That's incorrect. The US has four or five dozen fabs. It's one of the largest fab manufacturers globally, along with Taiwan, China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea. The US is likely to grow its domestic fab manufacturing over the next decade, thanks to the new lower corporate income tax rate and tighter restrictions on IP exportation (those two things lured Broadcom home).
> how long will it take to reverse engineer?
That's where China faces a problem: that only works if you have no plans to integrate further into the global economy.
For the most part, the EU, North America, South America, Australia/NZ, Japan, South Korea, etc. isn't going to buy your stolen semiconductor tech.
If you're going to steal semi tech and use it as your own, at best you can only sell it domestically.
Remember China is not just 1/4 of the world's population, it also has 1/4 of the world's smart people
I kinds lost count at least half way though, but this list has about 60-70 US fabs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
Long enough that by the time they do, the chips they've ripped are behind the times.
Chips march on a pretty fast cadence, and with billions of transistors they are no small feat to reverse engineer.