There are very few companies that actually own fabs for mass production in the United States. AMD use to own fabs but they sold them quite some time ago.

By virtue of being one of the five companies (while also being the largest) you’re going to easily get the money.

As for why, fabs are a tremendous resource for a specialized economy and will easily become a national security risk due to how wide spread they are in the military and to sell advanced products.

There’s also a de globalization movement that’s been underway for nearly a decade. Having a country whose neighbors aren’t in a politically stable region of the world is a future disaster. It’s also proven to be a disastrous domestic policy where supply constraints crunches every company.

It’s likely going to take a decade to resolve the supply chain issues and it nearly takes half a decade to bring a new fab online.

edit: spelling

China's entire industrial base is state subsidized. TSMC is a strategic asset of Taiwan. The US is still strongly dominant in aerospace, and there are few efforts or companies in that entire sector that are not subsidized (largely by defense spending and NASA). I could fill up several pages with this.

If nobody subsidized their industries, then maybe we could do just fine without subsidizing ours. In today's world, not subsidizing key industries is unilateral disarmament. It'd be like the USA unilaterally giving up all its nuclear weapons while Russia, China, North Korea, etc. still have theirs and hoping everyone plays nice.

Ask Russia how not having domestic chip fab capability is working out for them.

Maybe bail them out with conditions.

Say force them to open source chips older than a decade.

I wouldn't want us to fall behind on chip tech though.

National security.

"They may be a loser, but they're our loser."

You create the conditions for future complexity if you only allow winner takes all.

AMD was bailed out for years as Intel was king, and it’s a good thing they were.

Because is TSMC was unavailable to the USA it would take many years for the USA to recover. This bail out gives the USA a head start on a TSMC replacement so that we don't have to halt production of GPUs, CPUs, phones, tablets, appliances, cars, trucks, cranes, tanks, missiles, etc. etc. etc.

No reason, if you're willing to nationalize+split the monopolies.