Exciting about the progress but semi has always been boom and bust, I hope all the rush for investment will not create another down cycle.
The way we work and learn has changed, and it doesn't look like a reversion to pre-telework habits will ever fully occur. Several companies (including Salesforce, Twitter, Square, and Spotify) have said that telework will be a significant part of their post-pandemic reality.
Meanwhile, electric vehicles are slowly but surely taking market share from internal combustion engines that use less than a third as much silicon.
It feels like demand creation to me, and that means we ought to treat the prior capex roadmap for the industry as insufficient.
Even in the absence of demand creation, fab concentration in Taiwan is increasingly a liability in a world where Chinese economic hegemony is growing. One way to mitigate future perturbations that may result from military conflict, natural disasters, or other interruptions in Taiwan's fabs would be to build greater capacity outside of Taiwan.
And the continued move within the enterprise towards using cloud computing and SaaS products.
No matter which way you look there is an increasing demand for silicon.
I believe that the bigest drivers for silicon demand will be IoT devices, including automobiles, especialy when they become more affordable in the 3rd world.
The pressure from SaaS and cloud is more predictable than the consume market, sonthe semi industry can plan ahead, IoT not so much. Just see how the auto industry was caught by surprise by the increased demand.
there will be lasting change to to our lives and lives of people in our oribt. I don't think we appreciate that vast majority of the workforce (in transport, hospitality, retail, manufacturing) is not changing at all.
For the supply-demand feedback loop to work smoothly, you want the supply to be incremental and quick-to-respond to demand changes. The semiconductor fab is anything but. There are many other reasons for this https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimhandy/2014/05/28/the-3-reaso... but I think the critical reason is that when there's a supply shortage, there's naturally a race among suppliers to build more capacity as soon as they can, so that they can sell more, but the inherent time delay (measured in years) in building up the extra supply combined with the fact that a single new fab gets bigger and more expensive lead to inevitable oversupply, which causes the price drop, which reduces the amount of money to invest for the next cycle, which leads to undersupply a few years later, and rinse/repeat.
The pandemic created one of the biggest demand spikes for semiconductor ever, and combined with the nationalistic stance on building own supply in each country, I suspect this spike will have a ripple effect for the next few years.
Though, fresh pronts of "Pravda" never were. That "Pravda" was a very versatile material: from toilet paper, to packaging material, to building material as packing for cracks in walls, to an underlayer for wallpaper.
But any time someone points out flaws in capitalism, people respond with 'but socialism is worse' or 'planned markets are bad too'. A false dichotomy as clear as you get.
Capitalism has known flaws. That we should name, know and solve. A famous flaw is the pork cycle, which we see at work here.
Pointing out such flaws is good, because it allows us to improve, or at least prepare for. Countering such statements with 'but communism is worse' helps noone.
For me the biggest flaw in capitalism is that it tends to concentrate wealth over the long term, which in turn undermines the "wisdom of the crowd" principle market systems are based on by concentrating buying power in relatively few people.
We could fix this with much more aggressive progressive taxation and still have a system that is fundementally market based and looks nothing like a planned economy.
Indeed! Related, my pet-peeve, is that consolidation eventually leads to monopolisation: concentrating selling power to relatively few companies. The current growth model of most tech-companies hinges on the monopolisation almost entirely.
Free markets have organisations and systems in place to protect against that; which clearly shows that a free market -in its current state- cannot operate effectively without outside intervention. These orgs are only now moving against the 20-th century monopolies, and doing so too late and too little (IMHO).
But, another clear flaw in capitalism and free markets, patched with centralised, planned governments intervening in those markets.
I've become unsatisfied with all of the word salad concerning 'capitalism'. Large organizations tend to work in the same way, government potentially being the largest corporation of all. Communist countries had organizations largely indistinguishable from corporations although the elite might find different ways to pay itself. It's really all a matter of degree.
The eternal fight for resources and status (and hot chicks) gives you convergent evolution in social systems.