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Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

security risks aside, andy grove of intel publicly regretted offshoring semiconductor manufacturing because of his suspicions about generational shifts in innovation and expertise

I've tried to read econ papers on colocation of innovation and manufacturing -- they're mostly long-winded and unconvincing but the concept is compelling

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Dan Wang explores this idea in 'How Technology Grows' [0]. To summarize, he asserts that the main downside of offshoring is the loss of process knowledge (the tacit knowledge that is learned by doing and transmitted through culture).

[0] https://danwang.co/how-technology-grows/

intel is one of the few companies with leading-edge fabs in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...

Doesn't Samsung have some fabs in Texas?

Samsung does have a fab in Austin (maybe elsewhere), but it's mostly flash in the 50-180nm range, not a leading edge process AFAIK.

The Samsung LSI/flash lines in ATX are not a leading process node in terms of all foundries (i.e. TSMC), but last I heard they were pretty close to the bleeding edge of what Samsung is capable of in their Korean factories. The ATX lines were always intended to be exact copies of their Korean counterparts, but this may have deviated in recent years (I have been out of the loop for ~7 years now on their internals).

Some of the major reasons behind Samsung building that factory in Austin were to satisfy Apple and to also leverage the more "open" innovation attitudes of the average American worker.

According to Samsung's own account, their first fabrication plant in Austin, Texas opened in 1997, followed by major upgrades/expansion in 2007 and 2017.

Yes. It was Samsung's first 14nm fabrication facility. They were planning to upgrade it but haven't seen any articles since 2017 on that.

https://www.samsung.com/us/sas/company/history

> I've tried to read econ papers on colocation of innovation and manufacturing -- they're mostly long-winded and unconvincing but the concept is compelling

Sounds interesting, do you have some references?

I think Ketokivi is the paper I read (no idea what website this is hosted on):

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/63693/1/519737458.pd...

aside from the basic claim that large factories are doing some amount of R&D on-site, this read like nonsense to me. Could be my lack of depth in industrial organization / economics.

maybe also search 'industrial clustering' or 'innovation clusters'

> regretted

But not enough to lift a finger about it

> > Andrew "Andy" Grove was a Hungarian-American businessman, engineer, and author who had a net worth of $500 million dollars.

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