The Biden administration has pledged to provide up to $6.6 billion so that a Taiwanese semiconductor giant can expand the facilities it is already building in Arizona and better ensure that the most-advanced microchips are produced domestically for the first time.
Neither TSMC nor Samsung ever produced chips in North America in the first place. And TSMC sells their entire production capacity (minus whatever they use for development), so I’m not sure how big of a draw the military production would be, especially considering there isn’t a pool of people who are ready and educated for chip production work just sitting around waiting for a job offer. Plus there’s a cultural difference in work/school ethics; people in North America aren’t as willing to dedicate their lives to work.
Thank god for that.
I’m not sure what you mean by ever? Samsung’s been making chips in Austin for almost 30 years.
Fair enough, my main point was that any chip fabrication capability added to North America isn’t moving it “back” here like it would be for many other industries.
Ohh I misunderstood your other post.
I agree with your main point. I don’t think international manufacturers would find value in spinning up new fabs here just to make chips for the DoD. But it does make me curious how big of a chunk defense is vs total. I would guess it’s pretty small. Chips are in everything, it’s not like these aerospace guys where DoD is their cash cow.
Ultimately, whatever the case, it’ll take time to transition and if things with China heat up, we could see a situation where they destroy much of the chip fabrication for the west and Intel and global foundries have a lot of their capacity reserved for military uses. I mean, we’ll have bigger things to worry about than consumer chip shortages, but I’m wondering if it’s a good idea to keep some backups handy because if a part fails, it might be a while before it can be replaced at great expense.