make sure they have access to chip fabrication facilities that can produce near-state-of-the-art chips, even at inflated prices that are not commercially viable in peacetime, as well as the necessary strategic minerals like germanium and lithium. Only then does calculus swing the other way in favor of peace. Hence Biden's effort to get TSMC to build SOTA fabs in Arizona, and when that failed/stumbled, this investment in Intel.

The China narrative is pure nonsense. You always have guys like Gordon Chang pushing alternating stories about the coming collapse of China, followed by a scary hegemonic whatever.

Regardless of whether you believe the China narrative is true or not (that is to say, whether China will actually do this or not), it is driving US policy.

Well, these guys have literally been saying the same crap for 30 years, so it’s a good bet they are full of it.

You’re reading a lot into the US right now. US policy in 2025 is more about which member of the whack pack is the alpha gorilla than anything else.

In the executive branch. Congress has more say in setting defense acquisition policy.

The upcoming generation of weapons is going to use realtime sensor fusion done by AI. Cutting edge chips will matter for those weapons.

The existing systems do this. Look up the F-35. It's what I was referencing. Bleeding edge state of the art chips aren't required though, or even practical -- these systems need a lot of validation before use, and that makes them always a few process generation behind.

I'm not talking about the plane. I'm talking about the weapon itself.

Imagine a next-generation fire-and-forget weapons with radar and broad-spectrum camera arrays and an AI trained on a fused version of all this data. Typical defenses like chaff or flares would be rendered almost entirely useless.

This kind of visual approach also renders modern stealth almost completely useless. When an unexpected plane is found on L-band (or some other low-frequency radar), the AD would simply fire a couple of missiles into the area with instructions to visually identify the large objects moving at fast speeds using the fusion of these different sensors (and ground+air-based radars) while in flight.

We are getting pretty close to being able to do this in realtime with cellphone-level chips.

Yeah, this kind of whole-battlefield sensor integration is part of the F-35 program. It's not specific to the plane. You don't need the absolute latest gen hardware to do this.

I mostly agree with this but have a hard time digesting the fact that someone would invest going to war with inferior looking strategy and technology.

Future wars are likely going to be GPU driven, ML heavy entities where efficiency matters a lot more than brute force, blunt grenade throwing wars of the past.

A super power like US would likely want to be in the forefront of this if they happen to be in a tussle with a worthy adversary.

Bleeding edge efficiency doesn't matter as much as you think in those applications. A 20% or 50% energy efficiency matters a lot for datacenters or mobile phones. It matters less in a smart bomb, missile, or tank.

Haven’t you read Curtis Yarvin’s vision for America? Our leaders, VCs, and owners have

I don't care how nihilist or kafkaesque you want to take the conversation - the math won't check out. You can't sustain a third-sector economy on second-sector jobs while importing first-sector goods. The entire financial system in America won't survive that sort of transition, it would be the Great Leap Forward of the 21st century.

One of the things about the Great Leap Forward is that it happened. Just because a path of action will obviously lead to mass death and suffering while accomplishing nothing doesn't mean it won't be taken.

This point of view seems to bear repeating these days as the US leadership seems to be re-purposing Lysenkoism and its methods for the pro carbon burn movement and the anti-biological research movement.

Yeah why not fund a new foundry startup?

It would take a decade and hundreds of billions of dollars with no guarantee it would work.

It's a terrible idea

That's extremely risky, like 100 to 1.

Sure tough business but, risky compared to what? Intel?

Yeah. Risky compared to Intel. Intel manufactures chips _right now_. They have lost their process edge, but if I have to put chips into a drone tomorrow, I'm betting on Intel rather than any bag of scrappy kids. The risk that they _can't_ produce chips is the same risk as that of Hillsboro Oregon getting carpet bombed -- which is of course not 0%.

Note that there are several drone microcontroller manufacturers based in the U.S. right now - ModalAI, ARK Electronics, Rotor Riot, etc.

The thing about drones is that they actually don't require much computational power compared to modern consumer computing. It's just math - control systems, calculus, trig, waypoints, etc. All of these were solved problems in the days of the Apollo Guidance computer, and will run comfortably on chips from 2 decades ago. The STM32F722 microcontroller that is one of the most common hobbyist drone chips is built on the 90nm process node, runs at 216MHz, has 512K of SRAM, and costs about $5/chip. FWIW, it's made in France and Italy rather than China, and STMicroelectronics owns its own fabs rather than outsourcing to TSMC or Chinese companies.

If you want to do things like computer vision on the drone, the computational requirements are quite a bit higher, but you can still run something like YOLO at orders of magnitude less computational power than what you've got in a Pixel 9 or iPhone 16.

...which makes me wonder if a better strategy for the military would be to fund a wide variety of domestic chip manufacturers operating at decades-old process nodes (eg. the 65nm process node from 2005 seems to be at about the sweet spot), rather than try to prop up the one American company that can compete on cutting edge 7nm process nodes. Particularly since the experience of WW2 was that simple, robust designs that could be easily licensed to other suppliers and mass produced (eg. the Hawker Hurricane, Grumman F6F Hellcat, Grumman/GM TBF Avenger, Liberty ship, escort carrier) were much more effective at turning the tide of battle than designs that were on the cutting edge of technology (eg. the Vought F4U Corsair, Gloster Meteor, Japanese Shinano aircraft carrier). The latter were often better in absolute performance, but arrived late, in small numbers, and with teething troubles that made the former carry the bulk of the battle. The Liberty Ship, for example, used reciprocating steam engines that were 50-year-old technology in WW2, but they were "good enough" and dead simple to make.

You make an excellent point. My uC experience is limited to ESP32 chips (made in china) but that's another example of how much 'old' tech can do when it's cheap, easily available, easy to integrate, and not running bloatware.

If you think getting a couple million dollars of funding and expecting to show profitability in a few years is hard, just wait till you try it with billions and 5+ years.

All I can think here is the government forcing back doors

(like the failed Clipper chip) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

The thinking might be the government needs a local industry for security. Think submarine manufacturing. Not a huge private market for that, but best to keep local so the supply can’t be cut off.

Though usually the government isn’t the best stewards of companies. When I worked for a large government contractor someone joked “yesterday’s technology tomorrow”. Some of that is for reliability, but it wasn’t cutting edge in a lot of ways.

Most of the answers are going to be national security. That is the reason used by third world countries to nationalise companies.

US wants to maintain chip manufacturing presence and expertise within the borders, so saving everyone would achieve the goal but at a higher cost, so they're just focusing on the US ones in trouble.