If the chip makers are investing this much money into the substrate businesses, why aren't they just purchasing some of these companies wholesale?
In a sense, buying the future substrate production is just a future substrate contract.
Do you know how building a power plant is financed today? Basically someone buys 10 years of gas futures, sells 10 years of equivalent electricity futures, and uses the profit (since electricity is more expensive than gas) to build the power plant that will turn the bought gas into the sold electricity.
I assume a random person can't just sell 10 years of electricity futures without some kind of collateral.
Maybe they run the negotiations in parallel, so they can kind of use one set of futures as collateral for the other?
Comes to mind: "Be the change you want to see in the world, and get paid for it"
It also takes over three years to build the plant itself. We aren't even talking about the people you'd even need to employ, design, and run the place (highly specialized labor).
This is such a huge burdensome cost. It's not even a guarantee that that such an investment would even make sense once 5-years pass.
I do think there should be more fabs and having them located in one area of the world is already playing out to be a geopolitical nightmare. It's obviously going to become a national security issue for nearly every industrialized country on earth over the next decade if not sooner.
Thus there is still a lot of risk being taken on by the fabs. The production could go sour, geopolitics could change, resources might be unavailable, etc.
The purchasing companies are externalizing all of this risk by purchasing the products instead of the company.